Jonathan Petropoulos

How did you become a writer?

Writing is part of the job when one is an academic (“publish or perish”), but, like most of my cohort, I write for other reasons besides survival. Writing clearly satisfies a need to express oneself and to communicate with others. It’s also a craft where one can hone skills, and I have enjoyed evolving as a writer—in my case, loosening up a bit and enjoying telling a story. While I want my books to make a contribution in terms of scholarship, I’m also interested in making my work more accessible and engaging. I have derived satisfaction from people who have said they are “enjoying” Göring’s Man. 

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

I suppose I go back to my graduate training at Harvard with Charles Maier and Simon Schama—both brilliant individuals and talented writers. Maier, my Doktorvater, asks the best questions of anyone I have ever encountered, and his voice has remained with me over the years. As I process information or tell a story, I hear his many questions about what happened and why (and why is that important)? Simon Schama is remarkably erudite and eloquent—he sets a standard that I will never match--but in particular, I admire the manner in which he makes an event or object come to life, and the way he drives home a point or offers an insight. With both his presentations and his prose, his mastery of the English language helps make him an extraordinary teacher who connects with his audience. I would add that if required, I would point to Ian McEwan as my favorite writer: the way he masters a subject and transports the reader into different worlds is brilliant and magical. 

When and where do you write?

I am a plodder and like my routine. During summers and sabbaticals, I work in my home office and write from 8 a.m. until about 2 p.m. Ideally, I’ll then go for a swim or get some other exercise, and then come back in the afternoon to do “library work” (read and prepare for the next day’s writing).

What are you working on now?

I have a new book project about the end of the Third Reich. I am writing it with my colleague and partner, Wendy Lower, who also just finished a book. We are both at Yale University on sabbatical this semester, enjoying the hunting and gathering, as well as the conceptual phase of the project.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?

I rarely suffer from writer’s block, and this is for two reasons. First, I don’t always write sequentially. I will jump around and work on a section that I feel prepared to write (rather like filming a movie out of sequence). So, with book projects, I can usually find something to work on. Second, I tell myself that everything is subject to revision, and this seems to have a liberating effect. I tell myself that everything is provisional and that I can come back and fix it. Just get down a first draft…

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

Good writing is about re-writing. Very few of us can craft perfect prose on the first draft.

What’s your advice to new writers?

Find a topic you love—where it doesn’t seem like a chore to pursue a project. If one is a historian, like I am, look for sources that are special. If one finds a diary, or letters, or a trove of documents, well, it’s a huge advantage to have sources that are special. With my current book on Nazi art plunderer Dr. Bruno Lohse, I interviewed him for 9 years and obtained many of his private papers upon his death. I knew that someone else could write his biography, but it wouldn’t be my story.

Jonathan Petropoulos is the John V. Croul Professor of European History at Claremont McKenna College in Southern California. Previously, he received his Ph.D. from Harvard University (1990), where he also had an appointment as a Lecturer in History & Literature. He began working on the subject of Nazi art looting and restitution in 1983, when he commenced graduate work in history and art history. He is the author of Art as Politics in the Third Reich (University of North Carolina Press, 1996); The Faustian Bargain: The Art World in Nazi Germany (Oxford University Press, 2000); Royals and the Reich: The Princes von Hessen in Nazi Germany (Oxford University Press, 2006); Artists Under Hitler: Collaboration and Survival in Nazi Germany (Yale University Press, 2014); and Göring’s Man in Paris: The Story of a Nazi Art Plunderer and his World” (Yale University Press, 2021), and has helped edit a number of other volumes.

From 1998 to 2000, Dr. Petropoulos served as Research Director for Art and Cultural Property on the Presidential Commission on Holocaust Assets in the United States, where he helped draft the report, Restitution and Plunder: The U.S. and Holocaust Victims’ Assets (2001). He has also served as an expert witness in a number of cases where Holocaust victims have tried to recover lost artworks. This includes Austria v. Altmann, which involved six paintings by Gustav Klimt claimed by Maria Altmann and other family members (five were returned).

He is a Life Member of Clare Hall, Cambridge University and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

Kenneth R. Rosen

How did you become a writer?
Becoming -- I think I'm still becoming a writer. Each morning I force myself back to the writing desk. It's always a struggle. I think that's the key though: seat time and (occasionally) winning the ongoing battle against self-doubt and worry, external discouragement and one's insecurities. That conscious decision each morning (sometimes it's the afternoon, if I can't bring myself to face it earlier) to do something other than staying in bed has made me more of a writer than anything else. That, and delusions of wanting to write the Next Great American Novel. 

Name your writing influences (writers, books, teachers, etc.).
I always default to pre- and post-war fiction. Graham Greene, Philip Roth, Annie Dillard, John Dos Passos, Thomas Wolfe. Those are my comfort reads. All the contemporary nonfiction I read feels more like research/work. Throughout the years I've also cobbled together a self-study by reaching out to professors and writers I admire to help turn me toward books and authors I haven't yet discovered. They've also been keen readers and I give my deepest thanks to John Stauffer who took me in and guided me in the writing of my recent book, “Troubled.”

When and where do you write?
My working schedule changes, though I have one outlined in my calendar. Given any month I may be working on three very different forms of journalism, alongside several other projects spread across different genres. The seat time yields something no matter what, even if I wasn't feeling particularly up to writing before committing to the project at hand. Bursts of an hour-and-a-half are ideal, and when I'm lucky that turns into three hours which seem to vanish. It's easy to lose time in the office where I write, a former woodshed I converted in the summer of 2019 into a library-writing studio-machinist shop with casual views of the Dolomites.

What are you working on now?
I'm adapting my latest book into a feature film while struggling to finish and start new longform journalism projects.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?
Never. I don't have that luxury. The block is usually external.

What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received?
Something to the effect of, "If you keep going and don't give up, others will."

What’s your advice to new writers?
See above. And find writers whose professional and personal lives you admire and respect. Then do what they do.

Kenneth R. Rosen is the author, most recently, of Troubled: The Failed Promise of America's Behavioral Treatment Programs.

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.