Mona Susan Power

How did you become a writer? My parents met in the world of publishing, so I grew up in a home of dedicated readers. I remember being a preschooler, holding open a copy of Alice in Wonderland, willing myself to summon the magic to read the tantalizing pages (mesmerized by the illustrations). Once I could finally read on my own, the world opened in wonderful ways! Words were my friends, allies, protectors. When I wasn’t allowed to express difficult emotions in the open, I could write my heart out on the page. However, because writing was so integral to my survival from a very young age, it took me a while to consider trying to pursue it as a career. It wasn’t until I was in law school that I realized a legal career wasn’t my true calling since I had always been an Arts person (writer, singer, dancer, actress). I completed my schooling and earned the law degree, but then became serious about developing my craft as a writer.

Name your writing influences (writers, books, teachers, etc.). My parents were my first influences—my mother taking me to several libraries each week because libraries were essentially her church. She was also a phenomenal storyteller, and later developed into a talented writer, though she didn’t want to send her work out for publication. My father read aloud to me each night in the years before I could read, in a wonderfully dramatic voice that brought every story to life! Perhaps because of this, an important part of my craft in the editing stage is to read my work aloud. I need to hear the rhythm of sentences, the dialogue.

I was also very fortunate to have high school teachers who encouraged my writing: English teacher, Darlene McCampbell, and Acting teacher, Liucija Ambrosini. I was so thrilled to reconnect with them this past year! Frank Conroy changed my life by accepting me into the MFA program at the University of Iowa in 1990, championing my work, and Margot Livesey was a generous teacher and mentor there.

When Louise Erdrich’s first novel, Love Medicine, was published in 1984, I was so inspired—galvanized! Her stunning writing continues to be an inspiration.

When and where do you write? I can write pretty much anywhere, everywhere, though my preferred place is on my comfy couch with trusty computer settled on a lap desk. One time I had a character’s voice suddenly fill my head with delicious sentences and information when I was out on an exercise walk. I didn’t want to miss a single word, so I dashed into a bank lobby and began writing on a large bank deposit envelope.

When I’m in “finishing mode” with a novel, the pages quickly stack up each day. I’m the happiest at these times and rush out of bed in the morning, eager to begin writing as soon as I finish breakfast. Then I might do more writing in the evening. The momentum builds so much towards the end of a project.

What are you working on now? I have a personal deadline to finish a new novel in coming months. Actually, it’s a book I first began writing years ago, but A Council of Dolls elbowed it out of the way, almost demanding I write it in early 2021. It wanted to be “born” immediately! So now I’ve returned to my earlier novel with the working title, Harvard Indian Séance at the Lizzie Borden Bed & Breakfast.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? I can always write, but there are periods where what I write just isn’t working for me. Especially with longer projects, such as novels, I sometimes begin writing them too soon, before I’ve figured out some important elements of the story, or fully understand the characters involved. Thankfully I’ve learned to be more patient and move on to other projects when a book needs to simmer on the backburner.

What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received? Writers are often told to “write what [we] know.” But back in the 1990’s I heard author Marcie Hershman offer the advice: “Write what you need to know.” This speaks to me on a deep level. I also greatly appreciate Marcie Rendon’s recent talk at a writing conference where she said she writes all the time. Boom! Write!

What’s your advice to new writers? Read! One of my first strategies when I decided to shift gears from the Law to Creative Writing, was to read award-winning works in the genre that most appealed to me: Literary Fiction. I absorbed so much about craft intuitively, via this steady diet of inspiring work.

Mona Susan Power is the author of four books of fiction: The Grass Dancer (awarded the PEN/Hemingway prize), Roofwalker, Sacred Wilderness, and A Council of Dolls (winner of the Minnesota Book Award and the High Plains Book Award, longlisted for the National Book Award and the Carol Shields Prize). Fellowships in support of her work include an Iowa Arts Fellowship, James Michener Fellowship, Radcliffe Bunting Institute Fellowship, Princeton Hodder Fellowship, USA Artists Fellowship, Native Arts and Cultures Foundation Fellowship, and McKnight Fellowship. Her short stories and essays have been widely published in journals and anthologies, including The Best American Short Stories series, The Paris Review, The Atlantic Monthly, andGranta. Power is an enrolled member of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe (Yanktonai Dakota), born and raised in Chicago. She currently lives in Minnesota, where she's working to complete a new novel.

Sumana Roy

How did you become a writer? I have no idea how that happened. I mean, I can answer this with only as much honesty as I can say how I became a lover or my parents’ child. I am a reader, and it would have been the desire to share the immediacy of my experience of reading, whether it was a book, a film, the sky, a forest, that must have compelled me to start writing. Like many women, I began writing quite late. One needs permission from one’s imagination to be able to think of oneself as a writer or an artist, I suppose.

Name your writing influences (writers, books, teachers, etc.). I grew up in a small town in sub-Himalayan Bengal where there were no public libraries or even bookshops. We read whatever came our way – old copies of the National Geographic, Reader’s Digest, newspapers and magazines that had been sold to scrap collectors. I did not have the privilege of growing up amidst books. It must have been this deprivation that compelled me to read whatever I could find in the college library. Apart from poetry and fiction, I became addicted to literary criticism – 20th century literary criticism until the 1970s, for books arrived very late in provincial places like ours. I think of these writers and critics as my first teachers – from their curiosity and investigation about language, how it worked, the weight and measure of every word, what it could do and what it couldn’t, I must have moved towards creative expression without becoming conscious of the direction I was taking.

When and where do you write? Ideally, I like to write sitting on my bed in my room in Siliguri – my bed feels like my universe, like the ‘little roome’ did to John Donne, I suppose. But that isn’t always possible – so I write whenever I want to, whether I’m on a train or plane, railway station or airport, doctor’s clinic or between teaching. I don’t have a writing ‘routine’. I write whenever I can, building up sentences inside me as I go about my day, cooking, cleaning, housekeeping, gardening, teaching. At some point, like an insect, I try to deposit it into my laptop. Until then, the mind or a notebook will carry this weight and fidgetiness.  

What are you working on now? An essay, a few essays, for I work on things simultaneously. Some of these have been inside me – and the laptop – for years.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? There are various kinds of blocks that every person – and every artist – faces. I’ve not been able to write with any degree of joy or fluency for more than two months now because of urgent caregiving responsibilities at home. I take them to be as natural as fallow periods.

What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received? To be honest, I’ve never asked anyone for writing advice. I suppose I have learnt from studying the writing of my favourite writers, reading them over and over again, just to be let into the magic about how that language comes into being.

What’s your advice to new writers? I could actually do with some advice myself. I can only repeat what I tell my students and myself – that we are living in a time where everyone is lying: politicians, publicists, reviewers, bankers, insurance agents, doctors, engineers, teachers, students, parents, children, the State … . My advice – and request – to writers is to write honestly, not to milk market trends but to obey their writer’s instinct, even though it might be hard to get published. I’d like to believe that only honest writing will survive as literature.

Sumana Roy is the author of two works of nonfiction, How I Became a Tree and Provincials, as well as Missing: A Novel, My Mother’s Lover and Other Stories, and two collections of poems, Out of Syllabus and VIP: Very Important Plant. She is Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at Ashoka University.

Gemma Liviero

How did you become a writer?

As a young girl, I was easily distracted and often with my head in the clouds, so storytelling seemed a perfect fit. If I wasn’t out riding my bike, I was indoors writing poetry and short stories. I won two short story competitions and made the finals in several others. After completing senior school, I took various creative writing classes, then eventually I got serious and decided to study for a diploma in professional writing with the ambition of becoming a copywriter. I went on to work in the publishing, printing, and advertising fields while writing novels in my spare time. My early novels were rejected, and I continued coming up with new ones. In my early forties, life changed with Pastel Orphans. Sometime after self-publishing, another award, and gaining good reviews, Lake Union Publishing approached me with an offer and then a traditional contract. Sometimes when you least expect it, amazing things happen. I like to imagine that by always supporting and celebrating other authors’ successes, some good karma came my way. 

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

I was drawn to early gothic novels by Edgar Allan Poe, Wilkie Collins, and Oscar Wilde, as well as to stories by the Brönte sisters, Thomas Hardy, D.H. Lawrence, Bryce Courtenay, and Khaled Husseini. I was moved by poems about war and influenced by writers such as Aldous Huxley and Margaret Atwood, who convinced me to bend the rules a little.  My mother was a major influence also. One birthday, she bought me a poetry book by William Wordsworth, and I would pore over the pages and learned to recite some of them by memory. When I was fifteen, she bought me a portable Brother typewriter. I was hoping for something else that year, but it turned out to be the perfect gift and hugely useful (until the wonders of word processing). The experiences of various family members in the armed services, in WWI and WWII, also had an impact on my writings.

When and where do you write? 

In the early phase of a new story, I write between four and six hours a day. During the editing stage, even longer. I tend to start mid-morning and have small breaks throughout the day. Thinking is a huge part of the process, and you will often find me outside gazing into space or at the trees, then using the old notepad-and-pen method when I get stuck on certain parts of the story where I have to join the dots.  But the bulk of my writing and editing is in my office on my computer. I’ve tried writing in cafes, but I get too distracted. I’m a people watcher. 

What are you working on now? 

I’m working on another historical fiction that is a coming-of-age story, a mystery, and partly against the backdrop of war. Again, as with stories that have links to war, I focus on relationships and the effects of upheaval that extend long after the end of the conflict.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? 

I’ve gone through periods where I struggle to have a clear vision. There have been times when I get a third of the way and although I’ve planned my ending, I look at the paths I’ve chosen and think ‘they’re not working’. At that point I rework, but I also enjoy the challenge. For new books, when I’m searching for ideas, I think of an event in history, imagine a person who might have witnessed it, then write what that person might have felt and seen. It might not be a great beginning or a theme or period I’ve researched, nor a story I might complete, but this method seems to reawaken my creative side. Worth noting also that there is a lot of thinking time with writing, and spending time in your head can be productive.

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

I was taught formulas, that there had to be a beginning, a protagonist, an antagonist, a plot, a catalyst, a climax, and a conclusion. That was very early on, and I have bent some of the rules since. The best piece of advice was to write in a style that you feel comfortable with as readers can tell when you’re not. If you’re forcing the story forward, you might want to rethink it. Also, from my husband, block out negative thoughts and self-doubt.

What’s your advice to new writers?

Read a wide range of books to see what makes you turn the pages, but don’t necessarily choose a theme or style just because someone else used it successfully. Be authentic. Write about a subject you feel passionately about or find a genre that has you buzzing with ideas. Character personalities may change after certain things happen or secrets about them are revealed, but for the most part keep them consistent throughout the story. My novels are mostly character-driven, and I spend much time constructing personalities and analysing their motivations. Writers are usually their own worst critics, but it is also important to listen to constructive criticism by people close to you. It’s hard to hear at first and you may not agree with everything, but there might also be some value in it.

Bio: I’m a wife, mother of two adult children, and author living on the outskirts of Brisbane, Queensland, Australia. My professional writing career includes copywriting, corporate writing, feature articles, editorials, and editing. Other jobs over the years include secretarial and office work, public relations, and web content, as well as typesetting and designing of ads and promotional material for print. I have an advanced diploma of arts (professional writing), and in between each novel I somehow manage to squeeze in another subject of BA history.