Dominic Erdozain

How did you become a writer? Boarding school! I was sent to a Catholic prep school in North Yorkshire when I was nine. It was a shock to the system but I got into the habit of writing long, effusive letters home. People always appreciated my stories and the flashes of mordant humor and I realized it was something I enjoyed. As a historian, my writing has always been at the more playful end of the spectrum, so when I made the shift from academic publishing to writing for a general audience in One Nation Under Guns, the process was natural.

Name your writing influences (writers, books, teachers, etc.). I was fortunate to have a tutor at Oxford who embraced my rather energetic and free-flowing style. He warned me about relying on too few sources when writing an essay, but encouraged my tendency to “imbibe” a book and transport the ideas onto the page. For me, it was always more important to be inspired or provoked than to be apprised of the “state of the literature,” so I often found myself reading older, less fashionable authors, who may not have been on the reading lists. A book by Robert Young entitled, Darwin’s Metaphor, had a big impression on me as an undergraduate, showing the layers of history and philosophy behind the publication of On the Origin of Species, and tearing down the barriers between science and literature. Among American historians, I have always enjoyed Richard Hofstadter and Jill Lepore – exuberant writers who refused to stay in their lane. History has always been a form of activism for me, if only to interrogate received wisdom. There was a mischief to someone like Hofstadter that was infectious.

When and where do you write? In my quiet little study surrounded by trees.

What are you working on now? I’m writing a history of patriotism and democracy, to appear around the 250thanniversary of the Declaration of Independence in 2026. The idea is to explore the ways patriotism operates as an “established religion” in a notionally secular United States, prompting us to behave in ways that are not always democratic.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? Not in the technical sense of having nothing to say – just a certain fatigue and loss of sparkle when I have been working on something for too long.

What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received? I can’t remember who said it, but a phrase that has stuck with me is “emulate, don’t imitate.” As a historian, I always feel that there is a fine line between drawing energy and inspiration from your sources and becoming overly dependent – in style and content. If I can hear someone else’s voice in my head, or if the phrase does not feel like my own, I have to start again. Learn from others, but be yourself, is another way to put it.

What’s your advice to new writers? Say what you want to say, and let the style take care of itself. There is always a time for editing and pruning, but it is important not to get caught up in the craft. Try not to be self-conscious. If you can enjoy the process, so will the reader.

Dominic Erdozain is a historian of ideas and the author of One Nation Under Guns: How Gun Culture Distorts our History and Threatens our Democracy (published by Crown in 2024). A graduate of Oxford and Cambridge, he taught history at King’s College London for seven years before moving to Atlanta with his wife and three children in 2012. He is currently a visiting scholar at Emory University and writing a new history of patriotism in the United States, for Crown.

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.