Ellen Baker

How did you become a writer? I always loved to write stories, from the time I was a little kid, and I loved to read, too. I feel like I always knew it was what I wanted to do. I studied some other things (psychology, history, American Studies) and worked in museums before transitioning to working at a bookstore and then finally getting a book contract and becoming a full-time writer.

Name your writing influences (writers, books, teachers, etc.). When I was fifteen, I read Joyce Carol Oates’s Because it Is Bitter and Because it Is My Heart and I Lock My Door Upon Myself, and though I’d thought before about wanting to write novels, the experience I had reading these two books cemented that I really wanted to try to make a career of it. I still draw inspiration from the feeling I had then, which was of being understood completely at the same time that I was being swept away into another world. Then, when I was seventeen, I had the opportunity to meet Minnesota writer Frederick Manfred, and he read some of my writing and told me I would be published by the time I was thirty. I was inspired to try to prove him right! Beyond that, I've always read widely and constantly, from classics to bestsellers and everything in between. I love family sagas, mysteries, memoirs and biographies, and historical, literary, and commercial fiction. I look carefully at everything I read and try to figure out why something works or why it doesn't. I feel like I learn something from everything I read. Also, working at an independent bookstore for a number of years, I was constantly interacting with passionate readers, and they helped me understand a lot about the experience they're looking for when they pick up a novel. I would say they were tremendously influential, as well.  

When and where do you write? I write first thing in the morning (sometimes this is 5 am, sometimes more like 8 am) until noonish. I write everywhere in my house, depending on my mood and the weather. Sofa, dining room table, desk in the upstairs office, kitchen counter, front porch. If I’m writing a first draft, I prefer to be reclined on the sofa. For editing, I’m more likely to sit up straight at a desk or table. If the weather’s nice, I love to be outside. 

What are you working on now? A family saga set on the coast of Maine which spans from the 1930s to 2010, with three generations of strong women at its heart. 

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? There have definitely been times when the writing doesn't flow easily, and there have been weeks or even months in a row where I haven't written because life has made other demands. At those times, I do sometimes wonder if any more ideas will come. But when I sit down to write with a goal in mind, I have a pretty good system for keeping myself on track. 

What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received? I think the most transformative feedback I got was in a workshop led by J. Robert Lennon in about 2004. He and the other students in the workshop all pointed out that I seemed not to want anything bad to happen to my characters, nor anything impolite to be said about them. It was surprising to me to realize that if I wanted to write interesting fiction, I was going to have to let go of my Minnesota-nice upbringing and start getting more honest -- and even maybe a little mean. :) 

What’s your advice to new writers? Everyone says “don’t give up” and “stay in your chair.” I agree with those pieces of advice! One thing I would also add is “find your true voice.” Write about things you truly care about, in a way that sounds right to you. Authentic storytelling is what will finally resonate with readers – not with all of them, but with the ones you’re meant to find, and who are meant to find you.

Ellen Baker is the author of the novel The Hidden Life of Cecily Larson, which was the HarperCollins Lead Read for Winter 2024, an Indie Next pick, a People Best New Book, and a Woman's World Best New Book. It was also named as one of winter's most anticipated books by Goodreads and placed on multiple Best-of lists by BookBub, including Best Historical Fiction of 2024. Authors including Lisa Wingate, Tara Conklin, Kim Michele Richardson, Thao Thai and Kristin Harmel praised it respectively as “colorful,” “gorgeous,” “electrifying,” “riveting” and “beautiful. Ellen’s earlier novels, Keeping the House and I Gave My Heart to Know This, both published by Random House, were called “masterful” (Booklist), “vivid” (Chicago Tribune), and “artful” (Philadelphia Inquirer). Keeping the House won the Great Lakes Book Award and was a Chicago Tribune Best Book of the Year, as well as an Insider Discovery of the Literary Guild, a featured selection of the Doubleday Book Club and Random House Reader’s Circle, a BookSense Notable Book, and a Midwest Connections Pick.

After living most of her early life in Minnesota and Wisconsin, Ellen currently resides on the coast of Maine. Her online course, Start Your Novel With Confidence, offering a proven framework for getting your novel started plus a year of group coaching to support you as you write it, is available through www.ellenbakercreative.com.

Lauren Acampora

How did you become a writer? I was always scribbling stories from the time I could write my letters. They were usually about animals: dogs, horses, and bunnies. I also read a lot as a kid and was obsessed with the Little House on the Prairie books; I wanted to be Laura Ingalls Wilder, which included being a writer. As I continued to read more widely, I became both exhilarated and completely overwhelmed by the idea of writing fiction, the sheer enormity of its possibilities. I wrote poetry through high school, college, and beyond. For a long time, I believed I lacked the confidence writing fiction required. But I was still reading much more fiction than poetry, and finally my poems morphed into prose poems, which then morphed into stories. While living and working in New York, I enrolled in evening classes in a fiction MFA program, and those instructors and classmates gave me validation and encouragement to keep hammering away outside of office hours. Finally, I started to get a few things published, and I just kept at it.

Name your writing influences (writers, books, teachers, etc.). Having just outlined my path to writing fiction, I understand the core importance of those nature-based books I read as a young person: the Little House on the Prairie series, and all the novels in Walter Farley’s Black Stallion series and Jim Kjelgaard’s books about dogs (Big Red, etc.). My mind was also blown by the unsettling psychological tangles of Lois Duncan’s dreamy, spooky thrillers, and William Sleator’s time travel novel, The Green Futures of Tycho. I had two especially transformative teachers at Darien High School—Faye Gage and Lynda Sorensen—who challenged my thinking and nurtured my creative experimentation. John Steinbeck, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ray Bradbury, Richard Brautigan, and Henry David Thoreau all made deep impressions on me then. At Brown, my poetry professor, Gale Nelson, introduced me to the weird and wonderful. And Professor Arnold Weinstein, whose comparative literature classes I devoured, was—and continues to be—a major force in my thinking, writing, and reading. Literary influences from that era include Virginia Woolf, Charlotte Bronte, E. E. Cummings, and Franz Kafka. At Brooklyn College’s MFA program, I worked with incredible instructors who’ve become mentors, friends, and artistic influences in their own right: Irini Spanidou, Susan Choi, and Michael Cunningham. These days, writers and creators who excite my imagination include George Saunders, Donna Tartt, T.C. Boyle, John Cheever, Flannery O’Connor, and David Lynch. 

When and where do you write? I write at home on my back deck whenever I can. If the weather isn’t amenable, I work at my desk in a little blue office/guest room with a window. But truthfully, I get more done when I’m not at home, where there’s less temptation to get up out of the chair and putter around. The best place is the library. Being in view of strangers keeps me honest.

What are you working on now? I’m just finishing up a collection of linked stories about human-animal dynamics. I guess I never really stopped writing about dogs, horses, and bunnies.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? I don’t think I’ve suffered from “writer’s block,” as such, but rather “story’s block.” I think all writers sometimes come up against a problem in a story, some intractable issue in the plot, or a question of character, or just how to get from here to there in a narrative—and realize the story is stuck. I’ve found a few useful strategies for dealing with this. One is going for a walk. Another is leaving the house with a notebook, finding somewhere quiet, and just scrawling out the problem and all its associated questions and ideas. Showers also help.

What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received? Michael Cunningham’s advice has to be the best, although the hardest to follow: “Keep your butt in the chair.”

What’s your advice to new writers? Read the writers who make you feel like you can do it, too. Steer clear of the ones who make you want to give up. For very new writers, I’d say, don’t be too hard on yourself, and try not to put too much pressure on the work. Let your writing breathe and develop as naturally and joyfully as possible. Write about what’s really on your mind, no matter how unsettling or bizarre or silly. Write about what obsesses or perplexes you, what makes you feel excited, giddy, nervous. Crucially, write like no one is watching. In order to do this, I suggest labeling any work-in-progress with the word “freewrite” as a psychological insurance policy in case you are hit by a bus and someone finds it. 

Lauren Acampora is the author of three books of fiction published by Grove Atlantic: The Wonder Garden, The Paper Wasp, and The Hundred Waters. Her books have won or been nominated for the GLCA New Writers Award, the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, the Story Prize, and the New England Book Award, and she’s been named an Artist Fellow in Fiction by The New York Foundation for the Arts. Lauren’s writing has appeared in The Paris Review, New England Review, Missouri Review, Guernica, and The New York Times, among other places. She lives in New York.

Rachel Kousser

How did you become a writer? I have been writing in a sustained way since I started keeping a journal at the age of thirteen. I’ve tried everything: poetry, novels, plays, journalism, academic writing — my “day job” is as a professor — and narrative non-fiction, like my recent book, Alexander at the End of the World: The Forgotten Final Years of Alexander the Great (HarperCollins, July 2024). I even write a page or so every month describing what my kid is doing, to send to the grandparents. I think writing in so many formats has given me the courage to experiment.  

I don’t feel like there was a threshold I crossed, a moment when I became a writer.  It’s more that the writer was always in there, like a sculpture within a piece of marble, and over time, I was able to help it come out.

Name your writing influences (writers, books, teachers, etc.). Many books and teachers have shaped me as a writer, but the most important influence has been my writing partner, Ilyon Woo, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom. Years ago, Ilyon and I were neighbors, trying to write amid the pressures of small children and daily life. She asked me if I wanted a writing partner. I had no idea what I was getting in to, but I knew I wanted to write, and I trusted Ilyon. So I said yes.

Ilyon and I are very different, both personality-wise and in our areas of expertise. That’s made for some spectacular disagreements — I wish I’d preserved her comments on the start of my first chapter, because it was basically a sea of red pen — but it’s also been a real source of strength. From Ilyon, I’ve learned to be bolder in my writing, more of a storyteller.

I’ve also learned from Ilyon to think critically about whose story I am telling. Because I write about the ancient world, it’s easy to adopt the perspective of the ancient literary sources: powerful men, speaking to other powerful men. Ilyon showed me how to turn the camera around, to see, and show to readers, all the people that these ancient texts ignore or denigrate (for instance, women, foreigners, and enslaved persons). My commitment to telling untold stories, which became central to my book, came from her.

When and where do you write? I write whenever and wherever I can: at the kitchen table, at my desk, in cafes, on the subway. But my most substantive writing tends to take place first thing in the morning at the kitchen table. I sit with my computer and a beautiful teal mug that Ilyon gave me, filled with green tea. She has one too (hers is green), and I like to imagine that even though we live in different cities now, we’re up at the same time, with our cups of tea, writing in solidarity. In the morning, my mind is at its clearest, my energy at its height, and no one is asking me for anything. It’s perfect for writing, and my favorite time of day.

What are you working on now?  I’m working now on my next book project, a history of the ancient Mediterranean diet through four famous feasts. While researching my book on Alexander the Great, I became fascinated by how many important events in his life took place at feasts: there’s the one where he was almost killed by his father, the one where he himself killed a close friend, the one where he met and married his first wife, Roxanne, etc.

I began to wonder what these feasts were like, for instance what people ate and drank, how they behaved, and how Alexander’s conquests changed them. Writing about them felt like a way to bring this very remote and foreign part of history closer, because we all eat and go to parties. I’ve gotten to learn about everything from the spice trade in the ancient world to glamorous gold and silver drinking cups to how scientific testing of the insides of old pots is allowing us to reconstruct the stews and beverages people ate. It’s been a lot of fun!

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? There are definitely moments when I stare at the blinking cursor on my computer and feel totally at a loss. The good thing about having spent many years writing is that I know these moments will pass. I close my computer, get out my notebook, and start scribbling by hand, even if it’s just “I have no idea what to write. Why?”

More pernicious than writer’s block for me is writer’s delusion. That’s when I think that what I am writing makes sense and has value, but really, it’s schlock. Because I’m so close to my writing, even now, it’s sometimes hard for me to tell the difference. That’s one way having a writing partner really pays off. I call Ilyon my “schlock detector,” because if I’m going in the wrong direction, she is sure to tell me. And because we check in regularly, it short-circuits the process early on, before I’ve had too much time to get invested in what I’m writing. It’s so much better to dump two weeks’ worth of work than, say, six months’ (and I can say that, having done both. Ouch).

What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received? At the start of my last year in college, I met with my adviser about my senior thesis. He told me to start writing immediately. I protested that I hadn’t done enough research yet (truth be told, I hadn’t done any research at that point). He told me not to worry, that as I wrote, I would figure out what I truly needed to research, and do that alongside. I was terrified, but he was my adviser, and I didn’t want to disappoint him. So I dutifully went away, gave it a try, and lo and behold, he was right.

Ever since then, I have proceeded with the faith that the writing itself would tell me what I needed to do, research-wise. My professor’s advice has saved me from going down a lot of rabbit holes about things that weren’t truly relevant. It’s also led me in some surprising directions that I would not have predicted ahead of time. And while the research-writing issue is relevant particularly to nonfiction writers, I think his advice to just start writing immediately is important for everyone.

What’s your advice to new writers? If you’re just starting out, my advice would be to cultivate a regular writing practice. Ilyon and I always say to each other, you have to show up for your writing every day. Sometimes the Muse visits, and sometimes she’s busy elsewhere. But if you don’t show up, she can’t come.

Rachel Kousser writes and teaches about Alexander the Great, the destruction of monuments in ancient Greece, and the representation of gender and power in the Mediterranean world. For her work, she has received fellowships from the National Endowment of the Humanities, the Getty Research Institute, and the Center for the Advanced Study of the Visual Arts. She’s published articles in Art Bulletin, American Journal of Archaeology, and Res: Archaeology and Aesthetics as well as two books with Cambridge University Press. Rachel is currently the chair of the Classics Program at the Graduate Center, City University of New York and a professor of ancient art and archaeology at Brooklyn College. She has a B.A. in Classics and Art History from Yale University and a Ph.D. in Classical Art and Archaeology from New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts.