Member Spotlight: Emily Hunsberger

Why is writing important to you and why do you think it’s an important medium for the world? I’m primarily a literary translator, and I suppose that, if narratives and poetry and songs are some of the most fundamental ways we understand ourselves and the world around us, then translation is the vital key that helps us unlock our universal connections and expand our understanding of the broader human story.

What are your tried and tested remedies to cure writer’s block? I often work at home, so changing my setting to a library, a café, or a park almost always releases the hold on my brain.

What is your favorite time to write? The mid- to late afternoon, which rather inconveniently is usually when I need to pick up my children from school and everything goes belly up!

What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever received and would like to impart to other writers? I often cross-reference something I heard Adriene Mishler say in an online yoga video (stay with me, here!) which is: we didn’t come here to do *yoga*, we came here to *experience* something. And that’s how I feel about literature; we don’t come to it for Literature with a capital L, we come to it hoping to experience something meaningful or stirring in the writing or the reading of it. Which I guess is to say, don’t approach writing with the belief that you must perform your *idea* of what writing is, just do something with the pen (or keyboard) that makes you feel alive.

What excites you most about being a writer in today’s age? As a translator, it’s amazing to live in the 21st century be able to instantly get in touch with writers, young and old, across the globe. The possibilities for writers and literary translators to find one another and collaborate in the age of the internet are remarkable.

Emily Hunsberger’s translation of Melanie Márquez Adams’s Wonderland: Crónicas of Belonging in América is out now with Mouthfeel Books.