How did you become a writer? I love to read, and what locked in the writing for me was a visit a local author made to my first-grade classroom. Our teacher had read this author’s book out loud to us, and I made a connection: I loved that book, this woman sitting right in front of me wrote the book I loved, maybe I could write a book that someone will love. After I got an MFA, I felt brave enough to call myself a writer. (And for the record, that book was Hildy and the Cuckoo Clock by Ruth Christoffer Carlsen.)

Name your writing influences. Early on, two of my favorite novels were (and still are) The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald and The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger. And while I could name many dozens of other books that deepened my understanding of writing, I’ll pick six: Joan Didion, Play It As It Lays; Raymond Carver, Cathedral; Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried; Ernest Hemingway, In Our Time; Jay McInerney, Bright Lights, Big City; and Willa Cather, My Antonia. As for craft books, two I return to again, and still, are The Art of Fiction by John Gardner and Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott. 

When and where do you write? I’m an afternoon writer. Yes, I know how unusual I am, but I’m a thousand percent not a morning person! I use the morning for errands/life, keeping the afternoon as free as possible for writing. There’s something creatively inspiring about working on a novel for several hours in the afternoon, then heading into the kitchen to cook dinner—a different way of creative expression. Mostly I write at home, but I also do a lot of prompt-writing—by hand, on paper—out in coffee shops, sometimes with groups, which I think triggers a different part of my brain. That’s a particularly rich process for working through problematic scenes and developing characters, I think.

What are you working on now? I’m hoping to finish up a collection of linked stories that may turn into a novel or may feel right as stories. I’m saying that Nothing To See Here is like The Virgin Suicides minus the male gaze: a group of 12-year-old girls lives in a neighborhood in Iowa during the ’70s, and one of them disappears while buying candy. Without turning into a police procedural, the stories explore in greater depth how and why women and girls end up disappearing in our culture. 

 Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? I try not to call it writer’s block, but I’ve definitely felt panic at not having a Big Project to focus on, or at feeling frustrated by my writing. When I’m in that state, I try to change things up in some way, whether by trying a different genre or writing in a different place or an atypical time of day. I’m also fine taking a break, during which I read or research, or I connect with nature or art. Not every writing day (or week, or month) is going to be great, and that’s just part of the writing life, learning when to plow through and when to step back, and being very, very, very patient with yourself throughout.  

What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received? Richard Bausch, a beloved teacher I met at the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, told us to write until something surprised us. That’s when you’ll know you’re on the right track. And that’s my definition of an excellent writing day: when something surprises me.

What’s your advice to new writers? Persevere. I said that I started calling myself a writer after I got my MFA, and I admire my youthful boldness. But I wrote three novels before my “first” novel, Pears on a Willow Tree, was published. I just knew I wasn’t going to give up until I had a novel in the public library in my Iowa hometown. I advise cultivating a deep and abiding stubbornness.  

Leslie Pietrzyk’s collection of linked stories set in DC, Admit This to No One, was published in 2021 by Unnamed Press. Her first collection of stories, This Angel on My Chest, won the 2015 Drue Heinz Literature Prize. Short fiction and essays have appeared in, among others, Ploughshares, Story Magazine, Hudson Review, Southern Review, Gettysburg Review, Iowa Review, The Sun, Cincinnati Review, and Washington Post Magazine. Awards include a Pushcart Prize in 2020.