What’s New with Fiction Writer Zoe Elerby
Interview by Katie Lynn Johnston & Darcy Dillon
In our continued series of craft interviews, the Mulberry Team talked with previous contributing fiction writer, Zoe Elerby (“Your Hero is a Mythomaniac“), about her writing process, authors that inspire her, and the moment she first realized she wanted to become a writer.
Do you remember the first time you ever said to yourself, “I’m a writer”? What was it that made you realize you wanted to become a writer?
It was second grade and our big project for the middle of the year was making little booklets with our own stories. I had an obsession with Littlest Pet Shop, ya know, those ones with the bobbly heads? Yeah, I had over 150+ of those little things, and I would hyper-fixate on one specific group of them. I wrote my story about my Littlest Pet Shop, naturally. It was a story about these twin pandas, a boy and a girl and how they got lost from their home. My teacher was delighted by that story, so much so that she asked if she could keep it to read to her other students. That was the moment I decided to become a writer, I was so proud of myself. I’ve always called myself a writer, at least since that moment in second grade, but I really started calling myself a writer in high school when my best friend and I would exchange stories, talk about characters, and help each other work out plotholes.
Is there a difficult part of your writing process? How do you push past it?
The most difficult part is definitely the crippling self-doubt that every artist experiences when trying to create. Sometimes it flows like a river ,but most of the time, inspiration just drops on your head like a cartoon piano; completely random. You never know when it will hit you or when it will flow, all you know is the anticipation before it. When I’m not inspired, I feel like a failure, like I’ve failed my characters and my imaginary adoring fans. But I get more upset over the fact that I failed myself. There’s a voice in my head that says, “I told you so. This was a stupid dream and you spent your whole life wasting your time on it.” Whenever I told adults that I wanted to be a writer, they’d pat my head and say, “Oh, honey, that’s not a real job”—or something to that effect. It’s that voice that always interrupts me or tries to trip me on the way out of an amazing experience. I push past it by thinking about the fact that I am an impressive person, I’ve been humbling myself my whole life, I can shove my success into other people’s faces! Only recently have I realized this. As a black queer woman, I have always been put on the back burner, but never, never with writing. Writing is where my power lies, and I remind myself of that when I’m stuck in the process of trying to start.
Alternatively to the previous question, what would you say your favorite part of the creation process is?
This is kinda tough. I love all of it, even the hard parts. But if I had to choose, I would say polishing it, editing, making sure it looks pretty and reads the way it’s supposed to. I love reading my pieces out loud for editing, I’ve had many professors tell me that reading your piece out loud helps you hear what makes sense and what is difficult/what could trip up the reader. Then again, I really adore just throwing a story onto the page, no stopping except for necessities, just the days where I dedicate myself completely to my writing. I don’t think I have an ‘official’ writing process, I just go with how I grow as a writer and what my pieces need.
What keeps you inspired to continue writing? Are there subjects you always find yourself coming back to, subconsciously or otherwise?
Love is a big subject, one that’s kinda hard for me to escape. It’s not specifically romantic love, it’s every kind of love. I have haunting stories about love, intense stories about love, beautiful stories about love, it all circles back to the subject of love. The piece I’m currently working on is about what love isn’t and what love is, the main character [in it] deals with a toxic relationship, but then finds love in her child’s eyes. Love is an incredibly important concept to me, so much so that my first tattoo states that “love is everything.” A lot of things inspire me, but I think it boils down to just people in general. The things people do, the things people make, their smiles and laughs, the way they walk, the way their eyes move when they lie—all of it is so fascinating to me. When I feel stuck I go outside, sit and watch. It’s wonderful when you’re in the city, but it’s also great at Mom and Dad’s house.
If you could spend a day with any author in the world, dead or alive, who would you choose? What would you talk to them about?
Well, thankfully none of my favorite authors have died yet, but that makes the choice harder. I think I would probably choose C.S. Pacat, author of the Captive Prince trilogy. Reading her work really changed the way I go about telling stories and making the narrator just as interesting as the characters on the page. Close third is a default for me, I love it because I like the internal point of view. To see what someone thinks, then what they do makes for unavoidably morally gray characters. It humanizes them, even if they’re an elf or a dwarf. Pacat doesn’t write stuff like that, I was just giving an example. Anyway, I’d love to spend the day with her, mostly because of her sheer brilliance with diving into the nitty-gritty details of a character, along with the fact that my best friend recommended her to me when we separated for college. He said her writing reminded him of me, which is such a high compliment in my eyes. I’d love to talk about her process and compare it to mine, an author’s best teacher is a fellow author. I’d also like to go to Australia and experience that, get inspired by everything it has to offer.
What have you been working on recently? Anything you are excited about and would like to share?
For the entirety of my Junior year at Columbia College Chicago, I have been working on a novel that came to me while playing the Sims 4. The way that my stories are structured is akin to legacy stories about legendary families and whatnot—yes, magic is included. If you’ve ever seen JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, it’s like that kind of passing of power to descendants. This piece takes place in the 1950s and is told from the perspective of a 16-year-old black girl whose first love happens to be a 36-year-old white(ish) politician. Yes, you can cringe and say “ew,” that’s the point. It’s entitled Treasured. He has family magic in his blood, while she is a siren from the Caribbean islands. He kidnaps her, essentially, and keeps her in his mansion. He gives her rules and lessons that she will carry with her forever. Meanwhile, he sees her as a play-thing while his wife and children are away, until the point in the book where he gets sick of her and kicks her out while holding his wife’s hand. The girl, Amani, finds out she’s pregnant with his child and the story shifts as she starts to grow as a woman and a mother with a hybrid supernatural baby who is now being followed by her father’s curse. That is the best summary I can give without going on for too long. I was hit so hard with inspiration by Zinzi Clemmons’ What We Lose that I couldn’t sit still, I started writing in my journal as my class read the first chapter out loud. I highly recommend that novel, it’s phenomenal. Treasured is a piece that I’m planning on finishing this summer with the help of some wonderful writers I’ve met on this literary journey.
Zoe Elerby is a young writer from Chicago with a knack for writing stories with casual representation, urban fantasy, and realistic fiction. Elerby has been published 7 times by respective literary magazines and anthologies, including Mulberry Literary. Elerby is currently attending Columbia College Chicago to pursue her Bachelors degree in creative writing as she plants the seeds for her bright future.
You can follow her writing journey on Instagram @ScripturePerfect99.