Member Spotlight: Janice Milusich

Why is writing important to you and why do you think it’s an important medium for the world? Creative expression in its various forms is enlivening to the individual and the community at large. The act of writing is one of my favorite conduits to creative expression.

What are your tried and tested remedies to cure writer’s block? Experimenting with restrictive forms of poetry helps spark curiosity and a sense of play, and as a children’s author, those ingredients are essential to a writer’s toolbox.

What is your favorite time to write? Often, due to my teaching or other commitments, I find myself writing when and where I can. But my favorite time is mid-morning on a day when there are no to-dos on the periphery and I can disappear inside my writing for as long as I’d like.

What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever received and would like to impart to other writers? The two writers whose advice has stuck with me are Julia Cameron’s, whose suggestion is to write every day, setting a timer for twenty minutes, then, if you want, set it for another twenty, and Anne Lamott’s, whose anecdote on how to see a project through to its end, became the title of her book, Bird by Bird.

What excites you most about being a writer in today’s age? Reading other writers’ works and experiencing their voices is exciting to me as a writer. It wouldn’t matter what the day and age were.

Janice Milusich’s I Hear the Snow, I Smell the Sea, illustrated by Chris Raschka, is out now with Anne Schwartz Books.