Disgust, by Lorette C. Luzajic: Interview with Rebecca Weigold

Disgust, by Lorette C. Luzajic, Cyberwit Books, 2025.

Disgust, by Lorette C. Luzajic
Cyberwit Books, 2025
Click here to view or order on Amazon.
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Rebecca Weigold: Lorette, what can you tell us about your new book of ekphrastic flash fiction, Disgust? What inspired you to write it?
 
Lorette C. Luzajic: The stories in this book grapple with the turmoil of the body. Undergoing a devastating trilogy of serious illnesses changed my life dramatically, and for many years the emergency of the body was, against my will, the central reality of my life. 
 
I felt like Job in the throes of this triple whammy. There was a not-understood condition assumed to be fractures, gout, or rheumatoid arthritis, but ultimately none of these. There was a botched knee surgery that has not yet healed after four years. And the cherry on top was breast cancer, which I thought would be the final coup, and yet here I am.

​This ongoing ordeal has been terrifying. The pain consumed me and the fear of losing agency has been intense. Going through the gauntlet of invasive tests, scans, surgeries, poisons, needles, radiation burns, and relentless appointments has been unbelievably violating, and the realization that even the trusted experts know next to nothing about our bodies shook me to the core. I’m naturally squeamish, and was forced to confront the absolute essence of our humanity: blood, pus, vomit, gas, swelling. Everything was disgusting to me. 
 
At the same time I was going through this, there was the Covid pandemic and illness was the theme of the whole world. And my mother was going through a dramatic decline with a rare neurological disease that led to total helplessness. 
 
Mom died a slow and terrible death. I survived, for now. I’m doing quite well now, with manageable pain, but still have a lot of trouble with movement and activity. I am in remission from breast cancer.
 
I sometimes say that I was both humbled and humiliated. This level of illness connected me to every other human being, and to the essence behind the whole “vanitas” and “memento mori” art movements in Dutch still life paintings and beyond. Coming face to face in a real way with “remember, you are going to die” and temporality, the fact that we are compost, is profound.
 
As I do with everything, I began writing stories and poems fueled by the themes of this journey. I began looking at art that touched on these ideas, or seeing art through that lens. I wanted to shake off the shackles of social suppression, where people with valid fear and agony are told that their negativity is causing their illness. I call this toxic positivity. 
 
I am a very positive person, but the litany of dark emotions and anxieties that go with them are valid responses to pain. I wanted to tell the whole story: how people triumph over illness, how they sometimes don’t, how illness leaves people isolated and fractures relationships. How illness brings us closer to God and alienates us, too. I wanted to show how pain connects humans even when they don’t know it. How it is always there, part of the story, rather than its own story. I wanted to show humour, too, because the body can feel absolutely absurd.  And I wanted to give the collection the most honest title I could. So here we are.
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Rebecca: In what ways has writing about pain and suffering broadened your artistic vision?

Lorette: Suffering is one of the great themes of art and literature through history. My own writing and visual art veers between joy and darkness, embracing the full range of important experiences and the ups and downs of the human story. Artists reflect and process the complexity of life and death, and immersing myself in a spectrum of suffering gave me a deeper connection to and understanding of art, literature, and people.

A key moment in my journey was studying a small painting in my own collection, an unknown Peruvian artist copy of an older unknown Peruvian artist’s work. It was a gift given to me by a dear friend from Lima. I absolutely love Latin American art, colonial era, pre-Columbian, folk art, modern, and contemporary. The aesthetics and creativity of Latin American artists are astonishing to me: they are in contrast to my austere Calvinist-tinged church upbringing, and a throwback to my older German roots, where the macabre was also embraced in folklore and visual arts. This particular painting is gory, depicting with an unflinching  eye the agonies of Christ as he is scourged by a guard with a baton. Christ’s crumpled body bleeds profusely in the picture. 

There were several years in my succession of ailments that I lived in unbearable pain. It was difficult to make sense of. The knee surgery and its subsequent failure was wildly painful, and the trips with the walker to medical appointments and physiotherapy were horrible, and the mystery condition that flared in both ankles was inexplicably even more painful. There was no relief at all from painkillers, salves, ice baths, or deep breathing work. The intensity of those flares was a 15 out of 10, far worse than the actual surgery and follow-up weeks. I seriously considered having both legs amputated in hopes of eventual healing, but the research I did showed that if the problem was in my nervous system and brain rather than in the ankles, the issue might be transferred. 

When I looked at the gory little painting during these painful times, I had an epiphany. I understood that we had everything backwards about the agony of Christ. Many believe that suffering is sacred because it makes us like Christ, and some traditions today and historically included ascetic denial of the body or sadistic torture, as penance for our sins or in imitation of Jesus. This was not a theology I grew up with and couldn’t really grasp, but now I saw something different: that it was the other way around. 

Many times we ask why Christ had to suffer torture and death in order to  save us: surely this meant God was cruel, because He could have found another way. But now I understood the story deeply: the meaning of the incarnation was that Jesus was fully divine and fully human, having taken human form as a bridge. And to be fully human, because we suffer, pain, illness, heartbreak, childbirth, He too had to suffer the pain of the body and death. We do not suffer to be like Christ, rather, He had to suffer to experience what we do.

This revelation turned into the story “Agony” that wraps up the collection. And it was an understanding that helped relieve my isolation and place me, as a person, and as an artist and writer, in complete communion with everyone else.

I have always felt that making art is a religious act, and art history in every culture reflects this belief. I am not traditionally religious, and I struggle with the flaws and fallacies in religions, and my relationship with the Creator is erratic and fragile. My stories are not often religious, yet faith and mystery are still at their heart, and at the heart of all creations that humans make. Art is about communion with others, even when it is created in solitude. It is about delving into the unconscious, about symbols, about initiations and wonder and fear. Making art is a participation in ritual. We are imagining the meaning and puzzling it out. It doesn’t matter what someone believes or if they don’t. I really came to understand through art and through writing about the suffering of the body that all poetry, all painting, is some kind of prayer. It connects us with the oldest traditions in human history and the people who lived then. It connects us with everything we don’t yet know. 

Rebecca: One of your ekphrastic stories in Disgust is called “Strange Fire,” based on renowned artist, Frida Kahlo, who suffered from various afflictions. In the story, you call her “fierce and independent.” Do you find any similarities between you and Frida?

Lorette: Oh, gosh, yes. Frida’s life has enormous appeal to artists, writers, and to women, to the sick, to everyone. It is because we see ourselves in her, or perhaps, at least see what we want to be. We can relate to her pain, even if our own is not quite as epic and mythic. She did not intend to be the patron saint of millions, but her story has become that to so many of us. Frida lived passionately on her own terms, embracing her painful, turmoiled marriage with intensity; she did not let a male dominated world stop her from creating her own version of art, or from loving men deeply. She did not let a wheelchair or body-cast or terrible pain stop her from connecting to the world, to her culture, to her lovers, to justice, to her truth. She was incredibly beautiful and sexy, from within a broken body and her pain. She didn’t wait to be perfect and healed to live. We take inspiration from Frida and see ourselves in her because we want to be like her. She gives us permission to live the full spectrum of our feelings and emotions.

Rebecca: Suffering can be emotionally difficult to write about, especially when drawing on personal experience. Has there ever been a time when it felt particularly painful to write about your own suffering in detail, even if mirrored in a character? If so, can you give an example, or an excerpt from Disgust in which the character’s pain may have been especially challenging to write about?

Lorette: One of the stories in the collection is called “Choked Up,” about Nels developing an irrational fear that his partner Sebastian will choke to death. This reflects an experience I had after my partner had an incident where he swallowed an orange that went down the wrong way. He was coughing for so long and had a sensation of the orange being stuck in his windpipe. He had to seek medical help. At the same time, the other love of my life, my orange tabby Benedict, was having choking fits that turned out be feline asthma. I began to have intrusive fears around the clock that they would die. I was afraid that the orange would come loose while my partner was sleeping and go into his lungs, or that I would be helpless as Benedict gasped for breath and convulsed out of life. I became crazy for awhile, feeling a terrible panic whenever my partner chewed on food, wanting him to eat only soft mushy soups and yogurt. I had a nightmare out of the blue that one of my best friends choked to death. I became afraid of food and anything else that might randomly kill someone I loved. I started to have trouble swallowing myself. 

Although on one level I could understand that this was a pathological response to trauma, a struggle with the reality of the fragility of life, I also understood that I could not just stop everyone from eating, which would also kill us. It was a strange phenomenon and went on for months. I finally told my partner I’d been having bizarre, intrusive thoughts and was losing my mind over it. He encouraged me to write about it, so I wrote the story about Nels having the same fear. The strange thing was that bringing the strange story to life in this way banished the fear. I was better able to understand it and stop it from controlling me.   

Rebecca:  In your story, “Wasabi,” you speak of a character’s “deliberate embrace of life.”  What can your book tell us about making the proactive choice to live with this mindset in the face of chronic illness or pain?

Lorette: One thing I have come to understand through a very difficult life is that happiness is not separate from turmoil and pain. They exist at the same time. Joy and beauty and love are present at the same time as suffering, trauma, and chaos. Life ebbs and flows, and beauty and horror constantly intermingle. Toxic positivity assumes we can control and erase negativity. True joy and love come from understanding that life hurts, and deeply, but that it is thrumming with magic and beauty nonetheless. 

We try to avoid pain, but accepting it holistically is a better way to embrace life. It hurts to lose someone we love, for example, and too often we shut down our hearts to avoid loss. But the experience of going through an illness and demise with someone, while painful, is a very deep and intimate experience. Love and dating are often harrowing, and relationships risk divorce and betrayal, but cutting ourselves off completely guarantees we will have nothing. 

I learned that even in the pain of something as humiliating as radiation burns and losing part of your breast, and losing your hair to chemotherapy, there is still laughter and love inside of those days. My partner wanted a picture of us together when all of my hair had fallen out. I was very irritable at the time and demanded to know what he was thinking. “It’s the only time we’ll ever be twins,” he said, and we laughed and laughed, and I treasure every occasion of laughter.

When my father was dying of cancer, he told me that he still enjoyed each day and all of its small pleasures. The last trip in the car for ice cream on a sunny day. Watching the dog play in the backyard. The gathering of family.

An example of joy and wonder that is constant is cats. The unique relationship we have with pets is an ongoing miracle. Cats are sweet, funny, gorgeous. Every day with a cat is a good day, no matter what else happens. We have wild animals living in our home, the feared kings of the savannah, somehow curled up on our pillows. It’s actually mind boggling. They are unbelievable friends when you are sick or lonely. Pure magic.

I am not saying any of this comes easily. I renew my decision every day to live fully no matter what I face. I pray every day for strength to face what I have to.

A broken heart is a deep initiation into the human story.

In a poem I love, “Lead,” by Mary Oliver, she says, “Here is a story to break your heart. Are you willing?” 

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Lorette C. Luzajic is the founding editor of The Ekphrastic Review. Other recent collections of flash fiction and prose poetry include Pretty Time Machine, The Rope Artist, Winter in June,and Disgust. Her work has twice been awarded in the Best Small Fictions anthologies, and has been translated into Spanish and Urdu. She teaches art history and creative writing through The Ekphrastic Academy and other organizations. She also teaches mixed media and collage at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto where she was a patient for ten years. Lorette is a recent survivor of breast cancer. She is also an award-winning visual artist, with collectors in 40 countries so far.

Rebecca Weigold studied Theatre and English, specializing in poetry, at Northern Kentucky University. She has held positions including Editorial Assistant at F&W Publications in Cincinnati, Ohio, and Editor at ITP/Southwestern Educational Publishing, also based in Cincinnati. Her poetry has been featured in or is forthcoming in publications such as BlazeVox, The Ekphrastic Review, Rat’s Ass Review, Tipton Poetry Journal, The Tishman Review, and others. Notably, two of her poems were nominated for the Pushcart Prize by The Ekphrastic Review. Additionally, she is proud to have participated in the renowned Uptown Poetry Slam on multiple occasions, hosted by Marc Smith at the historic Green Mill in Chicago.
 

Still Life with Oranges, by Paul Gauguin (France) 1881

Jesus Bound, unknown artist (Peru) contemporary, after Jesus Bound, unknown artist, Spanish Colonial School (Peru) c. 1700s

before and after