Jane Ciabattari

How did you become a writer? I grew up in a family that revered books (my father was on the local library board). I read continuously growing up. I graduated from a small public high school in Kansas, and with a National Merit scholarship studied creative writing as an undergraduate at Stanford.  I got my graduate degree in creative writing at San Francisco State, going to school at night while working full time.

Name your writing influences (writers, books, teachers, etc.). Nancy Packer at Stanford was tough and because of that, encouraging. In graduate school I was most deeply influenced by Herbert Wilner. I was doing directed writing with him while working full time as managing editor of the Sunday magazine of the San Francisco Examiner & Chronicle. I was working on a novel. He was clearly ill from a heart condition caused by treatment for a lung cancer years before. He had surgery and died. I couldn’t continue that novel. I got a scholarship to Squaw Valley Writers Community and got back on track up there. “Stealing the Fire,” the title story in my first collection, which is coming out later this month as a selection in Dzanc Book’s rEprint Series, uses some of that emotion and that setting. It’s about a writer finding her voice. Some of us in Herb’s writing workshop (including Molly Giles, Susan Harper, and Jane Vandenburgh, who all went on to publish novels and story collections) started a writers’ group that went on for years. We’d gather at each other’s houses and drink wine and critique the work. We weren’t always kind. But we all ended up being better writers. More recently I've been workshopping my novel with my husband Mark, who also is a fiction writer, and Greg Sarris, a novelist whose work I admire greatly. We're all coming toward completion of our manuscripts. It helps to have others along on the long journey.

Writers? Flannery O’Connor. Margaret Atwood. Marilynne Robinson. Toni Morrison. And hundreds of people whose work I’ve reviewed. When I review a book I read it at least twice, sometimes three times. I look at the structure, the language, the themes, the intent. I admire too many contemporary writers to name.

When and where do you write? Anywhere.

Most often I write in the corner of the bedroom I share with my husband Mark, who also is a writer. Wherever we are living. Mark and I spent many summers in a deserted ski resort in the Catskills. I set up a folding wooden desk in a corner of the bedroom. I wrote a nonfiction book there, and lots of short stories, including “Memorial Day,” another  story in Stealing the Fire, in which a bear goes on a rampage.

I wrote the story “Gridlock,” also in Stealing the Fire, on the 104 bus while commuting between our apartment on the Upper West Side and my job across the street from Grand Central Station.

I take notes on napkins, on blue books I carry in my pocket (the kind used in final exams).

I’ve done some of my best writing at writers’ colonies.

At MacDowell I had a cottage to myself, which was a first/ I finished a first draft of the story “A Pilgrimage” there. It's also in Stealing the Fire.

At the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, where Mark and I have been in residence quite a few times, we once got a last-minute fill-in to work on a deadline and we shared a studio—we brought in a second desk facing out the window and got to work.

I finished the story “Stealing the Fire” at VCCA, and burned the manuscript in the fireplace to help me write the last scene. (I had it on my computer, of course.) The list goes on. Whenever I can get time from deadline work.

At the moment? I'm writing in a room of my own, facing Sonoma Mountain, with a grapevine’s green fire right outside the window.

What are you working on now? I’m finishing a novel I’ve been working on forever. Revising is so humbling. I’ve spent a lot of time researching—chunks of several years—and drafting. Now I have to let some of it drop away. But I needed that back story before I could write the first draft.

It’s called Eastville. It’s about a woman who grows up in a small Illinois town founded by her abolitionist forebears. She falls in love in high school with a classmate who is the fourth in a line of men whose ancestor was a runaway slave who worked on the underground railroad with the abolitionist founders. He becomes radicalized and leaves her when their son is not even two years old. The book is set in 2004 during the Obama-Keyes senatorial campaign in Illinois. The woman, who is now living in New York and quietly going about her chosen business as an American history post-doctoral fellow, gets a call from her son, who is in jail for being highly successful in the drug business. His girlfriend, who also is in jail, shoplifting for drug money, is pregnant. Twins. So my main character goes back to Illinois. Lots of trouble comes from that phone call.

I’ve almost finished a second story collection. Most of the stories have been published; I’m still working on a story set in New Orleans before Katrina. Can’t quite get it right.

And I’ve started something new, which seems to be a series of flash fictions accumulating around a man who separates from his wife and sets up camp in his backyard with an electrified fence between himself and his soon to be ex wife and a billboard totally up the money he's giving her, on an hourly basis. There are flocks of parrots. Swarms of bees. A case of blight afflicting an Asian pear tree. That’s all I know for now.

I’ve just seen the cover for the Dzanc Books e-book of Stealing the Fire, which is part of their rEprint series. http://www.dzancbooks.org/stealing-the-fire/ It’s fun to be an e-book newbie and ask all the dumb questions, like, how do you sign an e-book?

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? Not really. I’ve always done something else to make a living—I’ve worked as an editor, a journalist, a columnist, and now as a book critic doing reviews, interviews, and cultural reporting. Deadlines on other projects are my only block. And that work has fed my fiction writing.

What’s your advice to new writers? Expect to throw a lot away. Expect to work hard, and revise constantly. Love it. Or don’t do it. Isn’t that what we all say?

Bio: Jane Ciabattari is the author of Stealing the Fire, a selection of Dzanc Books' rEprint series. Her short stories have been published in Long Island Noir, edited by Kaylie Jones (Akashic Books, 2012), The Literarian, the online publication of the Center for Fiction (edited by Dawn Raffel), KBG Bar Lit, LOST magazine, Literary Mama, Ms. (nominated for O.Henry and Pushcart awards), The North American Review, Denver Quarterly, Hampton Shorts (which honored her with an Editors' Choice Award), and Redbook, which nominated her story “Gridlock” for a National Magazine Award. Her story "Payback Time" was a Pushcart Prize "special mention." Her story "How I Left Onandaga County," appears in the anthology The Best Underground Fiction (Stolen Time Press, 2006) and also was a Pushcart Prize special mention, as was her story "MamaGodot," which appeared online in VerbSap and in Chautauqua. She has been awarded fiction fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the MacDowell Colony and The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her reviews, interviews, and cultural reporting have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, NPR.org, The Daily Beast, the Boston Globe, Bookforum, The Guardian, Salon, The Paris Review, the Los Angeles Times, and the Washington Post, among others. She is vice president/online and a former president of the National Book Critics Circle. More details and links to stories at www.janeciabattari.com or @janeciab on Twitter.

Emily St. John Mandel

How did you become a writer? I've been writing since I was a little kid. I was homeschooled as a child, and one of the very few requirements of my parents' somewhat haphazard curriculum was that I had to write something every day, so at seven and eight I was writing awkward little poems about cats and daffodils and such. I continued writing into adulthood, but I never took it especially seriously; it was just a compulsive little habit. My first career was as a contemporary dancer, but at twenty-two I'd been dancing all my life and was getting a little tired of it, and that year I started to take the writing more seriously and started writing my first novel, which was eventually published as Last Night in Montreal.

Name your writing influences (writers, books, teachers, etc.). I think I've been somewhat influenced by Michael Ondaatje, Raymond Chandler, J.D. Salinger, Norman Mailer (specifically the prose style in The Executioner's Song), Jennifer Egan, Leonard Cohen, and Quentin Tarantino.

When and where do you write? I write at home whenever possible. I have a home office, and it's my favorite place to write. But like most writers of my acquaintance, I have a day job, and I can't write nearly as much as I'd like to. I often end up doing revisions on the subway en route to my job. My job's part-time with flexible hours, which is wonderful...so I'll write in the morning and then go to work in the afternoon, or vice versa. There are bad days where the only time I can find to write is on the subway on my way to work.

What are you working on now? My fourth novel. It's a bit of a mess at the moment, but I'm hoping to have a reasonably coherent draft by summer.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? No. I do sometimes find myself stuck, which is to say I'll have moments where I'm not sure how to write my way out of a particular plot situation, or not sure how to revise a book to make the structure work, but my approach is to just work on another part of the book (or work on an essay or some other project) and then come back to the difficult part later. 

What’s your advice to new writers? Write and read as much as you can. You don't need an MFA, but you do need to know how to write a book, and the way to learn that is by reading a lot of books. When you read a book you loved, think about what you loved about it. When you don't think a book is very good, analyze what didn't work. Practice your craft as much as possible, because you'll become a better writer by writing. 

Lastly, don't assume that the publishing world is closed to you. I've read a lot of nonsense online about how if you want to be published by a traditional publisher, you have to know the right people or go to the right parties or live in NYC or collect a massive bouquet of connections at an MFA program somewhere. None of this is true. I'm not saying that talented people don't fall through the cracks sometimes, I'm just saying that I have no MFA or bachelor's degree, that I knew no one in the industry when I was starting out, and that my first agent found me in her slush pile. Publishing is full of people whose job it is to find new talent, and publishing is extremely varied -- there are the massive publishers that everyone's heard of, but there are also dozens of excellent smaller outfits like Melville House, Algonquin, and Milkweed Editions that are publishing truly exciting work and doing a good job promoting their authors.  

BIO: Emily St. John Mandel's most recent novel is The Lola Quartet. She lives in Brooklyn and has a website at www.emilymandel.com.

Luis Urrea

How did you become a writer? I was possibly sprung from the womb writing. I certainly was a sonic vacuum cleaner, sucking up the endless loops of delightful sound in Spanish and English all around me. Mine was a family with little but pride and blather. My Mexican relatives spoke a Barbaric Yawp of both high Spanish and gutter Mexican. My mother, however, was a New York socialite who channeled Zelda Fitzgerald in her discourse. And my beloved god-parents were humble Mexican country folk who spoke puro rancho. I tried to make some sense of all this in my mind while wading into Twain and Kipling and Bradbury...then Brautigan and Vonnegut and Le Guin. I became a writer, though, as in putting pen to paper or fingers to typewriter keys, around tenth grade. I was trying to be Stephen Crane and Jim Morrison and John Lennon and Leonard Cohen. I tell this story often--my mom saw me actually applying myself to something: typing! And she sewed my manuscript pages together and made my first book for me. From then on, I was all in.

Name your writing influences (writers, books, teachers, etc.). Surely, you jest. See above. And see below. Add Steve McQueen and Pedro Infante. Add Dali (his Diary of a Genius blew my little mind). Biker movies, Hunter S. Thimpson, Diane Wakoski, s-f, Borges, Neruda. Ed Abbey. Thomas McGuane. Kerouac and Bukowski and Mary Oliver and the Asian masters: Issa, Buson, Basho, Han-shan, Li-Po, Wang Wei, Ko Un... Joan Didion and Annie Dillard. El Topo and The Wild Bunch. The Bible, ok, yeah. Malcom Lowry, from whom I stole reams of imagery for The Hummingbird's Daughter. More? I could fill your entire feed with this answer. I am a sucker for poets.

When and where do you write? I write in a loft on our second floor. Mostly. It looks out on an oak tree that is massive and ponderous in nature. It houses antic squirrels, and is overtraken at night by a fat owl. I have a small desk upon which grow some plants, and where I keep my antique telegraph key. I think all writers should have an old telegraph key. I half-expect it to start tapping out messages one day. To its left, there is a framed picture of Neruda's desk. To the right, a framed picture of a statue of Basho covered in snow. Between these, you will always find my words.

On either side of my desk are book cases. Two huge cases to my lest groan with poetry. The case to my right is crammed with haiku books, zen books, and Asian collections. On the far side are research, reference, and theology books. (Merton, yes; Buechner, yes; Thich Nhat Hanh, yes.) 
And there's always music. Loud music. Music forming a sonic cave that keeps the world at bay.

Or I'm writing on my knee in a speeding vehicle or under a tree or cactus on a long walk.

What are you working on now? I am working on a million things and nothing. Since Hummingbird and Queen of America took me 26 years to complete, I have been in a weird daze of relative inactivity. That being said, I never stop working. I currently have a book of stories I am dawdling on because the last story is not perfect yet. I have two collections of poetry ready to roll. And I am researching two other books. I also write a reular column for Orion magazine called "The Wastelander."

Mostly, however, I tour. I speak. In fact, I'm leaving in a couple of hours for Arizona. Again.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? I don't tend to suffer writer's block. But I do suffer a kind of life-block. This is when all my duties away from the writing desk blow my mind so much that I just sit and stare at the wall and can't do anything. Or I stare at Deadliest Catch marathons on cable.

What’s your advice to new writers? Urrea's writing Rule #1 is this--WEAR THE BASTARDS DOWN.

Also: remember that you are not trying to be rich or famous, or you would be a basketball player. What you are doing, as a young writer, is earning your black belt.

And: it's not about fame, it's not about money, it's not about groupies as sweet as groupies might be. It's not even about that private Led Zeppelin jet I used to think I'd get if I wrote a REALLY GOOD POEM about my girlfriend. Not writing that is going to last. My tip is this: put love in your pen. Love is the ink, my friend. If you don't load that sucker up with love, don't bother to write a word.

Bio: Luis Alberto Urrea, 2005 Pulitzer Prize finalist for nonfiction and member of the Latino Literature Hall of Fame, is a prolific and acclaimed writer who uses his dual-culture life experiences to explore greater themes of love, loss and triumph.
Born in Tijuana, Mexico to a Mexican father and an American mother, Urrea has published extensively in all the major genres. The critically acclaimed and best-selling author of 13 books, Urrea has won numerous awards for his poetry, fiction and essays. The Devil's Highway, his 2004 non-fiction account of a group of Mexican immigrants lost in the Arizona desert, won the Lannan Literary Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the Pacific Rim Kiriyama Prize. An historical novel, The Hummingbird's Daughter tells the story of Teresa Urrea, sometimes known as the Saint of Cabora and the Mexican Joan of Arc. The book, which involved 20 years of research and writing, won the Kiriyama Prize in fiction and, along with The Devil's Highway, was named a best book of the year by many publications. It has been optioned by acclaimed Mexican director Luis Mandoki for a film to star Antonio Banderas.

Urrea's most recent novel, Into the Beautiful North, imagines a small town in Mexico where all the men have immigrated to the U.S. A group of young women, after seeing the film The Magnificent Seven, decide to follow the men North and persuade them to return to their beloved village. A national best-seller, Into the Beautiful North, earned a citation of excellence from the American Library Association Rainbow's Project. A short story from Urrea's collection, Six Kinds of Sky, was recently released as a stunning graphic novel by Cinco Puntos Press.

Mr.Mendoza's Paintbrush, illustrated by artist Christopher Cardinale, has already garnered rave reviews and serves as a perfect companion to Into the Beautiful North as it depicts the same village in the novel.

Into the Beautiful North, The Devil's Highway and The Hummingbird's Daughter have been chosen by more than 30 different cities and colleges for One Book community read programs.

Urrea has also won an Edgar award from the Mystery Writers of America for best short story (2009, "Amapola" in Phoenix Noir). His first book, Across the Wire, was named a New York Times Notable Book and won the Christopher Award. Urrea also won a 1999 American Book Award for his memoir, Nobody's Son: Notes from an American Life and in 2000, he was voted into the Latino Literature Hall of Fame following the publication of Vatos. His book of short stories, Six Kinds of Sky, was named the 2002 small-press Book of the Year in fiction by the editors of ForeWord magazine. He has also won a Western States Book Award in poetry for The Fever of Being and was in The 1996 Best American Poetry collection. Urrea's other titles include By the Lake of Sleeping Children, In Search of Snow, Ghost Sickness and Wandering Time.

Urrea attended the University of California at San Diego, earning an undergraduate degree in writing, and did his graduate studies at the University of Colorado-Boulder. After serving as a relief worker in Tijuana and a film extra and columnist-editor-cartoonist for several publications, Urrea moved to Boston where he taught expository writing and fiction workshops at Harvard. He has also taught at Massachusetts Bay Community College and the University of Colorado and he was the writer in residence at the University of Louisiana-Lafayette.

Urrea lives with his family in Naperville, IL, where he is a professor of creative writing at the University of Illinois-Chicago.

George Bishop

How did you become a writer? I had a late start as a writer. I studied English Lit in college and wrote a little here and there, but I didn't have enough confidence in my writing to go at it full tilt. So after I graduated college I--weirdly enough--moved to Los Angeles to become an actor. I lived there for eight years, doing commercials and theatre and bit parts on bad TV shows, and writing occasionally, before traveling to Czechoslovakia as a volunteer English teacher in the early 90s. It was there that I finally got serious about my writing. I worked diligently at writing stories during the next six years living abroad, and then returned to the US to enter the MFA program at the University of North Carolina in Wilmington. While I was at UNCW I began to publish a few short stories, but it took me four (four!) novels before I wrote one that was deemed salable. That was LETTER TO MY DAUGHTER, which came out in 2010 with Ballantine.

Name your writing influences (writers, books, teachers, etc.). I credit my great teachers at UNCW for showing me how to be extra-meticulous in editing and crafting sentences: Wendy Brenner, Rebecca Lee, Clyde Edgerton, Sarah Messer. As for other authors, early and powerful influences were the usual lot for guys of my generation: Hemingway, Steinbeck, Fitzgerald, Salinger, Joyce. And then Tolstoy, Flannery O'Connor, Maugham, Greene. More recently, Orhan Pamuk . . . I wish I had a more original or exciting list.

When and where do you write? I have the luxury of writing full time now, but it's a very demanding sort of luxury. I try to write six days a week. I wake up early, put on coffee, and go to work. I write until lunch, taking frequent breaks, and then maybe put in another hour or two in the afternoon. Repeat every day. A very dull life, actually.

What are you working on now? I just turned in the final edits for my new novel, THE NIGHT OF THE COMET, coming out in August 2013. Now I'm getting back to work on another novel I started last year. Like COMET, it's set in Louisiana in the ’70s. It concerns four kids during the summer between their graduation from high school and the start of college, about how their lives intersect and change. 

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? No, not really. If anything, I suffer from having too much I want to write about. It's often a struggle to write, of course, but I don't consider that writer's block. I call it laziness.

What’s your advice to new writers? That's easy: Read, read, read. Write, write, write. Along the way, get what help you can. 

BIO: George Bishop, Jr., earned an MFA from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, where he won the department’s Award of Excellence for a collection of stories. He has lived and taught in Slovakia, Turkey, Indonesia, Azerbaijan, India, and Japan. He now makes his home in New Orleans.

C.M. Mayo

How did you become a writer? Ever since I knew how to write I've been a writer. Though I took a writing workshop in my early 20s, I did not take it seriously until I was about 30, by which I mean I signed up for several summer writing workshops (Iowa, Bennington and others) in fiction and creative nonfiction, started to educate myself about publishing, and got the gumption to start sending things out.

Name your writing influences (writers, books, teachers, etc.). Paul Bowles, whose workshop I took in Tangiers, was my first literary writing teacher but I learned far more from reading his books than from him personally. The Canadian novelist Douglas Glover taught me more than anyone about the novel, and in a one hour session, believe it or not. Much of what I've learned is from reading and rereading, actively, pencil in hand. Some key influences: V.S. Naipaul, Bruce Chatwin, Nancy Marie Brown, Sara Mansfield Taber, Truman Capote, John McPhee, Ian Frasier, Edward Swift, Tolstoy, Flaubert, Wharton, Flannery O'Connor... it's a long and ever-growing list.  I've also relied heavily on books on craft-- I read John Gardner's The Art of Fiction so many times, it fell apart and I bought another, and then that fell apart. For my workshops students-- and anyone else who surfs on in-- I maintain this list of recommended books on craft: http://www.cmmayo.com/workshop-rec-read-craft.html

When and where do you write? At my laptop, wherever that may be. Sometimes ideas just fly into my head; I ever and always keep a notebook handy to capture those.

What are you working on now? A travel memoir, tentatively titled World Waiting for a Dream: A Turn in West Texas. Apropos of that, I'm hosting a 24 podcast series, "Marfa Mondays: Exploring Marfa, TX and the Big Bend," and I invite you to listen in anytime. www.cmmayo.com/marfa

I'm also working (very slowly) on a novel and revising and expanding my introduction to my translation of the secret book by the leader of Mexico's 1910 Revolution, that is to say, Francisco I. Madero's Spiritist Manual. It's available on Kindle now; the updated edition and a paperback will be available soon. Read all about that here: http://www.cmmayo.com/SPIRITISTMANUAL/Spiritist-Q-AND-A/1-GENERAL-DESCRIPTION.html

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? Who hasn't? Oh, Joyce Carol Oates. I always wished I could figure out her secret. Though I am not anywhere near so prolific as Ms. Oates, I have managed to write several books and I am happy to share my simple trick: just keep at it, bit by bit, always, always, speaking to yourself kindly, and keeping your focus not on the past (regrets) nor the future (wishing and hoping), but in the present. When it gets really gnarly, turn to the literature on sports psychology.

 What’s your advice to new writers? There are different kinds of writing and different kinds of writer. I am a literary writer-- poetry, literary fiction, literary memoir and I specialize in big, fat, seriously researched tomes. So, speaking to the literary writer: Truly great books are an education of the heart-- and that is not something many new writers, enchanted with notions of fame, are prepared to seriously consider. At the nitty gritty level, though this is a gloriously creative path (revel in it!), the business of publishing your books is a lot like selling life insurance. Be prepared to persist. And be open to the new, for publishing as we know it is turning into a multimedia interactive I-don't-know-what. (That's why I took up blogging and podcasting and recently published an interactive ebook based on my one day workshop, Podcasting for Writers & Other Creative Entrepreneurs.) http://www.cmmayo.com/podcasting-for-writers/index.html It's probably also a good idea to get some chickens. I am not kidding.

Bio: C.M. Mayo is the author of The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire (Unbridled Books), a novel based on the true story and named a Library Journal Best Book of 2009. She is also the author of Miraculous Air: Journey of a Thousand Miles through Baja California, the Other Mexico (Milkweed Editions), and Sky Over El Nido (University of Georgia Press), which won the Flannery O'Connor Award. A long-time resident of Mexico and an avid translator, she is editor of Mexico: A Traveler's Literary Companion (Whereabouts Press), a collection of 24 Mexican writers on Mexico, and she is the first English translator of Francisco I. Madero's secret book, Spiritist Manual (Dancing Chiva). She hosts two podcast series, Conversations with Other Writers and Marfa Mondays, the latter apropos of a travel memoir-in- progress. www.cmmayo.com