Nathaniel Ian Miller

How did you become a writer?

I was one of those precocious, obnoxious kids who consider themselves “writers,” and it was encouraged. In the 4th or 5th grade I collected all of my fiction to date—seven stories—and we ran off a few copies with my hand-drawn cover, bound in those thick plastic spirals that office people used for boardroom presentations back in the 80s. It was called Ragged Randoms—The Best of Nathaniel Miller, and there was some sci-fi, and a ghost story, and the worst dialogue you can imagine. I still have a copy. Looking at it right now. As for these days, in sober retrospect, maybe I became “a writer” two springs ago, when, at long last, someone (other than my parents) wanted to publish my work. I would’ve loved to be one of those writers who doesn’t give a damn whether anyone ever sees their work, and their ego lives on undiminished, but for me, until my luck changed, the designation felt hollow.

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

So many! Books that left a lasting mark can hardly be counted, but the writers I carry with me are Dame Beryl Bainbridge, Patrick O’Brian, Frantz Fanon, Frans Bengtsson, Larry McMurtry, Subcommandante Marcos, Jim Harrison, J.R.R. Tolkien, Elizabeth Bishop, Cormac McCarthy, Ursula K. Le Guin, Brendan Behan, Jane Austen, Haruki Murakami, Tomi Ungerer and Margaret Wise Brown. To name a few.  

When and where do you write?

If I’m engaged in a project, I’ll write whenever time presents itself (which, as I’m also a farmer, is more often in winter). Most of it occurs in my beloved office, which overlooks the barnyard and what people in Vermont call “the dooryard.” The windows are rather old in this part of our 19th C. farmhouse, so I am joined here by marauding hordes of cluster flies. But if I’m insufficiently engaged in a project, I could have all the time in the world, and I won’t write a word.

What are you working on now?

Ideas are finally congealing productively on a new novel, but as it’s still in its infancy, I hesitate to say more. I’ll say this: there are motorcycles in it. And tobacco.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?

I don’t think so, though I fear it appropriately and raise the sign of aversion against the evil eye when it is mentioned. My problem is a total lack of writing discipline, unless I’m rolling.

What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received?

The truth is that I haven’t been offered much writing advice, or any that I can remember. It could be that my conflicted feelings about the writing life form a visible barrier around me, and few would wish to give advice to someone who repels it. Or maybe it’s just that I don’t know very many writers, and the ones I know are not advice-givers. This is unlike farming, which somehow everyone has advice about. And child-rearing. And how to change one’s perspective by simply changing one’s perspective.

What’s your advice to new writers?

Oh man, I stepped right in it. Maybe this (in a stentorian voice): New writer! Cultivate, if you can, a second line of work that provides you with a sense of worth and identity. If you cannot, I raise my glass to you, friend, for we are together in this.

Miller’s debut novel, The Memoirs of Stockholm Sven, was published in October by Little, Brown & Co. He has also written for the Virginia Quarterly Review and newspapers in New Mexico, Colorado, Wisconsin and Montana. He lives with his family on a farm in Vermont.