Joe Fassler is author of The Sky Was Ours, a novel published in April 2024 by Penguin Books. His nonfiction and reporting appear in venues like The New York Times, The Guardian, Wired, and The Best American Food Writing. In 2017, edited Light the Dark: Writers on Creativity, Inspiration, and the Artistic Process, a collection of as-told-to essays from leading authors, adapted from his “By Heart,” column for The Atlantic. He currently lives in Denver.
What is your favorite writing advice?
Caveat: not all writing advice will apply to every writer. The process is idiosyncratic and deeply personal, and different things work for different people. But with that said, I love writing advice. I’m forever hungry for details about strategies that have made literary production easier, more rewarding, or more transcendent for others. It was one reason I started “By Heart,” a series for The Atlantic that led me to talk to over 170 authors, later collected in Light the Dark. I just wanted an opportunity to hear about how other brains had dealt with the challenge of sitting alone for hours with nothing but a screen and a story to tell.
Over the years, I’ve relied a lot on something Andre Dubus III told me, paraphrasing E. L. Doctorow: Writing is like driving at night, he said. Just follow the headlights. In other words, when you’re writing, you can’t think about trying to write the entire book or render an entire world. To do so would be overwhelming. Instead, just follow the beam of your consciousness, and make visceral what floats up in front of you out of the darkness.
Tell us about your Colorado writing community.
I moved to Colorado in 2019 and started to meet other writers right away–there are some amazing people doing amazing work in this enormous state. The literary community here is smaller than in NYC, where I came from, but I love how willing Colorado writers are to meet and make new connections.
Why do you love living in Colorado?
The landscape feels very new to me in an exciting way: big, imposing, rugged, with wild mood swings forever perplexing the weather. Also, people have a different attitude to work out here. In NYC, people are so caught up in hustle culture, so fully in thrall to whatever it is they do for a living–and it can feel like many interactions are really performances of career aspiration and professional identity. Work obviously contributes to everyone’s sense of self in a major way, but in Colorado more people seem aware that we are more than our jobs.
What are you working on right now? And what are you reading?
I just finished a book, and for the first time in a long time, I am looking around for the next project. Two big-idea short story collections with fabulist, science-fictional elements have inspired me as I think about the next novel: Gina Chung’s Green Frog and Ted Chiang’s Exhalation. At the same time, as I develop a nonfiction project, I’m trying to learn how to write more directly about myself, and I’ve been inspired by Leslie Jamison’s memoir Splinters, an absolute master class in confessional narrative nonfiction.
What will you be reading at the event and what is meaningful about this selection?
I’m reading an excerpt from my debut novel, The Sky Was Ours, which comes out just a day before the Reading Den event. It’ll be the first time I read from the published book in public, and it’s been a very long road to here. I can’t wait.
Reading Den 
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