Jessie Gaynor

How did you become a writer? I have a theory that writing is acting for inward-facing people (or those who have limited acting talent). I am both inward-facing and sadly limited in my acting talent, so after my high school theater career ended with a whimper, I started writing one-act plays, then poetry, then fiction.

Name your writing influences (writers, books, teachers, etc.). Two of my early professors, Timothy Donnelly and Josh Bell, are the reason I pursued writing. Both are brilliant poets, and some of the best writing teachers I’ve ever had in terms of encouraging the development of a unique voice. In terms of books and writers, I’ve always gravitated toward humor. Reading Nell Zink’s Mislaid unlocked something for me—I love how unapologetically zany she allows herself to be. Sam Lipsyte and Paul Beatty and Mark Leidner are perennial favorites, and Mrs. Bridge by Evan S. Connell is a master class in brutal, unsparing tragicomedy. 

When and where do you write? Because my job as an editor at Lit Hub requires me to live in other people’s words all day, I have to write in the mornings. I also have two young kids, so by the end of the day, all I can do is watch terrible television. When I’m in the groove of a project, I try to wake up around 5:30 to work. (A programmable coffee pot helps with this.)

What are you working on now? I’m bouncing back and forth between a coming-of-age story about middle school girls in the ’90s and a romantic comedy. The latter is holding my attention more at the moment.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? Constantly. The only thing that really helps me are deadlines and external expectations, for which I lean on my writing group.

What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received? The best distillation of the best (and most difficult to follow) writing advice I know comes from Richard Hugo's The Triggering Town: "The hard work on the first poem is responsible for the sudden ease of the second. If you just sit around waiting for the easy ones, nothing will come. Get to work." This applies to any form of writing (and likely most other worthwhile pursuits, too). 

What’s your advice to new writers? Write what you want to read. I got my MFA in poetry, and I felt a great deal of pressure to write the kind of poetry that would win me praise from my peers, even though it wasn't terribly interesting to me. The praise was intermittent at best, and I ended up feeling deeply disconnected from my work for a long time. Now I really try to trust my own delight.

Jessie Gaynor’s work has appeared in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, The New Yorker, WSJ Magazine, and elsewhere. She is a senior editor at Literary Hub and she has an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was a Rona Jaffe fellow. She lives in Richmond, Virginia with her family. The Glow is her first novel.