Ten Questions

“When I work in coffee shops, people actually remark on the chaos of my desktop, wondering how I can get any work done.” —Tom Junod, author of In the Days of My Youth I Was Told What It Means to Be a Man

“I think that losing the joy of process causes writer’s block.” —Tayari Jones, author of Kin

“If someone else could do it better, don’t write it.” —Anne Fadiman, author of Frog: And Other Essays

“One day, all that sacrifice will have been worth it.”  —Alice Evelyn Yang, author of A Beast Slinks Towards Beijing

“Advice for poets should be poems.” —Bianca Stone, author of The Near and Distant World

“You have to learn to write when you don’t feel like it.” —Raquel Gutiérrez, author of Southwest Reconstruction

“It can take days, months, years for me to know when notes pass into the arena of poem or story.” —Devon Walker Figueroa, author of Lazarus Species

“I think the creative process is unboundaried.” —Sarah Hall, author of Helm

“At a certain point, you just have to make that shift into the difficulty head-on. You have to hit it.” —Emily Wilson, author of Burnt Mountain