Maurice Chammah

How did you become a writer?

In college I took a lot of classes in Near Eastern Studies and anthropology, and my goal was to be a professor of some kind. But after I graduated, I realized that all of my favorite articles were in magazines like Texas Monthly and The New Yorker. I discovered that nonfiction writing was a way to learn about the world and participate in a larger public conversation about policy, culture, and other big subjects.

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

From my editors at The Marshall Project, I learned a great deal about how to write sensitively about real people, as a way of helping readers understand complex and sad public policy issues. Among my favorite writers are Isabel Wilkerson, Lawrence Wright, and Pamela Colloff. I’ve also learned a great deal about storytelling from my wife Emily Chammah, who writes fiction and has pointed me to many great novels. 

When and where do you write?

I’m fortunate to get to write for my day job at The Marshall Project. I mostly do this from my home in Austin, Texas, in an office painted an intense shade of green — it’s like I’m writing in an emerald cave. While working on my book, I was living in New York City, and I would spend my hour-long commute on the subway rereading my interview notes and court records and other research materials. Then on Saturday I would try to get as many words down as possible.

What are you working on now?

I’m working on a series of articles about the criminal justice system. I’m especially interested at the moment in sheriffs and jails. In my free time, I am continuing to research my father’s life — which I have previously written about for Guernica — and I plan to write more about those discoveries.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?

Absolutely. Usually the problem is coming up with a compelling opening that both inspires me to keep going and will eventually inspire readers to stick with something long.

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

My Marshall Project editor Bill Keller once told me: start writing earlier rather than later. This was in the context of journalism, where it is easy to endlessly gather research and put off the writing. He explained that in trying to write, you actually discover what research you really need to do.

What’s your advice to new writers?

Don’t be afraid to produce material you think is terrible. Most of what we call writing is actually editing — you get something down that isn’t very good, and then you try to figure out how to make it better. 

Maurice Chammah is the author of Let the Lord Sort Them: The Rise and Fall of the Death Penalty, and a staff writer at The Marshall Project, a non-profit newsroom that covers the U.S. criminal justice system.

Coco Fusco

How did you become a writer? 

I have always been interested in writing. Once when I was seven or eight years old there was a fire in our neighborhood and my father, who was a physician, ran out to offer help in case there were people injured. I composed a report on the fire and across the top I wrote "for the New York Times." I was very ambitious.

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

I am a child of immigrants and many of my relatives did not speak much English when I was growing up. I read voraciously as a child and studied literature in college. I had a creative writing teacher in high school who encouraged me, but in college I began to feel that I needed to know more about the world and about history to be taken seriously as a writer. I did not want to limit my writing to my own experience. I can't say that there was one particular author or book that influenced me. I have often been motivated to write about art by artists that I believe are either not appreciated or misunderstood.

When and where do you write?

I have an office in my house and that is where I do most of my writing. I basically write when I can. I have to teach to make a living and I also make video and performances so I don't write all the time.

What are you working on now?

I am working on two short films.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?

Sure. Having to meet deadlines helps with that.

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

1. Get it done. 2. Revise. 3. Read a lot.

What’s your advice to new writers?

1. Read. 2. Personal stories are often not very interesting, so try to do more than that. I am definitely not one of those writers that spends endless hours navel gazing or spouting opinions about the task of a writer or about style. 

Coco Fusco is an interdisciplinary artist and writer. She is a recipient of a 2018 Rabkin Prize for Art Criticism, a 2016 Greenfield Prize, a 2014 Cintas Fellowship, a 2013 Guggenheim Fellowship, a 2013 Absolut Art Writing Award, a 2013 Fulbright Fellowship, a 2012 US Artists Fellowship and a 2003 Herb Alpert Award in the Arts. Fusco's performances and videos have been presented in the 56th Venice Biennale, Frieze Special Projects, Basel Unlimited, two Whitney Biennials (2008 and 1993), and several other international exhibitions. Her works are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, The Walker Art Center, the Centre Pompidou and the Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona. She is represented by Alexander Gray Associates in New York. She is a Professor of Art at Cooper Union. 

Fusco is the author of Dangerous Moves: Performance and Politics in Cuba (2015). She is also the author of English is Broken Here: Notes on Cultural Fusion in the Americas (1995) The Bodies that Were Not Ours and Other Writings (2001), and A Field Guide for Female Interrogators (2008). She is the editor of Corpus Delecti: Performance Art of the Americas (1999) and Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self (2003). She contributes regularly to The New York Review of Books and numerous art publications. 

Fusco received her B.A. in Semiotics from Brown University (1982), her M.A. in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University (1985) and her Ph.D. in Art and Visual Culture from Middlesex University (2007).

Jonathan Daniel Wells

How did you become a writer?

I grew up surrounded by books, especially novels, since my father was a professor of nineteenth-century American literature before he retired. It wouldn’t be true to say, however, that I was a prolific reader until I went to college and especially to grad school at the University of Michigan where many classes expected us to read a few books a week. And only recently have I really worked hard to become a writer as well as an academic historian. Among academics, history writing tends to be very direct and heavy on evidence and argument. But with The Kidnapping Club I really tried to be conscious of not just of the evidence but also the accessibility of the prose.

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

There are some great writers who are historians, and I have tried to use them as models. I think some of best prose comes from scholars such as Erica Armstrong Dunbar, Walter Johnson, and David Waldstreicher. In terms of fiction, I so admire writer such as Toni Morrison and Colson Whitehead. My students right now are reading Morrison’s A Mercy, a wonderfully rich novel about the Black experience in colonial America.

When and where do you write? 

I tend to write first thing in the morning after coffee, when my own personal energy is at its highest. Then I usually turn back to it in the late afternoon. I need to be comfortable and not claustrophobic so I often write on our enclosed back porch. I am easily distracted so I need near complete silence, which is sometimes hard to come by!

What are you working on now? 

Two projects: One is about the Draft Riots in NYC in July 1863 and the broader issue of racism in the Civil War north. The other is a sequel of sorts to my very first book titled The Origins of the Southern Middle Class(2004).

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? 

I think I have mostly avoided that by working on more than one project at a time. If I get stuck on one book or article, I have another I can go to.

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

It is important to turn off email and other distractions and notifications.

What’s your advice to new writers?

Try as much as possible to write every day, or at least with as little time away as possible. I have found that the longer you are away from a project the higher the hurdle becomes to get yourself mentally re-engaged.

Jonathan Daniel Wells, Ph.D., is Professor of History in the Residential College, the Department of Afroamerican and African Studies, and the Department of History at the University of Michigan. He is the author or editor of several books, including The Origins of the Southern Middle Class: 1820-1861 (2004); Women Writers and Journalists in the Nineteenth-Century South (2011); The Southern Middle Class in the Long Nineteenth Century (2011); and A House Divided: The Civil War and Nineteenth-Century America (second ed., 2016). His most recent books are Blind no More: African American Resistance, Free Soil Politics, and the Coming of the Civil War (2019) and The Kidnapping Club: Wall Street, Slavery, and Resistance on the Eve of the Civil War (2020).