“Writing isn’t a career choice, it’s more like a chronic illness,” said author Dara Horn. The desire to write is less of a conscious decision and more of an actual need, like for food and air. “I would be doing this even if someone didn’t pay me.”
Horn’s first pieces were published in 1992, after she visited Spain with her family, during which she chronicled the trip in a journal. Her mother read over it and suggested that she do some edits and submit it for publication. Titling it, “The Jews in Spain Were Mainly on the Plane,” Horn submitted the article to Hadassah Magazine, where it was published.
After winning a trivia contest about Israel, she won a free trip on the March of the Living, and again submitted her travelogue to the magazine. Several months later, her piece was nominated for a National Magazine Award — the first for any Jewish magazine ever. Horn attended the awards ceremony with her parents, “the only person there with braces,” she said with a laugh. She was fourteen years old.
After that came some dabbling in journalism, with Horn interning at Time, Newsweek, and New Republic over the summers. After some experience in the industry, though, Horn said she came to a realization: she didn’t like the news, problematic for a would-be chosen journalist. While she was undergoing this career related epiphany, an editor she knew contacted her with a proposition; to expand a nonfiction piece she’d written into a full length novel.
Since the first novel, her career took off, and she has since published five books—and is currently working on a sixth—is the visiting professor for Jewish Studies at Harvard, and has lectured around the world.
In a recent speech at Stern, Horn referred to herself as a “professional Jewish nerd,” citing her PhD in Hebrew and Yiddish Literature from Harvard University as evidence. Horn’s books bear this theory out as well, all with a decidedly Jewish theme. All Other Nights, for instance, follows a Jewish Union soldier during the Civil War, and ties into the story of Passover. One of her stories revolves around the Cairo Genizah—an enormous stockpile of documents pertaining to the Cairo Jewish community—and another charts a stolen Marc Chagall painting, and the artist’s life.
Does Horn ever worry about alienating possible readers who may not understand the many Biblical references? “Jews are the only people who are ever worried about being too Jewish,” Horn said. The trauma in our history causes us to be so, she posited, hesitant to embrace our heritage, or to seem like we’re shoving it in people’s faces. However, Horn pointed out, “the whole point of literature is communication.” Sure, some references may be missed or not understood, but that’s the case with any book. If you invite people in, they will connect with the story.
Hidden meanings in her books, she said, are more numerous than even she knows. All Other Nights has been presented to her as the story of immigrants in the United States and also the tale of a wounded war veteran moving on with his life, even being read by vets at Walter Reed hospital. “You write one book but after you publish it, everyone’s reading a different book than you wrote. Which is wonderful because they’re often reading a better book.”
When asked about her writing process, Horn replied, “Your question implies that I have one.” When she first started out, she kept notebooks in a Didion-esque fashion. These were filled, not with personal experiences or thoughts, but stories and snippets of information, “anything that was interesting to me that I couldn’t immediately explain to myself.” One of her first notebooks, for example, contained a story a friend had told her about his grandfather’s entrance into the bay of Ellis Island, the Statue of Liberty looming above as his fellow passengers flung their tefillin overboard, the black boxes bobbing on top of the waves and then, as they took on water, sinking. His grandfather told the story many times, her friend said, always telling him he should become a deep sea diver, so he could collect the abandoned phylacteries from the ocean floor. Horn would read through the notebooks, trying to notice patterns or themes that could be turned into a book.
These days though, her process is very different; “Now I just start with a premise and write it.” She’s never quite sure where the book is going to go, she said, and the first hundred pages are usually thrown out, a poor man’s version that got her to the real idea. Once she’s found what she wants to write about, the book “almost develops itself. The hardest thing for me is that moment of total possibility, because total possibility is paralyzing.” But, she says, once you start telling the story, once you’ve chosen a direction, there are many choices now closed to you, fewer possibilities of what can occur next.
Horn said writer’s block is an unaffordable luxury; as the mother of four children, she simply doesn’t have time. She aims for three pages a day; the goal is to keep producing, even if “I sometimes produce garbage,” as she freely admitted to doing. A short story she wrote called Shtetl World about an amusement park modeled after an Old World shtetl, where “everyday at two there’s a wedding, and everyday at four there’s a pogrom,” was something of a throwaway for her, but gave Horn the beginnings of an idea, which turned into her next novel.
In that familiar author speak, she said the characters often seem to be writing themselves, surprising her with their choices. Horn said that, when one section of the book is getting too confusing, she skips it and moves onto another, which is when the characters take over and begin to direct the story. She tries to approach her novel from a journalistic angle, where “you don’t have the luxury of sitting around waiting for your muse to show up,” but have to just get on with it.
“I do feel like these are people that I’m living with,” she said of the characters in her novels. At the dinner table, her husband will tell her about the people he worked with that day, while she’ll tell him about the people she spent her day with; “They’re my colleagues.” She often goes through a period of withdrawal once she’s finished a book, missing the characters, feeling “bereft,” like bidding goodbye to friends after graduation.
Asked if she has any advice for aspiring writers, Horn said, “Get your name out there as much as you possibly can.” Anything else? “Don’t get an MFA—waste of time and money.”