Email gets a bad rap. Well, actually, it might be largely deserved, but that’s not the fault of email itself. Everyone loves the ding of a good email showing up. A unique part of being a writer is waiting a long time for an email only to have it be a rejection. Writers, then, especially need some nice emails. Long story short, Mitch Nobis wanted more good emails, and because he also likes interviewing writers, Inbox Wisdom: Email Interviews on Creativity was born.

Andrew Bertaina is the author of the essay collection, The Body Is a Temporary Gathering Place (Autofocus 2024), the book length essay, Ethan Hawke & Me (Barrelhouse, 2025), and the short-story collection, One Person Away from You (Moon City Press Award Winner 2021). His work has appeared in The Threepenny Review, New Letters, Prairie Schooner, Orion, and elsewhere. His work has been anthologized in The Best American Poetry, The Best Microfiction, and listed as notable in three editions of The Best American Essays and as a special mention in The Pushcart Prize anthology. He has an MFA from American University and more of his work is available at andrewbertaina.com.

[Interviewer’s Note: It took me a while to get these interviews posted. Back when I began this interview with Andrew in the spring of 2025, Ethan Hawke & Me wasn’t out yet, but you can now get it here! (We were also still in the NBA playoffs, and now it’s the new season already. My bad.)]

Your recent book, The Body is a Temporary Gathering Place, is a collection of essays. This interview series is (mostly) about creativity, which most people may think of as inventing something out of the blue. You’re writing about your actual life, though, so would you explain the role of creativity when capturing “real life”? And I put quotation marks around that because I have my own ideas about how memory is wonderfully fallible and how pretty much everything has at least a minor element of fiction. 🙂 

I think creativity is a really interesting concept. For me, in writing essays, it’s really finding the right voice or container for a life to fit. Life is so abundant that you could spend a year describing a week in your life. As such, it’s really about finding a way to represent life. As much as I’d like to claim that I’m entirely original, a lot of creativity is a recombination of things I’ve seen other authors do. I think the creative part comes in when I decide on the structure, voice, and way that these elements combine. I mean, I think the science says that you’re altering a memory every time you revisit it. Eye witness testimony is now regarded as somewhat sketchy. Our brains actually create dual memories at the inception point, one in our hippocampus and the neocortex. That’s a bit of science to say that my essays are very explicit about the fallibility and construction inherent in memory. I’d hate to pretend like my version of my life was somehow accurate. It’s merely a version. 

I love the scientific explanation! Let’s stick with science for a minute. For a couple decades, I was a high school English teacher. No surprise, but students would often complain about their classes (so unlike adults, right?), and I always loved pointing out the ways various classes overlap. My personal favorite, or at least the one I probably mentioned most often, is that the scientific method and the writing process are very similar. They both require massive amounts of observation and wondering and testing and re-doing before arriving at a conclusion. Would you say that is accurate about your own creative process? Or does a piece more so arrive fully structured in your mind before you put it to paper?

You sound like a good educator. I’m sure your students have benefited from working with you over the years. I’m a very intuitive writer. In fact, I’m a firm believer that the essay form requires a question you haven’t answered. Thus, you are writing and testing yourself across the space of the essay. It’s a kind of process that actively works away from drawing a conclusion. In a way, this allows you to try out different hypotheses. For instance, I have an essay coming out soon with a magazine that’s about a trip to Croatia. The essay is really an examination of where I was at that point in my life. Even years later I’m not entirely certain what I needed or wanted on that trip. It was during a tumultuous period of time in my life, and I am trying to make sense of it years later. I think staying associative and creative is really the key to writing an essay. If you know the answer before you start writing it can be felt on the page! 

Thank you, and your answer circles back to teaching again, too. So many people complain about writing essays in school, and it’s ultimately because so many of us treat essay writing as an exercise in spelling out what we already know. But that’s missing the whole point of writing an essay! Writing an essay should be a journey of discovery. This is true of really any writing outside of, say, a grocery list. But, as soon as I say that, I realize even a grocery list should allow for discovery because you might not know the store got in a shipment of fresh bell peppers until you see the assortment of reds and oranges popping in the produce section. So, yeah, all writing should allow for change and discovery. This is, of course, why Artificial Intelligence—which I contend is a misnomer because there is no intelligence there because it’s merely regurgitating language patterns as a literal equation—is a huge pile of profiteering garbage. Writing is more than completing an equation. Creativity comes from realizations, from combining different bits of knowledge and experience, so there’s always an x-factor involved that a computer can never actually have. What are your x-factors? When you look back at your work, what are the ideas or events or mysteries that most often show up in your work? For example, you mentioned taking a trip but not know for certain what you wanted out of it. How does this same sense of questioning show up in your creative work? 

I absolutely agree! The point of an essay is to discover something you don’t already know. Without that factor, the essay tends to feel lifeless. As a writer, I always try to start with a feeling and a description of geography. In a way, it’s a kind of mapping of my internal geography or the external landscape. I use these first in many of my essays to start to explore what I think. For instance, in my essay, “Eating Animals,” I start with a feeling of irritation. But the essay begins by exploring this feeling of irritation. Why do I half-loathe perfectly good food essays? While writing the essay I discovered some possibilities for my irritation. For instance, the fact that my family version of going out was McDonald’s and dinner was fish sticks or chicken nuggets. But I don’t think I really realized where my irritation arose until I started writing. Another example is in my essay on uncertainty. It’s an essay about a relationship that seemed mired in uncertainty, but I wanted to trace other sources of uncertainty across science and culture. Thus, the essay is about me discovering why uncertainty is so painful. I mean, I write classic essays. I have a strong bias toward them. You absolutely should be doing this work as an act of creative discovery! 

Yeah, I miss writing essays. I used to help facilitate a summer writing program for teachers, and I wrote an essay or two every summer for a decade. Mine weren’t aiming for publication, but even just crafting an essay hones your thinking exponentially more than even the deepest reflection while walking the dog or doing hot yoga or whatever. Putting thoughts into organized words and structures forces you to really reckon with what you think and how you feel. This is, of course, why we should all do our own writing and not outsource it to machines and whatnot. This brings me to the next question. We’re friends online, where you post a lot of great photos of hikes. I obliquely referred a moment ago to how I do most of my thinking while walking the dog. What role does getting outdoors and/or getting exercise play in your creative work? 

 I think the task of finding out what you think is one of the great tasks of a well-lived life. It’s also a pleasure to spend time in thought, to contradict, to confound. I mean, we have 86 billion neurons in our brain. Let’s put some of them to use! I have grave concerns about outsourcing all of our thinking, but it seems like we’ve already crossed the Rubicon there. Anyhow, I think my answer is multi-faceted when it comes to the outdoors and creativity. First off, I’ll be practical. Every writer should take a walk after they finish a writing session. No phone. No music. Just thoughts. Your subconscious mind, which really activates in storytelling, is still really whirring after you’re writing. If you let yourself walk for a bit you’ll find that it’s still working on solving problems or providing insights into your story or essay. 

Secondarily, I think geography and landscape have always played a part in my emotional reaction to the world. I just feel moved by looking at beauty in nature. And I often feel compelled to write an essay about a deep and unnameable feeling. Nature provides me a nearly endless source for creating that feeling, which I then try to approximate in language. 

Last, I’d say that nature plays a role in evening me out. I have or have had a really intense inner life. And though that’s useful for the page, it’s also useful to take a break from my own intensity. Nature is a fantastic way to remain calm and dialed into the world. 

I love your answer about walking right after writing. That’s a marvelous idea. I will say this much for tech: My one little writing hack with tech is to record voice notes while walking the dog. In the same ways you mentioned, my mind hits ideas overdrive while walking, so I record the ideas before forgetting them. Just like finding a note you wrote yourself at 3:00 a.m., most turn out to be garbage, but some of them are godsends. Anyway, we’re nearing the end of this, and since we’re both huge basketball fans, let’s make the last question about creativity and sports. This probably won’t be published until well after the NBA season is done, so instead of predictions, we can just agree that it’ll be the Pistons in 6 in ’26. 🙂 For real, though, let’s end with this question: What connections do you see between creativity and athletics? How does movement connect with writing? Take that however and wherever you’d like. Essentially, the question is, words and sports? Go!

I think creativity and athletics are wedded, especially for me. In fact, I read this great passage in Paul Rousseau’s book, Friendly Fire, which neatly captures the meditative quality of shooting on a basketball court. I think it’s the first place that I discovered how much that state soothes me. Relatedly, a lot of my creativity comes from being able to enter that flow state that you can get into when you’re shooting a basketball well. It’s that whole focus on mind and body onto the task at hand. I think there’s also something really wonderful about the synergy that can happen on a court as well between players or a whole team, where the ball is whipping around and you’re finding the best shot that is communal. It’s hard not to think of the writers whose work inspires me to get to the page. That’s the communal part of writing. We’re all playing on the same team. Tolstoy might be like prime Shaq, but I’m somewhere very deep down the bench cheering him on. It’s a wonder we all have each other in this creative life. 

Shooting hoops is 100% my favorite form of meditation. We put a hoop in our backyard with a 20’x20′ pad of cement, and it was the best homeowner decision I’ve ever made. I’m, like, bathroom remodel? Yeah fine sure. New roof? Sure, need that. Basketball hoop in the backyard? HECK YEAH, LET’S GO!!! But I also hate how in both basketball and writing, the moment I realize I’ve achieved flow, the bubble doesn’t just pop, it explodes like the Death Star. Self-awareness is both the biggest strength and the bane of most writers’ existence. 

All right, we should wrap this up because I’m hoping to keep these interviews relatively short. I’m finding that my favorite last question is to just ask, what’s your most recent book about? Tell us a bit about it, where we can get it, and maybe what you’re working on next? 

The new book is called, Ethan Hawke & Me: The Before Trilogy. It just came out with Barrelhouse, and it’s a mixture of memoir and criticism. It covers a lot of my life and uses the Before Trilogy by Richard LInklater as a scaffolding as I move through the years. Early readers have said you don’t need to have seen the movies, but they meant a lot to me! It’s available from the publisher and other spots online. I’m now just working on short stories. I always write where the heat is, which means short stories right now. It can change. I’ve never been someone who can force feed a project. I just go where the wind blows and follow it. This is very much a for better or worse. 

Thank you so much for doing this! 

Dude, thanks so much for doing the interview!

Inbox Wisdom is an interview series conducted by Farmington writer Mitchell Nobis. He is the author of The Size of the Horizon, or, I Explained Everything to the Trees (Match Factory Editions, 2025). He also hosts the Wednesday Night Sessions reading series for KickstART Farmington, facilitates the Teachers as Poets group for the National Writing Project, and co-founded the Not at AWP (NAWP) reading series. For more, see mitchnobis.com.