Elizabeth Rush

How did you become a writer?

Katie Ford, the fabulous poet, is the person who turned me into a writer. I had been working on a collection of poems that would become my senior thesis and Katie had been assigned to mentor me through the process. I remember handing her the drafts I had labored over for months. She read them and gave them back a week or so later and told me, “this isn’t poetry.” I was a little devastated at first. Then I became determined. Katie sat down with me for an hour every week (now as a professor myself I understand what a tremendous time commitment this is) and she taught me how to edit my own work. How to return to it again and again and again until the language yielded wisdom all its own. She always told me to aim towards exactitude while editing in the mystery. 

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

I read as much poetry as I do nonfiction. One of the biggest influences on my latest book, RISING: Dispatches from the New American Shoreis Svetlana Alexievich’s Voices from Chernobyl, which recently won the Nobel Prize in literature. She tells the story of the nuclear explosion from the perspective of those who lived through and returned to the land after the event. The entire book is written in the voices of real residents of the region and is the result of nearly a decade of interviewing and meticulous transcription. The cumulative effect is that of a kind of polyphonic chorus, that depicts with incredible specificity what it was like not only to live through this environmental catastrophe but also to bear witness to the end of the Soviet Union. And of course I am always indebted to the work of so very many poets: C.D. Wright, Jamaal May, Robert Haas, Brenda Hillman, Ada Limón, Tracy Smith, I could go on and on. 

When and where do you write? 

I have an office in my house and you can find me there Monday-Friday from roughly 6 am (or 7 am) until 1 pm. Mornings are my sacred writing time and I try, when I can, to defend it fiercely. 

What are you working on now? 

Well, it looks like next year I will be sailing, with the National Science Foundation and the UK’s Natural Environment Research Council to Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica. Thwaites is literally one of the most remote regions in the world (only 28 people have ever stood atop the glacier) and yet in many ways the rate at which this glacier melting will determine the future of coastal communities around the world. That’s because Thwaites is considered “the cork” to the West Antarctic ice sheet. Its deterioration destabilizes the whole of the ice sheet behind it. And because Thwaites is so remote we have little data from region and so I will be accompanying three research teams as they investigate how quickly this glacier has retreated in the geologic past and just how quickly it is retreating now. 

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? 

Discipline is what helps me push through writer’s block. Writing is my job. I show up every day. Some days are better than others. If I am having a particularly tough time with a piece I tend to wake up super early and get to work. Sometimes writing with a foggy mind––in the space between dreaming and wakefulness––helps me to take chances I might not otherwise. If that doesn’t work I take a long walk or bike ride. Sometimes wringing my body out helps my mind make creative leaps. 

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

Revise. Revise. Revise. Revise. Revise. Revise. Revise. 

What’s your advice to new writers?

Create a writing practice. If you want to be a hotshot basketball player you carve out time to practice. Do the same with your writing. Figure out when your mind is most lithe and write during that time. You need not carve out five hours of every day. Start with an hour or two. Are you best early in the morning? Then set aside the same hour every day and fill it with your writing. 

Elizabeth Rush’s work explores how humans adapt to changes enacted upon them by forces seemingly beyond their control, from ecological transformation to political revolution. She is the author of Rising: The Unsettling of the American Shore (Milkweed Editions, 2018) and Still Lifes from a Vanishing City: Essays and Photographs from Yangon, Myanmar (Global Directions, 2014.) Her work has appeared in Harpers, The Atlantic, Pacific Standard, Granta, Creative Nonfiction, Orion, Guernica, Le Monde Diplomatique and others. Rush is the recipient of fellowships from the Andrew Mellon Foundation, Oregon State University’s Spring Creek Project, the Society for Environmental Journalism, the National Society of Science Writers and the Metcalf Institute. In 2016, she was awarded the Howard Foundation Fellowship in creative nonfiction by Brown University where she teaches creative nonfiction.

Anthony Madrid

How did you become a writer?

My parents were expressive people, so I was too. Early on, I started to see expressiveness as a form of ordinary magic, the only one I was any good at, so naturally I pursued it. Seemed like the only way I was ever going to glamor anybody, and I really wanted to do that. Pitiful enough, but there it is.

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

If I list a hundred poets and novelists, it will just be meaningless, a rigmarole of completely received bigshots. Instead, I’ll take the opportunity to name my mentor: Vivian Gornick, author of Fierce Attachments and The Odd Woman and the City. From her writing and her talk I’ve learned as much as from everything else put together. I’ve known her half my life.

When and where do you write? 

Whenever, wherever; I’m not particular. I have no prejudices against computers or pencils-and-paper or any of that. Morning, noon, night, they’re all the same to me. I do prefer silence, I will say that.

What are you working on now? 

The usual. Translations, poems. I want to do this Russian children’s poem into English. I may have just found an illustrator for it, literally day before yesterday. It’s a very nice piece, 121 lines. I’m memorizing it, in Russian, in preparation for translating.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? 

The thing that happens to me doesn’t deserve to be called writer’s block. It doesn’t hurt.

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

Joel Craig said to me, regarding delays in the production of his first book: “I don’t need it to be done fast; I need it to be done right.” That’s the kind of thing I always need to hear.

What’s your advice to new writers?

(This is just for baby poets; I don’t know anything about how to do fiction.) Poets, you have to vigorously separate what you Actually Like from everything you only sorta like. Study your pleasure closely. Because! all your poems and definitely all your books had better be the kind of thing you Actually Like. Otherwise, what the hell are we even doing here? Look, you will fail to impress all kinds of people it would have been nice to impress, no matter what you do. The only thing that protects you from the pain of that is the fact that you yourself actually like your own stuff. If you ignore this principle, if you write a book, say, that is formidable nine ways from Tuesday, piled high with sophistication and impressive this ’n’ that, but which you don’t actually like, then what ends up happening is you helplessly side with the people who don’t care about your work. Next stop is the bottle.

Bio: I was raised in Maryland, currently live in Texas, turn fifty this year. I am the author of two books of poems: I Am Your Slave Now Do What I Say (2012), and Try Never (2017). A book of children’s poems for adults is coming out later in 2018, titled There Was an Old Man with a Springbok.

Tom McAllister

How did you become a writer?

I think there are two parts to this answer: 1) how did I get into books and writing in the first place, and 2) how did I transition that into doing it professionally. 

I started reading and writing in earnest when I was in 7thgrade, after reading my first “real” book for school, Of Mice and Men. My father had always been a voracious reader, so the house was filled with books anyway, and we played lots of word games (Scrabble, games in the newspaper, etc), and so it’s not like reading was new to me, but it was the first time I thought about writing as a real thing one could do. 

In college, I started as a journalism major because I was pretty good at writing and knew that was a job that could lead to being paid for writing (in theory). I hated those classes, though. I took an elective with Justin Cronin, who had not yet become the big, famous author he is now, and that changed my life. Though it was probably more gradual than this, I remember it as a single moment of epiphany, saying, “Okay, this is what I want to do with my life. I want to be like him.” He helped me take writing seriously, and helped me get into grad school, where, for the first time in my life, I was surrounded by talented, dedicated writers who pushed me to demand much more of myself. 

I still didn’t publish anything at all for another 2 years after grad school, but that was how it got started. 

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

Teachers: Justin Cronin, Frank Conroy, Charles D’Ambrosio. Also a number of non-writers who taught me in high school and college and encouraged and supported me in incredible ways. 

I think the question of influential books is a little tricky, because the books I love now are not the ones I loved when I was 20, and vice versa. But some books that have had a huge impact on the writer I am right now: Slaughterhouse-Five (Kurt Vonnegut), Pastoralia (George Saunders), Play it As it Lays (Joan Didion), The Antagonist (Lynn Coady), inscriptions for headstones (Matthew Vollmer), Jesus’ Son (Denis Johnson), An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination (Elizabeth McCracken), Men We Reaped (Jesmyn Ward), everything by Jo Ann Beard. 

When and where do you write? 

I teach at Temple University, and lately I’ve had early classes, so on teaching days, I try to get work done in the afternoon before my wife gets home. On non-teaching days, I try to write in the morning, getting most of my work done before lunch time, if possible. It’s when my head is relatively clear and it prevents me from doing that thing where you keep tricking yourself into thinking the day is infinite, and eventually you’ll get to it. I’m fortunate, too, that my job allows me a summer break, when I try to get a ton of writing done, if possible.

Where I write: the answer is boring. I have an office in my house, with a standard desk and a standard computer and the standard knick-knacks on and around the desk. 

What are you working on now? 

I’ve had two novels come out in the past 16 months (they were both written over a long period, and the release dates are sort of a fluke), and all the activity around that has slowed me down some. I’m in the very early stages of drafting a new novel, but I hate even calling it a novel; right now, it’s 10,000 words in a document on my computer. It’s nothing. Maybe in a year it will be something. 

I’ve always been working on a number of essays that I’ve been half-writing for years. 

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? 

Right now, as I’m being more unproductive than usual, I don’t think I would call it writer’s block. I’m distracting myself. I’m on social media and I’m obsessing over the news, and I’m wasting time. That’s not about being blocked, though; that’s about slipping out of my good habits and doing sloppy work. 

The only time I could say I was feeling truly blocked, unable to do anything, was in grad school, when the deadlines paralyzed me with fear. Now, I have so many notes, and so many partially started ideas, and so many writing prompts I could use, that I only have myself to blame if I’m not getting something done. 

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

Is it cheating if I name two? 

One, from a variety of writers and teachers: if you’re getting bored while you’re reading it, then it’s boring. Don’t try to convince yourself it’s not.

Two, from my friend Dave Housley, who has written a number of books (most recently This Darkness Got to Give): don’t be afraid to get weird. Take that dumb idea you’re afraid nobody is going to like, and write that, because only you can do it. 

What’s your advice to new writers?

Stop measuring yourself against other writers. Very, very few of us will ever achieve anything close to fame or longevity; the only goal is to tell the truest, best, most interesting version of the story you want to tell. Every single other thing is out of your control. 

Tom McAllister is the author of the novels How to Be Safe and The Young Widower’s Handbook, and the memoir Bury Me in My Jersey. He co-hosts the podcast Book Fight! and is the nonfiction editor at Barrelhouse. He lives in New Jersey and teaches at Temple University.