Nicola DeRobertis-Theye

How did you become a writer?

I was always a reader, reading constantly during my childhood, after school, during school under my desk, everything I could get my hands on, from the Boxcar Children to the Babysitters Club and onward. I starting writing in high school—I worked on the high school literary magazine, and that was the first time I needed to produce and turn in creative work for someone else to read. I took one writing workshop in college, but it wasn’t until after college when I was working in a bookstore that I had any sort of regular writing practice. It was because I had a book that wanted to be written; I would hear sentences in my head as I walked. So I started writing regularly, and that led me to get an MFA.

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

I learned so much from my teachers in graduate school: Rebecca Lee, Robert Anthony Siegel, Clyde Edgerton, David Gessner, Virginia Holman. But before that, in high school, it was from Mrs. Mahoney, who was my French teacher and also ran the literary magazine—she gave me my first Sylvia Plath poem and Borges story to read, saying I think you’ll like these, and Mrs. Caraballo, who was my senior year English teacher and the first person to tell me I was good at writing. But above all it was other writers: Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, Edith Wharton, Anne Carson, W.G. Sebald, Roberto Bolaño, Haruki Murakami, Orhan Pamuk, Kiran Desai, Jane Austen, Doris Lessing, Nicole Krauss, Rachel Cusk. 

When and where do you write?

Mostly on weekend mornings, occasionally after work on weekdays. For the last year, stuck inside, it’s been at my desk, which is in the corner of the living room of a small Brooklyn apartment, at a window looking out at the Red Hook cranes and the Buttermilk Channel. I like to write at a window; any sense of claustrophobia is tough for me to overcome, creatively. I also love to write at cafés, but for the last year it’s just been me and the desk. Sometimes I write on the couch if I’m feeling particularly tired or resistant. A few times, when I was writing something especially emotionally vulnerable, I’ve let myself write in bed.

What are you working on now?

Another novel, set in my hometown of Oakland, California. 

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?

Of course. Short term, my tricks are a walk or a run or a shower. Long term, reading and engaging in creative lazing about, cultivating boredom so the mind has something to fill in.

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

This wasn’t given to me personally, but “Spend it, don’t save it,” from Annie Dillard, I’ve always found very useful.

What’s your advice to new writers?

Be prepared for it to take a very long time, longer than you think you can bear. Organize your life so that publishing a book (which, even if it happens, will take years, publishing is very slow!) isn’t the one thing that will make you enjoy it/feel like it’s been worth it. Be true to the book you want to write and what the book wants to be, not what you think will sell or what you think people want to read. Keep writing.

Nicola DeRobertis-Theye was an Emerging Writing Fellow at the New York Center for Fiction, and her work has been published in Agni, Electric Literature, and LitHub. A graduate of UC Berkeley, she received an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from the University of North Carolina, Wilmington, where she was the fiction editor of its literary magazine, Ecotone. She is a native of Oakland, California and lives in Brooklyn, New York.