Lauren Acampora

How did you become a writer? I was always scribbling stories from the time I could write my letters. They were usually about animals: dogs, horses, and bunnies. I also read a lot as a kid and was obsessed with the Little House on the Prairie books; I wanted to be Laura Ingalls Wilder, which included being a writer. As I continued to read more widely, I became both exhilarated and completely overwhelmed by the idea of writing fiction, the sheer enormity of its possibilities. I wrote poetry through high school, college, and beyond. For a long time, I believed I lacked the confidence writing fiction required. But I was still reading much more fiction than poetry, and finally my poems morphed into prose poems, which then morphed into stories. While living and working in New York, I enrolled in evening classes in a fiction MFA program, and those instructors and classmates gave me validation and encouragement to keep hammering away outside of office hours. Finally, I started to get a few things published, and I just kept at it.

Name your writing influences (writers, books, teachers, etc.). Having just outlined my path to writing fiction, I understand the core importance of those nature-based books I read as a young person: the Little House on the Prairie series, and all the novels in Walter Farley’s Black Stallion series and Jim Kjelgaard’s books about dogs (Big Red, etc.). My mind was also blown by the unsettling psychological tangles of Lois Duncan’s dreamy, spooky thrillers, and William Sleator’s time travel novel, The Green Futures of Tycho. I had two especially transformative teachers at Darien High School—Faye Gage and Lynda Sorensen—who challenged my thinking and nurtured my creative experimentation. John Steinbeck, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ray Bradbury, Richard Brautigan, and Henry David Thoreau all made deep impressions on me then. At Brown, my poetry professor, Gale Nelson, introduced me to the weird and wonderful. And Professor Arnold Weinstein, whose comparative literature classes I devoured, was—and continues to be—a major force in my thinking, writing, and reading. Literary influences from that era include Virginia Woolf, Charlotte Bronte, E. E. Cummings, and Franz Kafka. At Brooklyn College’s MFA program, I worked with incredible instructors who’ve become mentors, friends, and artistic influences in their own right: Irini Spanidou, Susan Choi, and Michael Cunningham. These days, writers and creators who excite my imagination include George Saunders, Donna Tartt, T.C. Boyle, John Cheever, Flannery O’Connor, and David Lynch. 

When and where do you write? I write at home on my back deck whenever I can. If the weather isn’t amenable, I work at my desk in a little blue office/guest room with a window. But truthfully, I get more done when I’m not at home, where there’s less temptation to get up out of the chair and putter around. The best place is the library. Being in view of strangers keeps me honest.

What are you working on now? I’m just finishing up a collection of linked stories about human-animal dynamics. I guess I never really stopped writing about dogs, horses, and bunnies.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? I don’t think I’ve suffered from “writer’s block,” as such, but rather “story’s block.” I think all writers sometimes come up against a problem in a story, some intractable issue in the plot, or a question of character, or just how to get from here to there in a narrative—and realize the story is stuck. I’ve found a few useful strategies for dealing with this. One is going for a walk. Another is leaving the house with a notebook, finding somewhere quiet, and just scrawling out the problem and all its associated questions and ideas. Showers also help.

What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received? Michael Cunningham’s advice has to be the best, although the hardest to follow: “Keep your butt in the chair.”

What’s your advice to new writers? Read the writers who make you feel like you can do it, too. Steer clear of the ones who make you want to give up. For very new writers, I’d say, don’t be too hard on yourself, and try not to put too much pressure on the work. Let your writing breathe and develop as naturally and joyfully as possible. Write about what’s really on your mind, no matter how unsettling or bizarre or silly. Write about what obsesses or perplexes you, what makes you feel excited, giddy, nervous. Crucially, write like no one is watching. In order to do this, I suggest labeling any work-in-progress with the word “freewrite” as a psychological insurance policy in case you are hit by a bus and someone finds it. 

Lauren Acampora is the author of three books of fiction published by Grove Atlantic: The Wonder Garden, The Paper Wasp, and The Hundred Waters. Her books have won or been nominated for the GLCA New Writers Award, the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, the Story Prize, and the New England Book Award, and she’s been named an Artist Fellow in Fiction by The New York Foundation for the Arts. Lauren’s writing has appeared in The Paris Review, New England Review, Missouri Review, Guernica, and The New York Times, among other places. She lives in New York.