Member Spotlight: Cole Nicole LeFavour

Why is writing important to you and why do you think it’s an important medium for the world? Writing fuels the imagination and broadens our understanding of the human lives in this world. Without written works, we would be islands. Instead we are a vast sea of human and animal life, each connected through the overlap of stories and images of place, time, and character. I think compassion and conscience is fortified by story. The world needs a great deal of that now.

What are your tried and tested remedies to cure writer’s block? I don’t tend to have writers block because I spend a great deal of time outside where images and stories build up so that, when I reach the page, they overflow and I never have enough time to get them all down.

What is your favorite time to write? I love to write in a pool of light in front of the wood stove or with the window open and the nighthawks calling; when the dog is sleeping and my spouse is deep in dream.

What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever received and would like to impart to other writers? I very much love the reminder I got that a story is not every event or every moment in a journey but is just the key flashes of time, more like beads on a thread, shaping the course of action but leaving plenty to the reader’s imagination and sense of curiosity and suspense.

What excites you most about being a writer in today’s age? In today’s age, I am excited by the idea of having something relevant to say about resistance and conscience, about the power of collective persistence in the face of cruelty.

Cole Nicole LeFavour’s In the Arms of Mountains: A Memoir of Land, Love, and Queer Resistance in Red America is out May 26 with Beacon Press.