Eva Jurczyk

How did you become a writer? I wanted to be a writer from childhood, but as an immigrant, that’s not something that you can tell your parents! I became a librarian instead so I would have a steady pay cheque while I pursued my craft. I love being a librarian, I worried I’d love it too much and settle in to a comfortable life, never pursuing my dream, so I pretty quickly established a strict writing practice. For a while that meant blogging, which morphed into writing for small online publications. That was useful as a way to get my work in front of an editor and get some feedback on words.

About eight years ago, when I learned I was pregnant with my son, I committed to myself that I would write a full novel before he was born (if it’s long enough to grow a whole person, it’s surely long enough to write a book!)

That turned out to be a stupid idea. I just napped and ate snacks through my pregnancy. But as soon as he was born I got to work. I wrote longhand in a notebook while he nursed, every day, and by the time he was six months old, I wrote “the end” on the first draft of my first ever novel. 

That book was terrible and mercifully, never published, but it taught me that I could finish a book-length project. I wrote another, also not published, and had some heartbreaking experiences getting and losing an agent, having strong interest from small presses and them then losing funding. Finally I wrote The Department of Rare Books and Special Collections and my dreams came true. A quick search for an agent, a quick submission process. An overnight success, 35 years in the making. 

Name your writing influences (writers, books, teachers, etc.). The only formal creative writing class I ever took was in high school, but I was lucky enough to be taught by Frank Paci, a novelist in his own right. He wasn’t a Dead Poet’s Society kind of inspiring teacher, but he was a nice guy and the fact that he had published novels made it feel possible for a person like me. 

After college I briefly lived in London’s Willesden Green neighbourhood, at around the same time I discovered the work of Zadie Smith. Living in a place while reading about that place (Smith set her early work in Willesden Green) taught me to centre place in my work, and that any location can be magical to reader if you treat your descriptions with specificity and care. 

My early readers often joke that I’d be happiest writing snappy dialogue with no plot at all and I think I got that - my love of the sound of two smart people talking - from Jane Austen. I’ve read her books from childhood and it’s the dialogue I love best. I suspect it’s why she’s so frequently adapted for the screen, everything you need is right there on the page. 

There are really too many to name. Kazuo Ishiguro taught me how to withhold information from the reader until just the right moment. Richard Price taught me how to balance plot with just giving readers the vibe of a place, Italo Calvino taught me that it’s ok to get weird. All those books over decades of reading taught me how to write one. 

When and where do you write? I really only write from 5:00 to 5:45 AM every morning and until noon on Sundays, but I call that my “typing time” rather than my “writing time.” I’m thinking about my stories all day, every day – on the subway, on a run, zoning out while my son talks to me about dinosaurs. When I can’t be at my keyboard I try to solve plot problems or dream up backstory so in the hours I’m writing, I’m usually going for every single minute. Most of the time I write at home, on my dining room table but on weekends I like a coffee shop, the train station, or even a park on a nice day. I find I’m helped by ambient noise (so long as that noise isn’t my child asking me for some strawberries). 

What are you working on now? I’m just finishing up the edits for 6:40 TO MONTREAL, another thriller that I’m publishing with Sourcebooks/Poisoned Pen Press in 2025. It’s a reimagining of the classic locked room mystery, but in this one, we following Agatha St. John as she boards a train to Montreal a couple of days after Christmas, in search of inspiration. After the stunning success of Agatha’s debut novel she’s struggled to put anything new down on paper and some bad health news means time is limited for Agatha to secure her literary legacy, and her family’s financial future. The train pushes through a blizzard and Agatha’s inspiration is nowhere to be found until a downed tree stops the journey in the deep forest. The scattering of passengers in the business class car with Agatha think tardiness will be their biggest problem until the lunch service cart rolls down the aisle and finds the occupant of seat 6A dead, his severed right thumb held tight in his left hand. Knowing that one of them is a killer, the passengers begin to panic. All except Agatha, who finally begins to write.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? Luckily, no! Like I said above, I don’t have a lot of time to write every day so I find I’m pretty productive in the time I do have. While it’s my goal to one day quit my day job and write full time, I do wonder if I would grind to a halt and be paralyzed by the lack of constraints. For now I have lots of ideas for my fourth, fifth, sixth novels, and I hope I’m lucky enough to put them out in the world one day.

What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received? Early on, when an agent for a major literary agency was rejecting my work, she wrote that “it lacked that element of dynamism that separates our lives from our art.” I had been so fixated on capturing a true representation of life that I hadn’t thought about how to make my book entertaining. That’s a really hard line to find, but I think about it a lot when I’m writing. Is this dynamic enough to hold a reader’s attention? 

What’s your advice to new writers? Not everyone needs to write at 5 AM, not everyone needs to write every day, but if your goal is to become a writer, you have to establish a practice, then stick to it. It’s really hard to treat something like a job before you’re getting paid for it, but if you don’t prioritize it the way you prioritize the things you do to pay your rent, you’ll never see any forward momentum. On the flip side, be gentle with yourself. This is a long process with a lot of rejection. Set little goals (finishing a chapter, finishing a draft, finding a reader) and celebrate when you accomplish them. 

Eva Jurczyk is a writer and librarian living in Toronto. Her debut novel, The Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, was an international bestseller as well as a LibraryReads, IndieNext and Canadian Loan Star selection for January 2022. Her follow up, That Night in the Library, was published in June 2024.

Julia Phillips

How did you become a writer? First I became a reader. I loved stories as a kid: fairy tales, Roald Dahl, Nancy Drew and the Boxcar Children and the Hardy Boys...after a few years of reading, I started trying to imitate what I loved by writing my own stories in blank notebooks. Thankfully, the grown-ups around me encouraged this writing habit, and things took off from there. 

Name your writing influences (writers, books, teachers, etc.) My second-grade teacher, Mrs. Fine; the Brothers Grimm, Stephen King and Anne Rice; Vladimir Nabokov and Gabriel García Márquez; Barbara Kingsolver, Alice Munro, and Louise Erdrich; The Anatomy of Story by John Truby.

When and where do you write? Lying down in bed, and usually right before—or right as—I fall asleep.

What are you working on now? I'm really excited to be working on a third novel that grapples with some of the same themes I've written about before but approaches them in a new way. 

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? Oh, yes, I sure have. My favorite work on this subject comes from Alexander Chee, who says that we stop writing to try to protect ourselves because we're afraid our idea will humiliate us. His advice is that we have to forgive ourselves the humiliation in order to get going again. And that has definitely been my experience. 

What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received? Honestly, maybe the above. Or anything the author Mira Jacob has ever said—I remember she told me at one point that the first novel takes ten years, and I couldn't believe it at the time, and then...it did. And I was so glad to have her soothing, normalizing, patient voice in my mind, reminding me that it takes a decade and saying that it's all right.

What’s your advice to new writers? It's not new advice but it's highly effective: read as much as possible, write as much as possible, and find yourself a writing community.

Julia Phillips is the author of the bestselling novels Bear and Disappearing Earth, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and one of The New York Times Book Review’s 10 Best Books of the Year. A 2024 Guggenheim fellow, she lives with her family in Brooklyn.

Anna Noyes

How did you become a writer? I come from a family of writers – my grandfather a newspaper editor and reporter, my grandmother a children’s book author, and my mom, who was also a reporter and is a brilliant fiction writer. I grew up reading her novels and short stories, and her favorite writers, which became my own: Toni Morrison, Jamaica Kincaid, Alice Munro. I can remember a long road trip, reading aloud to her from A Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Newton Peck – alongside her, rhythm, concision, cadence and each pause began to feel essential. She was my first serious reader, and a transformative editor. While I’ve written since childhood, I began to take the craft more seriously in high school, writing a novella during an independent course senior year under the guidance of a life-changing teacher. I did a similar project in college, with another teacher whose respect for my work lit the way. My MFA – where I finished my collection of short stories, and met lifelong friends, teachers, and my agent – opened the door to a professional writing career.

Name your writing influences (writers, books, teachers, etc.). My mom, Toni Morrison, Alice Munro, Shirley Jackson, Stephen King. These are writers I imprinted on in childhood. I’ll never forget my high school teacher, Harry Bauld, crying as he read our class Tobias Wolff’s “Bullet in the Brain.” He showed us stories could be electric, and holy. My teachers, and their work, transformed me: Chris Fink, Ethan Canin, Charles Baxter, Marilynne Robinson, James Alan McPherson, Lan Samantha Chang, Kevin Brockmeier. Writing The Blue Maiden, I craved books that made history fresh, with singular voices or forms: Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders, Tinkers by Paul Harding, The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald, The Greenlanders by Jane Smiley, or Molly McCully Brown’s incredible poetry collection The Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded. And lately I’m enthralled by writers whose work has elements of Gothic or Horror, including Carmen Maria Machado, Samantha Hunt, Evie Wyld, Gloria Naylor, Samanta Schweblin, and Mariana Enríquez.

When and where do you write? I write while my 21-month-old daughter naps in the afternoon, and often for a few more hours before dinner. I have a little home office for the first time, with windows that look out at climbing roses (my desk and routine is a novelty…for years I wrote in bed or on couches, and drafted my short stories overnight. Nevermore! Now sleep is precious).

What are you working on now? I’m excited to return to short stories after 8 years of novel writing. Knowing all a novel takes, I can’t quite believe I’m diving back in, but there’s a new novel tugging at me, too.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? In different forms, yes. Never a dearth of ideas or projects. I have worked to solve problems in a piece for months, even years. Essential to the process, but I wonder if fear or perfectionism plays too large a part, or resistance to the vulnerability of finishing and sharing (especially online), or just being hard on myself. I’ve also found deadlines alternately helpful and constricting (the enormity of an unwritten novel against a series of ever-extending deadlines felt nearly impossible and heavy). I’d like to feel the way I did at the beginning, writing in private and secret, in the dark, for myself or a close circle, braving everything.

6. What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received? I’m taken with George Saunders’ description of revision. He generates a block of writing (paragraphs or pages) then reads and re-reads, imagining a meter on his forehead that swings from positive to negative. Each time his meter swings negative, he tweaks the text until he is pleased. By increments, and a kind of alchemy, the work becomes better (more kind, complex, clear, generous, strange) than the writer could have imagined. My “meter” isn’t on my forehead but in my chest, a feeling of openness or constriction. I’ve used this method since I started writing, but Saunders’ reframing of revision as “ritual self-expansion” – decision by tiny decision imbuing a piece with the writer’s taste and essence – gave the bodily intuition I pay to each word, and the pace that requires, a fresh sense of purpose and grace.

What’s your advice to new writers? I often come back to specificity – concrete, sensory details and images. Set aside what you think the work is about, and aim to tell the story with as much precision as possible. Layers of meaning and emotional questions will emerge in time, on their own, as if by magic. And at a certain point in the process, each word must matter. Barry Lopez has a quote I think of often, referencing the Japanese novelist Kazumasa Hirai, who told him “Your work is to take care of the spiritual interior of the language…each word has within it a spiritual interior. The word is like a vessel that carries something ineffable. And you must be the caretaker for that.” I think it’s necessary, also, to caretake your own spiritual interior, the “inner life” as Lan Samantha Chang calls it in this beautiful essay, which I return to often. It can be tempting to measure yourself – myself – by the outer life (publishing, promotion, followers, feedback, degrees, awards, sales, agents, a list that grows ever longer). But guarding that secret, a worthy inner self is essential, the ground where all good work is born.

Anna Noyes’ debut novel, The Blue Maiden, was published by Grove Atlantic on May 14, 2024. Her short story collection Goodnight, Beautiful Women, was a finalist for the Story Prize and the New England Book Award, as well as a New York Times Editors' Choice, Indie Next Pick, and Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers Selection. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Her writing has appeared in Vice, A Public Space, LitHub, Electric Literature, and Guernica, among others. She has received the Lotos Foundation Prize, the Henfield Prize, and residencies from MacDowell, Yaddo, Lighthouse Works, the James Merrill House, and Aspen Words. She lives in New York, on Fishers Island.