How writing could be:

An interview with Elisa Gabbert

February 18, 2025

Carleton E. Watkins, “Cape Horn near Celilo” (1867)

You can listen to the introduction to this interview on Substack, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify.

Editor’s note

I consider Elisa to be among the foremost essayists of our time.

As someone who is both a poet and an essayist, she writes in a way that few others do. Regular readers of her work will have noticed, for example, how her prose contains both the crystalline logic of well-reasoned argument and the subtle music of verse — how it features, simultaneously, the rational and the rhythmic, marrying thoughtful reasoning with sonic richness. It is thus no surprise that she regularly publishes in places like The Paris Review and The New York Times (where she has been a poetry columnist since 2020), or that she recently released her third book of essays.

If you haven’t previously encountered her work or had the opportunity to study what makes it so distinct, this interview offers an excellent starting point. I’m grateful to have connected over it.

Jana M. Perkins
Founder, Women of Letters

Elisa Gabbert is the author of seven collections of poetry, essays, and criticism, including Any Person Is the Only Self, Normal Distance, The Unreality of Memory & Other Essays, The Word Pretty, and The Self Unstable. She writes the On Poetry column for The New York Times, and her work has appeared in Harper’s, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, The New York Review of Books, The Believer, The Yale Review, American Poetry Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Providence.

How did your childhood shape your ideas about what work looked like and what was possible for you?

Elisa Gabbert: Some of my earliest memories are of reading—reading was important to me long before writing ever was. But my teachers often told me I should be a writer, or simply took for granted that I was one. It wasn’t something I talked about. It’s striking to me now, that they knew something about my future I didn’t.

For a while I wanted to be a teacher, then later, an architect, and then a psychiatrist. I studied cognitive science and linguistics in college; I always liked the brain and language. I was reading all the time still, and writing a little, mostly poetry—but it wasn’t until my early twenties that I began to understand how writing could be, and should be, more central in my life, that I could make my life about books. Though it may have been obvious to everyone around me, it felt like a radical shift from inside.

Did you have any mentors along the way?

EG: I certainly had lots of help, but I regret not forming longer and deeper relationships with people who might have been mentors—with teachers who knew before I did that I was a writer. I was a little too self-sufficient in my youth, I think, and a little too confident. I was used to pleasing my teachers. I didn’t seem to recognize the chances, when they arose, to work toward something more complex and reciprocal.

In recent years I have badly wished for a mentor—there are new kinds of problems in the middle of one’s life and career. And I need help!

“It wasn’t until my early twenties that I began to understand how writing could be, and should be, more central in my life, that I could make my life about books.”

Tell us about some of the projects, ideas, or questions you’re currently working on.

EG: Mostly, how to be happy, how not to feel like I’m wasting my life. As Kafka wrote in his diary, “My life here is just as if I were quite certain of a second life, in the same way, for example, I got over the pain of my unsuccessful visit to Paris with the thought that I would try to go there again very soon.”

What do you wish you’d started doing sooner?

EG: Applying for grants and awards. Starting on that late, I’ve never developed the habit or knack.

When you think of women who have inspired or influenced you, who comes to mind?

EG: Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, Susan Sontag, Mary Ruefle, Joy Williams, Elizabeth McCracken, Yiyun Li.

What’s a commonly shared piece of advice that you disagree with, and why?

EG: “Never write for free.” I think we need to write a lot to get good at writing, to figure out our own standards for “good,” and it’s useful to have some space for play-like work, for practice, apart from a framework of labor. (Woolf wrote in her journal, “It strikes me that in this book I practice writing; do my scales.”)

It’s also useful to find ways to share our writing freely, to learn a sense of what it means to have a readership. I used my blog for this when I was younger; now many writers have email newsletters, and they serve a similar purpose, cutting out the need to find a market for all our writing.

“I regret not forming longer and deeper relationships with people who might have been mentors. I didn’t seem to recognize the chances, when they arose, to work toward something more complex and reciprocal.”

Where do you feel the most scarcity in your life? Where do you feel the most abundance?

EG: Scarcity of time, never enough time to do everything I want to do.

We recently got our car cleaned out, professionally, for the first time since we bought it in 2019, and it looked so clean that day I felt wistful—nothing gold can stay! I feel that way in May, like I can see the whole year about to rush to its close. Time feels abundant early on in a three-day weekend, when there’s even a little to waste. But when I am doing something I want to be doing, I stop thinking about time.

What keeps you going?

Photo credit: Adalena Kavanagh

EG: Sometimes I think telling myself that I might not keep going, that fantasy out, keeps me going. But mostly I can’t help it, I can’t help generating meaning this way and wanting to share it with people, to feel part of an ancient tradition, commune with the dead and the living, to feel less alone.

Where can our readers find you?

EG: I’m nominally on Twitter and Instagram, and share links to recent writing (and my email) on my website.

We corresponded with Elisa over email. Our exchange has been edited for clarity.