Member Spotlight: Terese Svoboda

Why is writing important to you and why do you think it’s an important medium for the world? I write myself into and out of my life. If nothing else, it’s fixed talk, and that’s more important than any other medium.

What are your tried and tested remedies to cure writer’s block? I don’t have writer’s block.

What is your favorite time to write? On a deadline.

What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever received and would like to impart to other writers? Grace Paley told me the key to a writer’s success was low rent.

What excites you most about being a writer in today’s age? The openness of genre. People are writing across formal lines, looking for what the content demands. Publishing can hardly keep up.

Terese Svoboda’s Roxy and Coco is out now with West Virginia University Press.