Stella Santamaria: Could you tell us a little bit about yourself and why you became a writer?
Zack Rogow: From a very early age I was interested in the arts. When I was 12 years old my mother, who was a free spirit, took our family on a trip to Europe. At the time, I was very reluctant. My sister and my mother had to drag me from museum to cathedral to sculpture garden, and I wasn’t that interested initially. Then, gradually, as we went all over Europe, I became aware of how powerful art was in the lives of the people there.
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The following year my mother took us to Mexico and we went to Mexico City quite often. I saw the art of Diego Rivera there and saw what a huge impact his art had on Mexico and on people learning about their own history there. That convinced me even more to become an artist. I learned everything I could about art, but I was very hesitant to become a writer because my father, Lee Rogow, had been a writer.
If I Was Going to Be an Artist, I Was Going to Be a Writer
An interview with Zack Rogow
by Stella Santamaria
My father died when I was very young, and he was a very successful writer. He was published in The New Yorker, in Esquire, in all the leading magazines of the day and he had just sold his screenplay to Hollywood before he died tragically at the age of 35. I always felt that people who had known his writing would compare me to him and that I would be in his shadow. So, I tried lots of different arts. I studied modern dance, pottery, and visual art. The problem was I wasn’t good in any of those things. So, I realized if I was going to be an artist, I was going to be a writer.
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That was when I was in college, as an undergrad. I had a wonderful teacher and mentor both in undergraduate and graduate school in two different universities: the poet June Jordan.
June was an incredibly inspiring teacher and believed very much in young people and their ability to change the world. She empowered me in a way that gave me a lifelong momentum to continue writing.
Do you have any advice for emerging writers?
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Give yourself the benefit of the doubt--it sometimes takes years or even decades to get to the point where you are writing at a level that you feel is what you hope to attain. You have to be patient with yourself. Writing is not like music where there are prodigies who are seven years old composing symphonies. You have to have life experience to be a writer, and sometimes it takes a long time to figure out which life experience is the material that you want to mine for your own writing. You have to be kind to yourself and not judge yourself too harshly, at the same time. You have to hold yourself to the highest standards, aim very high, and believe there is a niche waiting for you in the writing community that you are working to reach.
What are your thoughts on MFA Programs?
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I’m pro-MFA, and I’ve taught at several MFA programs. I think if you are in the right point in your career an MFA could be an extremely valuable program because it gives you license to really devote the kind of time that it takes to develop as a writer. We live in a society in North America that doesn’t give a lot of strokes to writers, and I think that to justify to yourself and to your loved ones that you’re working seriously on your writing, an MFA is very useful.
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Developing a community of writers is perhaps the most useful thing to help a writer to maintain a career--knowing there are friends and fans of your writing that are waiting for your next poem or next story eagerly. And you feel the same way about their work. Knowing you have a community of peers who are going to help you maintain the energy and enthusiasm of your writing is crucial. It is very rare to have a lifelong commitment to writing without a community.
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Then there’s the question of having a mentor. A mentor can be enormously helpful. If it’s the right mentor and they’re not trying to mold you but instead are allowing you to become the writer that you are meant to be, that’s rare. I think a lot of mentors have a kind of bias--they want disciples rather than enabling writers to become the person they need to be as a writer.
Do you recommend any books or writers that truly inspired you early on aside from your father and June Jordan?
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There are many! There are certain writers who, when I read them, I am just in awe of what they do, and I want to emulate the power of their writing--not to necessarily write like them but to write with the same kind of fire they had--George Orwell, Virginia Woolf, and Langston Hughes. I have just been reading Langston Hughes’ Collected Poems. Sometimes it’s good to read the collected poems of a writer so you can see how their career has developed. A career is not just greatest hits, it’s a long process of developing interests, style, searching for certain kinds of moments that sometimes takes years to find.