When I want to purchase goodwill from creative-writing students who have convinced themselves that nonfiction is boring, I bring cookies and assign them some Roxane Gay. They read her work and respond, “You can do that in nonfiction?”
The best-selling author of Bad Feminist, Difficult Women, and Hunger (among others), Roxane Gay holds the Gloria Steinem Endowed Chair in Media, Culture, and Feminist Studies at Rutgers University. She manages to be funny and fearless while writing about things she loves (Vanderpump Rules) and hates (Django Unchained), and searing and profound while writing about being gang-raped at age 12 and about years logged in a sometimes uncomfortably large body.
Beyond the usual publications (collections of stories and essays and a novel), Gay has created a weekly newsletter on Substack — “The Audacity,” billed as “writing that boldly disregards normal constraints” — and a book group called “The Audacious Book Club.” She did a podcast (Hear to Slay, for two years with Tressie McMillan Cottom), oversees her own imprint at Grove Atlantic, and has written for Marvel’s Black Panther: World of Wakanda series.
With the efficiency of people who are far too busy, she was able to field some questions by email for the Scholars Talk Writing series about writing for the public and other matters.
You recently hosted a workshop at Rutgers for underrepresented scholars, with a focus on writing for the public. What were some of the big takeaways that came out of it?
There is a real demand among academics for guidance on how to write for the public, how to take their life’s work and translate it for a broader audience without diluting the rigor. It was a pleasure to host an all-day workshop for Rutgers faculty members, and we brought in some amazing guest instructors like John Warner, Brittney Cooper, and Claire Potter, all of whom have extensive experience writing for the public.
The biggest takeaways were the importance of knowing your work and how to talk about it, remembering that writing should be beautiful and interesting, and understanding how to pitch your work to the right editor.
This transition can be challenging for academics because we spend years and years learning the norms of scholarly writing, which is largely written for a specialized audience, not the general public. The work we read only reinforces what we’ve learned. But public-facing writing is a different beast. It cannot be insular.
While you should have a primary audience in mind, you also have to consider the many other audiences who may engage with your work and how to best reach them. The prose cannot simply be utilitarian; it has to be readable, engaging. You have to make people care about this specialized thing that dominates your professional life — which requires thinking about why someone might care and then articulating that why as effectively as possible.
What, if anything, did you have to unlearn from your time in graduate school?
I didn’t really have to unlearn anything because I’ve always prioritized beautiful prose in my work, regardless of the genre I am working in. Really, it’s my graduate work in rhetoric and technical communication that has helped me become a stronger essayist.
In this continuing series, Rachel Toor interviews scholars about their writing process and influences.
You have given lots of advice on podcasts, on Twitter, and now as the Work Friend columnist for The New York Times. What is some of the best advice you’ve gotten — and then passed on — to people in academe, in general, and about writing specifically?
One of the best pieces of advice I’ve received is the simplest — to just be myself, to stay true to what I believe and how I articulate those beliefs, rather than contorting myself into uncomfortable positions to please others.
The advice I dispense to others is about being relentless. To find any kind of success as a writer, you have to be persistent. You need a high tolerance for rejection and failure over years and years. You need to prioritize your writing time as much as you prioritize your other responsibilities.
And you have to find a way to tolerate discomfort, whether it’s discomfort over being vulnerable or writing about difficult truths, and so on.
You’ve been an author and a book publisher and now have your own imprint at Grove Atlantic. What should scholars know about the publishing industry that they may never have been taught in grad school? What do you look for in book proposals?
There are a lot of conspiracies about publishing, and a lot of people talk themselves out of trying to publish a book before they even write one. There are, absolutely, obstacles to publishing a book, but those obstacles are not relevant until you’ve actually written the book.
It’s great to have goals and dreams, but it is also important to recognize that publishing is a process. There are steps and when you follow those steps, take them one at a time, the overwhelming prospect of navigating publishing becomes more manageable.
When I read a book proposal, I am interested in a great, original idea, great writing, and a clear sense that the writer is the best person to write that book.
Are there books that blur the scholarly/literary line that you think have been overlooked and you’d like to recommend?
I’m not sure it has been overlooked but Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments by Saidiya Hartman is simply astonishing.
I heard you say that you were still paying off student loans. What do you say to students who want to get a graduate degree in the humanities?
I have staggering student loans because of compounding interest, but fortunately I only have five payments left before I qualify for debt forgiveness. The most important thing people should understand is what compounding interest really costs. With some loan amounts, it seems like you can never really pay them off, not with what people working in the humanities earn. But I also don’t think it’s productive to tell people to not take out loans if they want to pursue a graduate education. Sometimes, that is the only way to fund a graduate education or supplement paltry stipends.
I urge people to try and get as much institutional funding as possible and to be cleareyed about what repayment will truly cost and how it will affect their quality of life. A graduate education has been invaluable to me. I would do it again if I had to.
I am, of course, fortunate that this writing thing has worked out, enabling me to pay my student loans every month. I’m sure I would feel quite differently had I not gotten a faculty position after I graduated.
If you were queen of the world or a university president, what are some changes you would make in higher ed?
I would stop the indentured servitude of graduate education, and, of course, end the overreliance on contingent instructors who are paid far too little, without job security, and often without benefits. The economic model of higher education is broken, and I don’t have immediate solutions, but I do know that if a university can only succeed through exploitation, we really have to grapple with the ethics of that.
We are doing this interview by email, which is my preferred mode because I’m better on the page than I ever am in person. You’re known for being a fearless writer. Do academics need to be more audacious (and vulnerable) in their writing?
Given how academia currently works, and how mercurial the tenure process for those on the tenure track, it’s hard to tell people to be more audacious and vulnerable when the professional costs of doing so might be untenable.
We all have different tolerances for risk, so it’s important to figure out how much risk you can tolerate — given the realities you contend with — and then be as audacious as those realities will allow, within whatever boundaries you set for yourself.
Or, allow yourself to be terrified to take risks and take those risks anyway, which is what I do.
