Brendan Flaherty

How did you become a writer? Still working on that, but mostly by just loving to write as an activity and exercise. When I first entered the workforce, I’d get up early and write for at least an hour before going to a job. I’ve kept that habit up for almost two decades now. So, if you are what you do, then little by little, I guess.   

Name your writing influences (writers, books, teachers, etc.). There are too many great writers and teachers to name, of course, but my parents are the biggest influences. My mom is a painter who encouraged creativity. And my dad was a lawyer who stressed linguistic precision. My wife is also a big influence. She’s a psychologist who’s driven by empathy and an understanding of human nature. Finally, my neighbor when I was growing up was the school librarian, and she encouraged my reading early with stuff like Brian Jacques’ Redwall series, which is about rodents doing some kind of medieval cosplay. Those books were inspirations and initiations into the power and beauty of literature. So, if you read my dark and stark novel, The Dredge, and find it disturbing—please don’t blame me. Blame the villainous saber-rattling weasels in those YA stories and also Washington, D.C.    

When and where do you write? First thing, ideally before dawn. I get my coffee and go into my office and try not to wake my kids.

What are you working on now? My second novel, which will be more light than dark.  I’m superstitious and don’t want to say too much about it yet.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? Not exactly, but I’ve been writing slower lately, because I’m anxious about politics, climate change, technology, and the future overall. A book requires such a long investment of time. And the world doesn’t need more clutter. So, I have to keep reminding myself that we will never know what tomorrow holds and just keep going and let the mystery unfold, and then I’m off and running again.

What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received? Interrogate every sentence. Have I said exactly what I meant to say, and have I said it in the best words in the best order? I got that from the wonderful writer and teacher, Sigrid Nunez.

What’s your advice to new writers? Do what you love first. Whether it’s writing or hanging out with your kids or exercising, I think it’s important for you as a person and writer to set the tone for your day with as much joy as possible. It will be whittled down. It will be chewed up and spit out. You will likely lose control. But hey, at least things started off pretty good.

Brendan Flaherty is the author of the novel The Dredge, which came out from Grove Atlantic in March 2024. Per the New York Times Book Review: “Flaherty writes with stealthy acuity, his prose seemingly simple yet full of coiled power.” He lives near Hartford with his family. You can read more about him at bflah.com.

Michelle T. King

How did you become a writer? Byproduct of being a professional historian! We are required to write in academia for our livelihood. 

Name your writing influences (writers, books, teachers, etc.). Dorothy Duff Brown (the late, great writing guru of Berkeley, who gave advice on how to get it done), Advice to New Faculty Members by Robert Boice (invaluable for figuring out how to get writing done in small bits)

When and where do you write? In the mornings first thing, if I can manage it. Always keep to the same best brain time if you can. I write on my laptop in an Ikea Poang chair. 

What are you working on now? Having just spent the last ten years researching and writing my book, Chop Fry Watch Learn, I'm now just doing small projects, with new ideas for some articles. Making room for the next big idea!

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? No, not really. The best antidote to writer's block is to write. Even if it's garbage, just writing ideas down will clear the way for better ideas to follow. 

What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received? Lots of great advice, but of late the idea of a Zero Draft. Just dumping all ideas, questions, quotes, ramblings into a single file and just getting everything in the brain on the page. Also, the idea that you cannot simultaneously Write and Edit. You have to let the creative juices flow for generative writing; editing should be treated as a different stage that cannot occur at the same time. Forgot where I learned that though, maybe in Boice?

What’s your advice to new writers? Figure out the best time of day that you work and treat that as sacred. Touch the project every day—the longer you are away from a project, the harder it is to get back into it. I think Robert Caro had some kind of word count goal. But you have to treat it like a humdrum job and do it daily, not just thinking of writing during moments of inspiration. 

Michelle T. King is an associate professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she specializes in modern Chinese gender and food history. She was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholars grant for Chop Fry Watch Learn: Fu Pei-mei and the Making of Modern Chinese Food (W. W. Norton, 2024). King is a co-editor of Modern Chinese Foodways (MIT Press, forthcoming), editor of Culinary Nationalism in Asia (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), and editor of a special issue of Global Food History (Summer 2020) on culinary regionalism in China. She is author of Between Birth and Death: Female Infanticide in Nineteenth-Century China (Stanford University Press, 2014). Her work has appeared in Food and Foodways, Global Food History, Gastronomica, Journal of Women’s History, Social History, and other publications.

Holly Gramazio

How did you become a writer? Well, a lot of kids write stories – I guess I became a writer by just not stopping. Until recently my work was mostly in games, but that always involved a lot of writing too, whether that was rules, or scripts for video games, or curatorial text for exhibitions, or whatever else. 

Name your writing influences (writers, books, teachers, etc.). It's definitely different for different projects. I guess when I encounter a particular problem or question I tend to dig into writers who do that particular thing well. So for The Husbands, I was looking at three main areas:

• First, for how to pull off a nonrealist thing in a basically realist setting, I looked at work like Zen Cho’s Black Water Sister, Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes, Andrea Lawlor’s Paul Takes The Form Of A Mortal Girl, plus movies and TV like Groundhog Day, Russian Doll, Palm Springs

• Second, for tone, I kept going back to Nora Ephron’s Heartburn for its lightness and jokes and intensity of feeling and how it talks about day-to-day life, and how wonderfully it picks its moments and anecdotes, and to Christopher Isherwood and his groundedness in observation and how people exist in their bodies. 

• Third, for structure I ended up treating the book almost as a travelogue, since it's very episodic, with new characters turning up throughout and occasionally coming back down the line. So I looked at Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Langston Hughes' I Wonder as I Wander, the game 80 Days by Inkle and Meghna Jayanth.

More generally, for books on writing I really like George Saunders' A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, Samuel R. Delany's The Jewel-Hinged Jaw, John McPhee's Draft No. 4, Lydia Davis' Essays One. I do really like to read books on writing, even when they don't have any specifically helpful advice for whatever I'm working on at the time. They help me feel excited about books and writing and sentences. They make "go and sit on your own and write something" feel less lonely and more fun. 

When and where do you write? I tend to write best if I get to it pretty soon after waking up in the morning, ideally before looking at the internet. 

What are you working on now? I'm knocking away at a couple of things. I'm hoping one of them will turn into my second novel but at the moment neither of them have quite reached that point of convincingly taking off. I reckon maybe in another week or two.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? I'm a big procrastinator, so I definitely have long periods of not getting anything much written, or having a deadline and sensing it creep closer and closer but not doing anything about it. But it's always more because I'm wasting time, rather than pure "staring at a blank page" writers block. 

What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received? Stop writing for the day in the middle of a sentence, so that it's easy to get started again when you come back to it.

What’s your advice to new writers? If you're torn between ideas, you might be able to figure out what to work on by answering the question: Which project would you be saddest about if you discovered that someone else had beaten you to it?  

Holly Gramazio is a writer, game designer and curator from Adelaide, currently based in London. She founded the experimental games festival Now Play This, and wrote the script for the award-winning indie videogame Dicey Dungeons. Her novel The Husbands, a comedy about a woman whose attic starts generating an infinite supply of husbands, was released in April 2024.