How did you become a writer?

When the poet and essayist Joseph Brodsky was on trial in the Soviet courts for "social parasitism" in 1964, he gave his profession as "poet." According to the translated transcript published in the New York Times, the judge asked, "And who said that you were a poet? Who included you among the ranks of the poets?" Brodsky's reply: "No one. And who included me among the ranks of the human race?" 

 I wish I shared his certainty! I myself struggled to call myself a “writer” for quite a while. I knew I was someone who wrote. But what would make me a writer? Who would make me a writer? Who would include me among the ranks of writers? It turns out, Brodsky was right: a writer makes themselves. I became a writer by writing every day.

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

Oh gosh, I fear this question because I live in such debt to so many books and teachers that I know I will answer incompletely! I’ll attempt to list books and authors chronologically as I encountered them: Lang’s Fairy Books, D’aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths; the King James Bible; The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil; the Epic of Gilgamesh; Anne Carson; Averno by Louise Glück; Gilead by Marilynne Robinson; The Future of Nostalgia by Svetlana Boym; Orientalism by Edward Said; Bad Behavior by Mary Gaitskill; A.B. Yehoshua; Mahmoud Darwish; Terrance Hayes; Claudia Rankine; Edward Siken; Homegoing by Yaa Gysasi; The Known World and Lost in the City by Edward P. Jones; Look by Solmaz Sharif; Black Skin, White Masks by Franz Fanon; The Kingdom of Strangers by Elias Khoury; the Talmud, which I am encountering slowly as part of a queer yeshiva; Minor Detail by Adania Shibli; Rifqa by Mohammed El-Kurd.

The writers who have influenced me as teachers are Michelle Latiolais, Vu Tran, Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, Danzy Senna, and Amy Gerstler. I’m also grateful to my teachers of Talmud at the “traditionally radical yeshiva,” Svara. 

When and where do you write? 

I’m a morning writer. From the time I get up, I feel that an hourglass has been overturned and my time is running out as the morning slips by. I write at home. My desk is by a window.

What are you working on now? 

I am working on a novel about a love affair unfolding within political ideology.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? 

Shhhh, it can hear you. (Yes. When this happens, I forgive myself and try again the next day.)

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

Vu Tran taught me that plot is a character device: it is a way to reveal a character by forcing them to make decisions; this changed the way I write. Michelle Latiolais taught me to build recovery time into my writing, as I give so much of my emotional and physical self to the work; this has allowed me to develop a sustainable writing practice.

What’s your advice to new writers?

Forget the fantasy that you’ll sit down and out of your fingers will pour a story ready for The Paris Review. Embrace the mess, embrace revision. Let the first draft be a story that you tell yourself. Then, lose yourself in the process of editing as that story becomes an act of communication with a reader. You got this. 

Rebecca Sacks is a graduate of the Programs in Writing at the University of California, Irvine. Rebecca, who uses both “she” and “they” pronouns, has been awarded grants, prizes, and fellowships from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Elizabeth George Foundation, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and the Mellon-Sawyer Documenting War Seminar Series. A graduate of Dartmouth College, they worked for several years at Vanity Fair before moving to Tel Aviv to pursue an M.A. in Jewish studies. City of a Thousand Gates (HarperCollins, 2021) is her first novel. They live in Los Angeles.