How did you become a writer?

By becoming a reader first. As a kid, I read nonstop -- my mom took me to the library every week and every week I came back with a sky-high stack of books that made me so happy. I love being immersed in a world. My dad is an artist, and we grew up in his downstairs studio. It was a pretty creative environment in our house -- we were homebodies, but our imaginative life was internally expansive. 

Name your writing influences (writers, books, teachers, etc.).

In college I took two nonfiction seminars with the writer Natalie Kusz, the author of Road Song, an incredibly riveting memoir. She taught me that nonfiction writing could be just as creative as fiction, the prose as vivid and diamond-bright and powerful. That was eye-opening. It changed my life.

When and where do you write? 

When I need to write something that requires sustained thought, I get up really early. That five to six am window when everything is still and dark is so clarifying. The where matters less.

What are you working on now? 

Finishing up the back matter for my first children's book, which will be published next year. Writing an essay for an anthology on San Francisco. And neck-deep in my next book, about fallow time.  

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? 

Not really, though this period of pandemic and protest has certainly made it difficult to get writing done, mostly because so much of my waking life is taken up with thinking and talking about these big and uncertain things, especially with my children.  

What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received?

Get up and do the work. 

What’s your advice to new writers?

Writing is a discipline, just like any other. It's not some magical thing that happens to you -- ultimately, you are the force that drives the work. Carving out a regular routine for your practice is critical. And then you can make the magic.

Bonnie Tsui is the author of WHY WE SWIM, a cultural and scientific exploration of our human relationship with water and swimming. A Boston Globe and Los Angeles Times bestseller, it was named an Editor's Choice by The New York Times Book Review. It has also received praise from NPR, The San Francisco Chronicle, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, and Booklist, and was named a best book of the season by Amazon, Outside, Buzzfeed, Oprah, and more. A journalist and longtime contributor to The New York Times, Bonnie is also the author of AMERICAN CHINATOWN, winner of the Asia/Pacific American Award for Literature and a San Francisco Chronicle bestseller. She lives, swims, and surfs in the San Francisco Bay Area.