Robert Rosenberg is Professor of English and teaches fiction courses at Bucknell. He holds an M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, has served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Kyrgyzstan, as a Fulbright Scholar in India, and has lived and taught in both Istanbul and on the White Mountain Apache Reservation.
His first novel, This Is Not Civilization, was a Borders Original Voices, a BookSense, and a New York Times Paperback Row selection. Rosenberg received an NEA Literature Fellowship for his second novel, Isles of the Blind, which was a 2016 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Finalist.
We were delighted to be able to interview him, and we hope you find his answers enlightening and insightful.
TSM: Can you tell us a little about yourself and your work?
RR: I’m a novelist, educator, and traveler. I served in the Peace Corps (Kyrgyzstan ’94-96), and taught internationally for a number of years, before landing at Bucknell. My novels are set around the world, and largely driven by my travels. The pandemic drove my concerns closer to home, and since 2019 I’ve been section hiking the Appalachian Trail, and seeing what comes of it in my writing.
TSM: What was the inspiration behind your novel, This is Not Civilization?
RR: In 1999 I had just moved to Istanbul, Turkey, to start a teaching job. Istanbul has always felt to me – culturally and geographically – like the center of the world, the meeting of Eastern and Western cultures. Five days after my arrival the city was shaken by an enormous earthquake, now known as the Marmara or Izmit quake. Tens of thousands of people died in the poorer outskirts of the city. I’d never lived through a natural disaster of this kind, and the suffering of the nation affected me deeply. I had been toying with a few characters in my fiction, and over the next year or so, with the country in mourning, I kept asking myself: what if these characters were here, in Istanbul, during the quake? What would have brought them here, and how would their lives have been changed? So the novel was very much inspired by place and time – Istanbul and the 1999 earthquake — as a kind of connective tissue that linked these disparate characters from around the world.
TSM: Your novel Isles of the Blind is about a Jewish man named Avram who uncovers the mysteries surrounding his brother, Yusuf, off the coast of Istanbul. How did your experience living and teaching in Istanbul impact this novel’s creation?
On my very first visit to Istanbul, during my time in the Peace Corps, I had fallen in love with Bozcaada, a magical island just off the coast of the city. I had biked around the island and climbed its highest mountain to a scenic Greek monastery, the sun setting over the Marmara, the shoreline of Istanbul spread across the distance. I was so taken by the island I told myself: someday I’m going to return here and write a novel about this place. Only towards the end of my time teaching in Istanbul did I discover that the family of one of my students owned a house on the island and that she was, like me, Jewish. This led me into an investigation of the complex history of Sephardic Jews in Turkey, their place in the city and on these islands. So once again, it was a novel driven by place and characters.
TSM: Your work has been praised by numerous esteemed organizations and has garnered several awards, such as the 2010 Alaska Book of the Year, the 2010 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, and the William Saroyan International Prize in Literature shortlist. How do you handle the praise/criticism of your work?
RR: Any kind of recognition is always nice, but in the literary world it comes a long time after the work is done, if it ever comes at all. Finding an agent, publishing, reviews…all of that is so removed from the writer’s work, from the daily effort of getting the right words on the page. So in terms of praise, I just never think of it, and it’s always been a surprise if or when it has come.
Criticism, on the other hand, is welcome…especially when it comes in support of the work. An agent, an editor, a close reader…telling me something can be better, or that something in a story isn’t working for them…well, that’s part of the iterative process of revision. I’ve always found it motivates me to go back to the page and try to solve the puzzle of what’s not working.
TSM: You also have extensive experience in short fiction and creative nonfiction. What challenges do these genres present that novels don’t and vice versa?
RR: Writing a novel takes years, and as I’m doing it, it feels like I’m building a house, brick by brick, while simultaneously living in the house as it rises around me. That is, I’m surrounded by it, seeing and thinking about it all the time, knocking down walls and adding rooms. It feels like a kind of architecture, in scope and size.
Short fiction, essays, travel writing – these feel, comparatively, like quick bursts for me. Usually, I can see the finish line from the start. They might take a few weeks or a month or two. So that’s a wonderful change of pace. But the challenge that comes with that is intensity. They’re closer to a poem or a song. Every word has to be right, every sentence sing, in a demanding way. So there’s a kind of perfectionism inherent in the shorter form that’s its own challenge.
TSM: What’s your favorite place that you have traveled to? Do you have any interesting travel stories you would like to share?
RR: My wife and I met in the Peace Corps, and we’ve always been intrepid travelers. We’ve raised our two kids this way, and every year we’ve done long trips abroad as a family. If you asked my family what their favorite trip was, there’d be immediate and unanimous consensus: Vietnam. We went there in 2016, and on top of the stunning natural landscapes (sailing overnight around Ha Long Bay, boating through the Mekong Delta), the incredible food (steaming pho for breakfast in dark alley street stands), I was so moved by the kindness of the people. As Americans we were embraced and spoiled with kindness and generosity everywhere we went. How was this possible, considering what America had done to the country just a few decades ago? The vicissitudes of time and history never cease to amaze…
TSM: Who are some of the authors that you read that have inspired your work?
RR: During my senior year of college I discovered the work of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and V.S. Naipaul. For years they were the authors I read most deeply, and they made me want to be a writer. I copied pages of their work by hand, trying to figure out how they pulled off such enormous feats of literary style and storytelling. Flannery O’Connor and Alice Munro have remained large influences, especially in the short story, and what is possible with language and structure and dialogue. And I regularly return to the Russians – to Chekhov and Tolstoy in particular. When the war in Ukraine broke out, I thought I might never be able to stomach anything Russian again. But I forced myself to reread The Brothers Karamazov, and was reminded how, in its deep humanity, literature transcends and outlasts even the politics and wars of insane autocrats.
TSM: While teaching at Bucknell University, you have taught classes in comedy and satire. What first sparked your interest in that genre? How do you incorporate comedy into your more serious works?
RR: I wanted to teach that class because I didn’t understand comedy in literature – where it comes from, what its purpose is. I’ve long admired the comedy in the work of Gogol, Vonnegut, Roth, Brady Udall, George Saunders, and in off beat writers like Miranda July. People have praised the comedy in my own work – but what’s it doing in there? How did it slip in?
Teaching the class, treating comedy seriously, wrestling with the insights and talents of my students, has been both revelatory and fun. The great insight we have, time and again, has been how comedy counterbalances tragedy, and in doing so, deepens it. Consider the awesome power of Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five. Try to imagine that effect, that depth of sadness, without the comedy. It would have failed. So comedy seems like this amazing tool that somehow opens a reader’s consciousness and allows the themes of literature to penetrate more deeply.
TSM: In a 2017 article for Forward, you wrote about a rabbi who organized a rally outside of a local mosque as well as a reading of the Constitution at a local park and examined how these small efforts helped heal a local community in Pennsylvania. Do you think that writing fiction can also have a healing effect similar to this? If so, how?
RR: Thanks for reading that piece. What struck me as so powerful about the rabbi’s work in our local community was her optimism. This was in the days after the 2016 election, and the world here in central Pennsylvania felt like a very ominous place. It was easy for many of us to slip into our silos, blame others, and bemoan the state of our democracy. Instead, our local rabbi said yes to life, to connections, to community, and rallied the people around her to do the same.
Writing fiction is, likewise, an act of optimism. The very act of writing is a way of saying yes to life. You’re saying that the world around us is worthy of attention, that for all its problems it’s often beautiful. It’s worth criticizing and fighting for, through our storytelling. And if a story or a novel elicits a connection, a moment of awe, a laugh – well that small moment is good for the world.
TSM: Do you have any advice that you would like to share with beginning writers?
RR: Write a little every day. Make it a habit. A page a day. They accumulate. 365 pages a year – that’s a book. Stop thinking and get writing!