Meet Wendy Goldman Rohm — writer, teacher and all-round literary inspiration. For details of her Cape Town workshop, follow the link at the bottom of this article.
What inspired you to create the Rohm Literary Agency?
I’ve been an author and writer for most of my life, and after my first book hit the New York Times best-seller list, I was asked to speak all over the world. One of the places I was invited to talk was Yale University, where I gave a series of Master’s Teas, honourary events in which I talked about the process of developing a book and being an author, and the world of book publishing. One of the leaders at Yale encouraged me to keep teaching, and so, I began — again, all over the world. My best students were gradually becoming published authors, and a few New York literary agencies noticed that I was discovering a lot of new talent, and asked me to work for them. My own literary agency came from there. I love nurturing writers, and, unlike many agents who are not writers themselves, I know how to recognise what’s wrong with a manuscript and how to improve it to make it of interest to the best publishers.
How does being an agent affect your own writing?
Being an agent doesn’t really affect my own writing. The better question is — how my experience as a writer and editor feeds my work as an agent? And the answer to that is that I am able to use my knowledge as a writer and editor to help other writers become published authors. After decades of personal experience, I know both the creative and the business side of publishing.
You hold writing workshops around the world, and you have one coming up in Cape Town a few week from now. What can people expect from your writing workshops?
The Cape Town conference will be held at a private space in the city and is open to all writers of fiction, nonfiction, screenplays and play. You can attend if you want to develop an idea, if you want to perfect an existing manuscript, or even if you haven’t yet started your project. You can find a detailed schedule on our website (below). During the workshop, participants learn to get to the essence of their most powerful work, and to break through the points where they’re stuck. The ingredients of great narrative are the same, whether you are writing fiction or narrative non-fiction. And even if there are major differences in what publishers want from the two genres, the dynamics of great storytelling are the same, and many new authors don’t recognise the creative power they possess in this regard.
Who are your favourite authors and books?
I read everything under the sun, especially great literary fiction, philosophy, science and history. Some of my favorite authors of fiction are Milan Kundera ( The Book of Laughter and Forgetting) D.M. Thomas ( The White Hotel), Albert Camus (my favorite book by him is The Fall); and the works of Cormac McCarthy, Paul Auster, and Jennifer Egan (who won a Pulitzer Prize for A Visit From the Goon Squad). When it comes to non-fiction, I love Vladmir Nabokov’s book about the Russian writer Nicolai Gogol (Gogol) and Mario Vargas Llosa’s book about the French writer Gustav Flaubert ( The Perpetual Orgy). Other nonfiction authors I admire include Tom Reiss ( The Black Count and The Orientalist), and Susan Orlean ( The Orchid Thief). And when it comes to history, I find a lot of inspiration for narrative ideas while reading the historian Fernand Braudel’s The Structures of Everyday Life. I also get many ideas and deep insights from the work of historian/philosopher Mircea Eliade ( Myth and Reality, and many other books.) There are so many favourites that there’s not enough space to list them all.
How do you motivate yourself to get writing?
I believe that writing is a form of meditation, whether you are writing fiction or non-fiction. To be a writer, you need to pay attention to what arises at any moment in life, and you must be humanity should fascinate you and arouse your compassion. When writers are overwhelmed by having facing the blank page, as all writers, even the most accomplished ones, are my advice is: “Wake up in the morning and tell yourself you are not writing today; you are simply going to type.” That typing will quickly turn into interesting writing once you forget what you’re doing and lose yourself in it : ). Our egos get in the way, so I teach writers about writing from a non-cerebral place, a state of flow that comes from a deep and mysterious realm.
What is the one piece of advice you give to budding writers?
Take yourself seriously as a writer. No one else will unless you do!
Want to find out about Wendy’s Cape Town workshop? Just click through for all the details!
