Becca Rothfeld

How did you become a writer? Professionally? By sending email after email to editors, begging them to publish my writing, until one day, they started paying me for it. Metaphysically? By writing at every opportunity, and writing in my head when pen and paper weren't available. And of course, by reading.

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

There are too many to name. But a few that spring to mind right now: James Wood, Christian Lorentzen, William Gass, Colette, Henry James, Dwight MacDonald, Norman Rush.

When and where do you write? Ideally, I'd write in the mornings, or at least immediately after I wake up (which, I must be honest, is often in the afternoon), in a cafe. I write much better when it's light outside, and I hate writing in my apartment. In reality, I often write at all hours, often at home.

What are you working on now? I'm revising the last essay of my soon-to-be- book.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? Yes, often. The best remedy, I find, is to read really good prose for an hour or so, internalize its rhythms, and get back to work.

What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received? To be honest, I haven't received much advice. Insofar as I've learned to write--I'm skeptical that writing can be learned or taught, really--it's been by following examples, not advice.

What’s your advice to new writers?

You should only care about the opinions of writers you think are good. Everyone else doesn't matter.

Becca Rothfeld is a contributing editor at the Point and the Boston Review. Her essay collection is forthcoming from Holt.

Diana Khoi Nguyen

How did you become a writer? I think in some ways I’m still becoming—but it happened/is happening because I’ve made a concerted effort to write, to be a literary figure who publishes, and to be a literary citizen who engages in the literary community! As a child I wanted to write children’s books and wrote dozens of illustrated stories in my composition notebooks—then I wrote to cope with the circumstances and emotion of my life through my teen years—then began to pursue the writing of poetry with a focus on thinking about craft starting in my undergraduate time at UCLA—to my MFA at Columbia—after which I tried to unlearn what I’d been taught to figure out what was essential for me as a writer/thinker person. Through all of this, I’ve been writing and most of the time fail to capture what I thought I might encounter on the page—only to try again and again. In this way, I am constantly trying to become a writer. 

Name your writing influences (writers, books, teachers, etc.). Too many to remember, but a sampling: Teachers: Cal Bedient and Lucie Brock-Broido. Writers: Susan Howe, Jenny Erpenbeck, Yoko Tawada, Clarice Lispector, Brian Dillon, Layli Long Soldier, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Arthur Sze, Carl Phillips, Myung Mi Kim, Sun Young Shin, Douglas Kearney, Tyehimba Jess, Victoria Chang, Don Mee Choi, Alex Ross.

When and where do you write? I write every summer and winter (December), in 15-day intervals. Sometimes in my home office, sometimes at residencies or while traveling (Hawaii, SE Asia). 

What are you working on now? A prose project that I won’t call fiction or nonfiction—based on the process filmmaker Lee Isaac Chung describes as his method for writing Minari: by writing out 100 memories then finding the a path through them. Which is to say: I’m working with personal and familial memories. At its heart, the project is a ghost story and about how we grieve over time.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? Yes and no—I think writer’s block in that I reject what my mind wants to put to the page, but doesn’t yet know how or what wants to be uttered. The last time this happened was in the early months after my first book was published: the poems I wrote during that post-publication time felt like residual aftershocks of poems that could’ve been in the first book, which frustrated me. It turns out I just needed more time away from the published manuscript and more time just being in the world, soaking things up like a sponge. 

What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received? To never stop writing, no matter what happens in one’s life. 

What’s your advice to new writers? My advice is to avoid looking at what peers might be doing, and to focus on what is most essential and core to your work—and to create the conditions in which happy accidents might occur on the page. 

A poet and multimedia artist, Diana Khoi Nguyen is the author of Ghost Of (2018) which was a finalist for the National Book Award, and forthcoming collection, Root Fractures (2024). Nguyen is a Kundiman fellow, recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and winner of the 92Y Discovery Poetry Contest, and 2019 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Currently, she is core faculty in the Randolph College Low-Residency MFA and an Assistant Professor at the University of Pittsburgh.

Jessie Gaynor

How did you become a writer? I have a theory that writing is acting for inward-facing people (or those who have limited acting talent). I am both inward-facing and sadly limited in my acting talent, so after my high school theater career ended with a whimper, I started writing one-act plays, then poetry, then fiction.

Name your writing influences (writers, books, teachers, etc.). Two of my early professors, Timothy Donnelly and Josh Bell, are the reason I pursued writing. Both are brilliant poets, and some of the best writing teachers I’ve ever had in terms of encouraging the development of a unique voice. In terms of books and writers, I’ve always gravitated toward humor. Reading Nell Zink’s Mislaid unlocked something for me—I love how unapologetically zany she allows herself to be. Sam Lipsyte and Paul Beatty and Mark Leidner are perennial favorites, and Mrs. Bridge by Evan S. Connell is a master class in brutal, unsparing tragicomedy. 

When and where do you write? Because my job as an editor at Lit Hub requires me to live in other people’s words all day, I have to write in the mornings. I also have two young kids, so by the end of the day, all I can do is watch terrible television. When I’m in the groove of a project, I try to wake up around 5:30 to work. (A programmable coffee pot helps with this.)

What are you working on now? I’m bouncing back and forth between a coming-of-age story about middle school girls in the ’90s and a romantic comedy. The latter is holding my attention more at the moment.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? Constantly. The only thing that really helps me are deadlines and external expectations, for which I lean on my writing group.

What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received? The best distillation of the best (and most difficult to follow) writing advice I know comes from Richard Hugo's The Triggering Town: "The hard work on the first poem is responsible for the sudden ease of the second. If you just sit around waiting for the easy ones, nothing will come. Get to work." This applies to any form of writing (and likely most other worthwhile pursuits, too). 

What’s your advice to new writers? Write what you want to read. I got my MFA in poetry, and I felt a great deal of pressure to write the kind of poetry that would win me praise from my peers, even though it wasn't terribly interesting to me. The praise was intermittent at best, and I ended up feeling deeply disconnected from my work for a long time. Now I really try to trust my own delight.

Jessie Gaynor’s work has appeared in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, The New Yorker, WSJ Magazine, and elsewhere. She is a senior editor at Literary Hub and she has an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was a Rona Jaffe fellow. She lives in Richmond, Virginia with her family. The Glow is her first novel.