Richard Slotkin

How did you become a writer?

I’ve wanted to be a writer since I learned to read. In school, what absorbed me was writing, whether class papers or articles for the school newspaper. I chose college teaching as a profession because it would allow me to write. But writing always meant two different things: non-fiction, in my case academic writing; and literary fiction. I suppose one doesn’t really “become a writer” till the work is published – and you know that you can not only put words on paper, but that they “work” for an audience. So I first became an academic writer (starting in 1966) and then – when academic publication boosted my confidence – a fiction writer (in 1980).

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

Teachers: Miss Rockmore in Freshman English at Brooklyn College, who took my writing seriously as writing as opposed to responding just to the ideas. Writers were my best teachers. Mark Twain, Faulkner, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Hemingway, Conrad, Paul Horgan – in a strange way, John Ford

When and where do you write?

If I’m committed to a project, I prefer to write in the morning, break for lunch – then perhaps go over what I’ve written in the afternoon. If I’m between projects I’m usually still writing, sketching ideas, taking notes – on a more random schedule.

What are you working on now?

I’ve just finished a novel, THE BROOKLYN BOYS, about a Jewish war veteran and union organizer (in 1931) trying to get the gangsters out of the garment unions.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?

Not as such. I’m always at least playing with possible projects, and I can always sit down and write an article or lecture for a particular occasion. But I’m often between projects, when there’s no book project I can fully commit to.

What’s your advice to new writers?

I’m assuming “fiction writers” here. You have to have confidence in the validity of what you have to say, and in your ability to get it said. You have to give yourself license to speak freely on your subject – not worry about critics, but see yourself as the authority on the subject at hand. Of course you’re the authority – who knows better than you what it is you’re trying to say? After that, it’s putting in the time to get the work done.

Richard Slotkin is Olin Professor of American Studies (Emeritus) at Wesleyan University, where he began teaching in 1966. He developed and for more than twenty years directed the American Studies Program, for which he received the 1995 Mary C. Turpie Award of the American Studies Association. He also helped develop Wesleyan’s Film Studies Program.

He was born in Brooklyn, NY in 1942, and educated in the public schools and Brooklyn College before getting his Ph.D. in American Civilization at Brown University (1967).

He is best known for an award-winning trilogy of scholarly books on the myth of the frontier in American cultural history. Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860 (1973) was a Finalist for the 1974 National Book Award in History, and received the 1973 Albert J. Beveridge Award of the American Historical Association. The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800-1890 (1985) received the literary award of the Little Big Horn Associates, and has become a standard reference in the field of American Studies. Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth Century America (1992) was a Finalist for the 1993 National Book Award. Lost Battalions: The Great War and the Crisis of American Nationality (2005) combined military and social history to show how war transformed the nation’s understanding of race, ethnicity and social justice. In 2009 he published No Quarter: The Battle of the Petersburg Crater, 1864, a study of the political and military forces that shaped the war’s largest racial massacre. His latest book is Long Road to Antietam: How the Civil War Became a Revolution (2012), which deals with the political and strategic crisis that transformed the conduct and objectives of the Union and the Confederacy.

He has also written three historical novels. Abe: A Novel of the Young Lincoln (2000) received the Michael Shaara Award for Civil War Fiction (2001) and the Salon.com Book Award (2000). A chapter was reprinted in the Library of America’s Lincoln Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and Legacy (2009). The Return of Henry Starr (1988), is a historical Western about an American social bandit. The Crater: A Novel of the Civil War (1980) was the first work of fiction offered by the History Book Club. His other works include So Dreadfull a Judgment, a collection of primary documents concerning King Philip's War (1675-77), published in 1978. Articles and reviews have appeared in American Literary History, American Quarterly, Berkshire Review, Journal of Popular Culture, Prospects 9, American Historical Review, Journal of the West, Western Historical Quarterly, William and Mary Quarterly, Radical History Review and Representations. His article "Nostalgia and Progress: Theodore Roosevelt's Myth of the Frontier," in American Quarterly received the 1981 Don D. Walker Prize as the best article on Western American literature.

Slotkin has been awarded fellowships from the NEH and Rockefeller Foundation. In 1987 he received a Distinguished Achievement Citation from Brown University; and in 1986 was elected a Fellow of the Society of American Historians. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2010, and in 2012 received the Distinguished Achievement Award of the Western Literature Association. He has twice received Wesleyan’s Binswanger “Excellence in Teaching” Award (1997 and 2007).

He often serves as a consultant and on-screen interviewee for media projects on violence, racism, popular culture, the Civil War and the West. Recent projects include “America: The Story of Us,” History Channel (2009-10); Custer’s Last Stand: American Experience (2010); “Clint Eastwood” (American Masters, 2000), “Colt: Legend and Legacy” (PBS/1998), "Big Guns Talk" (TNT, 1997), and “Gunfighter Nation” on Bill Moyers & Co., PBS (2013). 

Julie Salamon

How did you become a writer?

During my childhood in a tiny, rural village in Southern Ohio, it never occurred to me that writing books was a possibility. But when I arrived at college that fall and people asked what I wanted to do, I said, as if I’d always known, I want to be a writer. That desire never wavered.

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

I’ve been influenced by almost every writer I’ve read, but some have inspired in particular ways: Rebecca West, E.B. White, Norman Mailer, Upton Sinclair, Edith Wharton, Isaac B. Singer, Philip Roth and Laura Ingalls Wilder. George Dardess and Jesper Rosenmeir were influential teachers, as was Raymond Sokolov, my editor at The Wall Street Journal arts section for a decade.

When and where do you write?

For first drafts, I keep “business hours,” force myself to sit in front of my computer pretty much 9-5, hoping a few hours of productivity will emerge (with breaks to walk the dog, pace, make cups of tea).  I write on a PC perched on a big wooden desk in my office, which doubles as a guest room, in my apartment in New York City.

What are you working on now?

I just finished “Cat in the City,” an illustrated novel for young readers (7-12), working again with the wonderful artist Jill Weber. Penguin’s Dial Press for Young Readers is publishing the book next fall.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?

Depends on how you define writer’s block. I’ve gone for stretches when I’ve hated everything I’ve written, but I always keep writing.

What’s your advice to new writers?

Whenever you think something is finished, put it aside for a week or more, then take another look.

Julie  Salamon has written a nine books in many genres, on the subjects of show business, the Holocaust, murder, charity and philanthropy, and life in a big city hospital. She was a reporter and the film critic for The Wall Street Journal for 16 years, and then a culture writer on the staff of the New York Times. She is a graduate of Tufts University and New York University School of Law. She is chair of the BRC, a social services organization in New York City that provides care for people who are homeless and may suffer from addiction or mental disease. She is co-president of The Village Temple, a Reform Jewish congregation in Greenwich Village, and a mentor with Girls Write Now, a writing and mentoring program for New York City public high school girls. Born in Cincinnati and raised in Seaman, Ohio, a rural town of 800; in 2008 she was inducted into the Ohio Women’s Hall of Fame. New York City has long been home; she lives in downtown Manhattan with her husband Bill Abrams, executive director of Trickle Up. They have two children, Roxie and Eli, and a cat and dog, Kuro and Maggie.

Karen E. Bender

How did you become a writer?

I became a writer when I was six years old and hit on the head by a rock. This experience is covered in more exhaustive detail in my essay, “The Accidental Writer.”  

After the rock incident, I started many stories and novels with great enthusiasm and then quickly abandoned them. I didn’t know what I wanted to say but I loved the feeling of writing, the rush of expression, the power of creation. I started finishing stories and revising them when I was in college.

I think “becoming a writer” is a problematic term—you are a writer when you write. You become a better writer after revising and pushing and reading and envisioning a beautiful work that you want to create. At some point, I realized that becoming a writer was all about denial--I pretended I was a better writer than I actually was, and then, with patience and ox-like stubbornness, did get better. 

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

I’m influenced by whoever I read and fall in love with at any moment. Some writers who have been important to me: Philip Roth, J.D. Salinger, John Cheever, Paula Fox, James Baldwin, Vladmir Nabokov, Flannery O’Connor, Carson McCullers, Truman Capote, Martin Amis, Jayne Anne Phillips, Cynthia Ozick, Denis Johnson, Lorrie Moore, Deborah Eisenberg, Isaac Babel, Junot Diaz, Alice Munro. More recently, I’ve been loving Yan Lianke, Grace Paley, Craig Nova. I love characters who I understand and somehow understand me, and great, vivid sentences that illuminate the world in a new way. 

When and where do you write?

I write whenever I can—usually I try to schedule teaching in the afternoon so that I can write a bit in the morning; I also write when our children go to sleep. I write on a desk in the bedroom.

What are you working on now?

Right now I’m playing around with new stories and a longer piece of fiction. I’m living in Taiwan for the year, and am taking notes, trying to absorb as much as I can; living abroad also highlights all of the peculiarities of America, so it’s helping me see what I want to focus on next. 

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?

I stopped writing once in my life, for three months, after a class with a charismatic but terrifying instructor who tended to encourage his students to sound like him. I wasn’t cooperating, so I wasn’t getting a lot of affirmation in the class, and when the class ended, he gave the students the option of re-enrolling, with the chance to reach literary glory by learning his method, etc. I decided not to take his class again, and for three months, I took a break from writing. Did I want to sound like this teacher, or did I want to sound like myself? I decided that I wanted to sound like myself, whatever that meant. It was an enormous relief, actually. And then my writing got better.

What’s your advice to new writers?

Know that the deepest, strangest things that you want to say are not to be hidden but shared, and that other people will understand them and be reassured by them. Trust patience and the process that a story may take in finding itself. What you say matters; think about how you want to join the conversation.

Karen E. Bender is the author of the novels Like Normal People and A Town of Empty Rooms, which is now available in paperback. A story collection will be published by Counterpoint Press in 2015. Her stories have appeared in magazines including The New Yorker, Granta, Ploughshares, Zoetrope, Narrative, and The Harvard Review, and reprinted in Best American Short Stories, Best American Mystery Stories, and the Pushcart Prize series. You can read some of her work at www.byliner.com, and visit her at www.karenebender.com.