Member Spotlight: Valerie Nieman

Why is writing important to you and why do you think it’s an important medium for the world? Writing shapes me, shapes my understanding of the world. An image or phrase or overhead comment and I am pulled into story. I must follow where it leads, which has led to much genre-hopping over the years. No way to build a career, perhaps, but it has been the path to a certain happiness and to the kind of “soul-making” that I seek. After a half-century of writing, I cannot envision my life without it. The world needs poems and stories and novels for the same reasons–to open our hearts, allow us to connect with others, and through the ensorcellment of language, enter lives and places that we had not imagined. By that empathy we might move toward a kinder and more expansive society.

What are your tried and tested remedies to cure writer’s block? I was trained as a newspaper journalist and taught to work around any blockage. If you can’t get started, then figure out the ending, choose quotes, whatever. Just get something down. The story will start to take shape. I also love to walk – the steady motion and the sensory flow from the natural world nearly always help me begin new writing or work out a knotty situation. “Solvitur ambulando” indeed.

What is your favorite time to write? I’m best in the morning. Now that I’m retired, I can linger in bed and watch the light spread behind the curtains. I let my mind wander, consider characters and situations. I often must hop up and quickly jot down the new insights that emerge in the half-dark. Then it’s coffee and breakfast, a run through the news and emails, and right to the keyboard. Sometimes for quite a long session, other times broken up by chores and exercise. And really, I’m no good at all after 8 pm. That’s time to unwind!

What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever received and would like to impart to other writers? So much advice! Most of it true. Apply butt to chair. Leave a sentence unfinished to pick back up easily. Read the work aloud. Revise, revise, revise. Cut 10 percent. But I think the best advice came from Fred Leebron who heads the Queens MFA program. “The primary way that writers fail is through attrition. Don’t attrish.” It takes a peculiar stubbornness to stay with a novel over years and decades. I know many writers who have. I’ve been among them, with 15 years between the start of “In the Lonely Backwater” and its appearance in print. Double that for “Upon the Corner of the Moon.” Some books have come fairly quickly, a year or three, but others have needed a long maturation to properly unfold, like one of those desert flowers that appears infrequently and spectacularly.

What excites you most about being a writer in today’s age? I’m thankful for the incredible wealth of information we now have available. I began working on this new novel three decades ago, when research meant traveling to the library or placing an order for interlibrary loan books. Maps, photographs, out-of-print materials were just not accessible to writers living outside of major metropolitan centers. As much as I adore visiting the great libraries — the Library of Congress, National Library of Scotland, etc. — the materials in those stacks are not a resource I would have had available but for the rapid expansion of digitalization. The internet, for all its flaws and sometimes inaccuracies, is also a magnificent resource for facts, visuals, and connections with experts and other writers.

Valerie Nieman’s Upon the Corner of the Moon: A Tale of the Macbeths is out now with Regal House Publishing.