I met Erika when she was living in Albuquerque on sabbatical from her academic job. She quickly found her way into the writing community here for good reasons: She is funny and quirky and smart. Really smart. And talented–as a poet and a novelist. But what I have admired about her most is her tenacity and persistence. Her latest novel, You Who Enter Here about native gang life in Albuquerque was rejected several times by publishers not because it is not good, but because the subject matter was dark… though one reviewer said the novel was “… a darkly splendid achievement.” SUNY Press published the book earlier this year and it’s a good thing they did. Life doesn’t always end up wrapped in a pretty little bow, and tough stories need to be told.
Plume: When did you know that you were a writer?
Erika Wurth: I’m not exactly sure, but I remember vaguely that I wanted to be an inventor when I was maybe five or six. And then, even though I knew absolutely nobody who was a writer, and perhaps because I was such a big reader, I decided pretty quickly after that that I wanted to be a writer. I had no idea what that entailed, though, but for some reason it kept on with me, and here I am, all of these years later with all of the big, bad and occasional, wonderful good things that entails.
P: Where do you get your ideas?
EW: I don’t really know. That’s always been a difficult question for me because ideas are always crowding me out – and I’m always working on multiple writing projects at one time. I don’t go searching for ideas or experience writers block. I know what inspires me, though, and I definitely am interested in writing my own poetic and imaginative version of what I know, which is mainly contemporary Native American life, whether that has to do with Native gangs, or Mayan-like civilizations in other galaxies.
P: How supportive is your local community for writers?
EW: I live part time in Denver and part time in rural Illinois. And Denver has become an amazing city for writers, and I feel deeply supported by folks here. There are loads of reading series, for example, featuring writers in every part of their careers. And although Western Illinois University where I teach and live part time is a small community, we have a really amazing writer series via a foundation grant, and because of that I’ve been able to create a kind of writing community with the people that I’ve brought in. Not to mention that the students are strong writers, many of whom have gone on to MFA programs, and to publish.
P: We at Plume consider you a successful writer–How do you define “success” for a writer? For yourself?
EW: That’s also a difficult question because for some it means financial independence and for others it means fame. But I like what a friend said to me recently. I had a reading at North Florida University and the writer who brought me said that he had a decent job teaching exactly what he loved and he was able to pay the bills. And he was able to publish with regularity. And that was really beautiful.
P: Do you have a writing shero? A fellow woman writer from whom you get inspiration?
EW: Sure, I have lots of them. I really admire my friend Rebecca Roanhorse; she’s a native literary fantasy writer, and she just came out swinging with this incredibly brilliant indigenous novel, and though she’s had her rocky moments in the native literary community, she’s just kept on writing. She’s been a deep inspiration, especially for young native people, and really people reading her work everywhere. I’m also a big fan of my friend Eden Robinson, who has been writing for years and has had moments where she experienced difficult things that made her writing life smaller than she wished it would be. But again, she came out swinging with a number of novels that have done unbelievably well, after her initial success with her first novel years ago.
P: What are you currently working on?
EW: I’ve been writing in screenplay and graphic novel – and I’m half-way through a science-fiction novel, but the novel I’m done with and sending to agents has to do with a woman named Cary, whose mother, Cecilia, abandoned her when Cary was two days old. Cary’s always hated her mother, until her cousin finds a letter that indicates that her mother’s father might have tried to murder her and her sister, and Cary decided to go to Oklahoma to find out if her mother is still alive, and if not, what happened to her.