Member Spotlight: Tracy Slater

Why is writing important to you and why do you think it’s an important medium for the world? We experience the world and ourselves through story, through narrative, and so writing makes the world legible to us. It’s also the way we connect to each other across space and time, the way we intimately enter each other’s experience.

What are your tried and tested remedies to cure writer’s block? Writer’s block isn’t as much of an issue for me, given that I write only narrative nonfiction. If I get stuck or feel mired in inertia, I just read more on my topic or listen to a related literary or history podcast. If all else fails, then: coffee!

What is your favorite time to write? Anytime our kiddo is at school or otherwise occupied.

What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever received and would like to impart to other writers? If you’re hoping to publish, you have to find a way to take this story or historical moment that has captured you, and make it meaningful and relatable for your audience. Or, as is quoted in the introduction to every Creative Nonfiction podcast episode (one of my favorite podcasts), “This [story] is going to have to be meaningful to someone, somewhere, besides me.”

What excites you most about being a writer in today’s age? 1) Having work that I can balance with the scheduling constraints of being a parent and a trailing spouse 2) The endless amount of historical documentation that is now available online, particularly after archives ramped up their digitizations after COVID.

Tracy Slater’s Together in Manzanar: The True Story of a Japanese Jewish Family in an American Concentration Camp is out now with ‎ Chicago Review Press.