Member Spotlight: Roxanne Varzi

Why is writing important to you and why do you think it’s an important medium for the world? For me, writing is about educating and advocating and pure pleasure. My latest book incorporates my advocacy for neurodiversity, (dyslexia and ADHD in particular) my love of a good cozy mystery and my belief that teaching anthropology is a form of activism.

What are your tried and tested remedies to cure writer’s block? Going for a walk. Working on something else for a while—like backstory, a character sketch or dialogue. Dictating ideas into my phone.

What is your favorite time to write? Morning for new material, evening for editing.

What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever received and would like to impart to other writers? It doesn’t have to be perfect.

What excites you most about being a writer in today’s age? There are far more venues open for publication. Writers now have access to the means of production… Virginia Woolf and Dostoevsky are great examples of why this is so important. And, as I always tell my writing students, good writing is still the foundation for everything—be it a video game, film, song, theater, sound art—the text, the story, the word is key. And this is true of all the modalities I use in my own work from sound art to ethnographies to novels.

Roxanne Varzi’s Death in a Nutshell: An Anthropology Whodunit is out now with Bouncing Box Press.