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

Meredith Maran

How did you become a writer? I was born that way. No, really. I was writing stories under the covers with my Barnum & Bailey flashlight when I was five. I published a poem when I was seven, and that sealed my fate. 

Name your writing influences (writers, books, teachers, etc.). My dad was an aspiring playwright, and he kept his rejected manuscripts in his bottom dresser drawer. I spent many childhood hours reading the rejection letters clipped to each one, and, being oppositionally defiant by nature, somehow this made me determined to write and to publish. I was profoundly influenced by the first book I loved, Bonjour Tristesse by Françoise Sagan, which is why Why We Write is dedicated to her. I didn't have any writing teachers except for the writers I love; I've never studied writing.

When and where do you write? I used to write all the time--by day, by night. But then publishing, um, changed and the advances weren't enough to sustain my Hendrick's habit anymore, so I got a job at age 60. I have 3-day weekends and I'm learning to write in that more constricted space. I was also beyond overjoyed to have a month at MacDowell in September. My writing psyche must have sensed the urgency of the opportunity; I wrote most of a novel during that month. As to where: reclining, always. In the sun if I can manage it. One reason I moved to LA a year ago and love it here. My writing is solar-powered and the power is here.

What are you working on now? Bringing the newborn baby, Why We Write, into the world. I'm just back from tour which was incredibly juicy. It's not "my" book; it's the 20 writers' book, too, so I get to do events with Susan Orlean and Terry McMillan, and with James Frey and Kathryn Harrison, and with a whole slew of writers I admire who aren't in the book: Julie Klam, Christina Haag, and Martha Southgate, most recently. 

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? I have suffered from some shitty-ass first, second, and twelfth drafts, but never from writer's block. I don't believe in it. Although I don't believe in suffering, either, and that still happens. 

What’s your advice to new writers? To paraphrase Jane Smiley from Why We Write: do it if you love it. Don't do it to make your mother love you, or your ex-boyfriend regret leaving you, or to make impressive cocktail party chatter. Goddess knows no one should do it for the money, unless one is David Baldacci--and in our interview, he too says he does it because he loves it. So there.

Bio: Meredith Maran (www.meredithmaran.com) is a book critic for People, Salon, The Boston Globe, The Chicago Tribune, More Magazine, and the San Francisco Chronicle. The author of eleven nonfiction books, Meredith published her first novel, A Theory Of Small Earthquakes in 2012. Her new nonfiction book, Why We Write, is just out from Plume. She’s on Twitter at @meredithmaran.