How did you become a writer?

The simple answer is that I’ve wanted to be a novelist since I was a child. The longer answer: it took many years and many discursions until I had the courage and resilience to really try writing fiction (and showing it to people!). I’d written fiction up through college, but once I graduated, I stopped for years. I did Teach For America for two months; quit and worked at a startup; went to journalism school; and worked as a freelance journalist. It wasn’t until I started taking classes with the amazing Beth Ann Bauman at The Writer’s Voice in Manhattan that I returned to writing fiction in my late twenties. Beth created just the kind of space I needed: supportive, warm, and playful—and not at the expense of rigor. And so I started writing again. 

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

Beyond Beth, I’m indebted to so many gifted, generous wonderful writing teachers. In college, Gabe Hudson taught me how to play on the page. At NYU’s program in Cultural Reporting and Criticism, Katie Roiphe expanded my notion of what was possible on the page, and Susie Linfield taught me how to write—that is, how to think—with relentless clarity. In the New School’s MFA program, where I wrote my debut novel Hysteria, Helen Schulman interrogated my writing while also nurturing me; Darcey Steinke encouraged me to lean into my weirder impulses; Luis Jaramillo’s novel-writing course was a revelation; and Katie Kitamura’s incisive feedback as my advisor helped shape my manuscript. As far as influences I’ve met on the page, they’re far too many to count.

When and where do you write?

Mostly in the mornings, at the kitchen table. 

What are you working on now?

A new novel!

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?

I prefer to think of it as “writer’s fear.” There are so many kinds of fear that can repel me from the page: fear of writing poorly; fear of writing my way to something I’m not ready to see; fear of others’ judgment. I could go on. It’s been helpful to me to set aside just half an hour each day to write. I can keep going, but I don’t have to. That makes it less scary: how much can really happen in half an hour? (Well, a lot. But don’t tell future-me—the one who’s going to wake up tomorrow and do it again.)   

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

Almost all the good stuff happens in revision.

What’s your advice to new writers?

Have fun.

Jessica Gross’s writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Longreads, and The Los Angeles Review of Books, among other places. Her debut novel, Hysteria, was published by Unnamed Press in August 2020.