Reading Den

Erika T. Wurth’s novel White Horse is a New York Times editors pick, a Good Morning America buzz pick, and an Indie Next, Target book of the Month, and Book of the Month Pick. She is both a Kenyon and Sewanee fellow, and Kenyon faculty. She’s published in Buzzfeed and The Writer’s Chronicle, and is a narrative artist for the Meow Wolf Denver installation. She is an urban Native of Apache/Chickasaw/Cherokee descent. She is represented by Rebecca Friedman for books, and Dana Spector for film. She’s a professor of creative writing at Western Illinois University and lives in Denver with her partner, step-kids and two incredibly fluffy dogs. 

What is your best writing advice?

Something that I realized over time: you have to write in the genre that you truly love, and for me that’s speculative. 

How have you found writing community among Colorado creatives and how does it differ from other writing communities?

I belong to the Indigenous fiction community, and my relationships with those folks has developed mainly over social media, then face-to-face. Similarly, my relationships in [Denver and Colorado] have developed fairly organically, either with people reaching out via social media or through the Regis MFA low-residency program where I teach.

What do you love about living in Colorado?

I grew up 40 minutes from where I sit now, in between Evergreen and Idaho Springs, in the mountains. So this is home.

What reading is currently inspiring you?

These days I’m reading a lot of books that I need to blurb. For example, my friend Dino Enrique Piacenti, a local writer, his book is simply stunning. Additionally, I have a conversation with Stephen Graham Jones coming up at my Westminster One Book event, so I’m reading the last in his trilogy, The Angel of Indian Lake. He’s a phenomenal writer, and just about the most supportive fellow writer one could ask for.

What are you sharing at the upcoming Reading Den?

I’m going to be reading a section from my novel White Horse, which is about an urban indigenous woman who despises the mother she thinks abandoned her at two-days-old. But when she touches a family bracelet, her mother’s ghost starts haunting her, and she decides she has to find out what happened to her. The section I’m probably going to read is a flashback about the main character’s deepest wound, when her best friend OD’ed.

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