By Laura Whitmer

Writer and reviewer Gemma Sieff rejoined the Mountainview Low-Residency MFA’s faculty in the summer of 2021 after completing her own MFA in Fiction at the University of Iowa. In a video call with Laura Whitmer, Sieff discussed her writing process, how she found community through teaching, and the persisting sincerity of Justin Bieber.

Laura Whitmer: I want to start with your i-D essay on Justin Bieber. I feel like the piece celebrates him in a way the media, or other commentary I’ve seen about him, doesn’t. Can you talk about the process of writing celebrity into your work?

Gemma Sieff: It’s funny because he’s having such a continued moment now. He’s settled down and seems to be grown up and happy. I mean, who knows, with celebrities you’re always just getting what they project, but I do feel like I saw the good in Justin Bieber. [Laughs] Actually it’s not fair to claim that because he was already getting a lot of attention for his music then, but he was closer to his scandals. I was just taken by his sincerity. I remember that summer, and still today, he writes a lot of God stuff on his Instagram. Like, ‘everything in you, God gave you, so you can handle any challenge.’ It’s sort of relentlessly positive in a way that, for some reason, I find really sincere. Some of that stuff will rub me the wrong way, and I feel like it all sounds like pablum. Maybe it’s just his angelic, sweet voice and horribly good looks or something, but he strikes me as a sincere person.

I can’t remember how they approached me for [the piece]. They wanted to do a style icons thing. You’re looking at me right now, and my look has migrated away from Bieber, but at the time I had spiky blonde hair and I had just gone on this bad Hinge date and [the Bieber comparison] was the highlight of the Hinge date. So he was on my mind, and then I did a deeper internet dive on the latest news about him. The piece turned out funnier than I expected. I expected going into it that I would write it in a more adulatory tone. I wrote the piece at a weird time where I was living at home. My mom was really ill and I hadn’t been writing at all. I remember feeling quite out of practice, and then when I sat down, I just wanted to write something that felt fun, light, not too serious. But I feel like there is something interesting you can do with that in fiction as well. Because these characters do feel almost avatar-like and we project so much onto them. Obviously, anyone writing about a celebrity is mostly writing about themselves.

LW: How do you know when an experience is going to turn into something you write about?

GS: I’m drawn to awkwardness, embarrassment, social interactions that nag like a hangnail. I wouldn’t say I try to find the humor in them, but awkwardness and embarrassment is funny. Usually, you have to have a little bit of distance from it and if you’re fictionalizing it, you want to abstract it enough or blur it. I do write from my life experiences, and I’m drawn to experiences that nag at me, where I feel I behaved badly, and/or someone else behaved badly. I think whether it’s personal essay or it’s fiction, that’s the best place to try to explore those things because they’re not think pieces and they’re not non-fiction. They’re ambiguous awkwardness that you want to try to, if not explain, describe as accurately as you can.

LW: When did you feel like, “I am a writer”?

GS: I don’t feel like one. I have severe imposter syndrome. I was an editor for nine years in New York City, and I never had any problems saying, “I’m an editor.” Then I was freelance, and even getting to Iowa and being a student again, I felt shy about it. I don’t know why. I suppose maybe it’s because I don’t have a book to my name. But sometimes you hear that from people who have published books, that they suffer from… What is the Simone Biles term? The yips or the twisties. Perhaps I have a bit of imposter syndrome because I haven’t entirely figured out what kind of writer I am. I worked on short stories at Iowa, and fiction felt really new. It was the steepest learning curve. I hadn’t written much fiction in a long time. I came out of those two years feeling like, ‘Oh my god, I know even less than when I went in,’ which I think is sometimes the K-shaped learning curve they talk about with stuff. It was so immersive and so excellent, and the instruction there is amazing, but there’s no paint by numbers for writing of any kind.

LW: What made you decide to get your MFA in fiction instead of non-fiction?

GS: I had been writing some nonfiction that people kept telling me read like fiction. And at the time, I felt a little shy about mining my life for material that I was calling nonfiction. Which isn’t to say that would preclude writing a memoir in the future. Maybe my feelings will change. I had one experience that I wrote as a long nonfiction piece and it nearly went to press, and then for certain legal reasons, it was held. And I came to feel quite relieved that that had happened. Because had that been published as it was, I might have been quite embarrassed to have put that out there just as straight memoir or nonfiction. So, I applied to Iowa with this long piece that I had then fictionalized in various ways. I’m still working on a version of it because I haven’t gotten it right yet, but with that experience, it felt like there could be a way to write more truthfully about it if I could say it was fiction. In some ways I think the burden of truth on fiction is almost steeper. You want the author to invite you in even more because there’s no excuse for the author not to if you’re calling something fiction. I’m not sure if I’ve solved that problem in this particular piece, but that was my initial impulse for applying [in fiction].

LW: What influence has teaching had on your own creative practice?

GS: At Iowa, I taught four semesters, and I really liked the teaching aspect of [the program.] I found it gave my weeks some balance and structure. I taught the required humanities course for non-English majors, and it was great to get a bunch of kids who didn’t necessarily think they liked reading and certainly didn’t want to be reading a syllabus of literature. I did away with everything MLA. I had them write hybrid essays that brought in experiences in their lives. For instance, I taught this book Black Swan Green by David Mitchell, which is an unbelievable account of his thirteenth year in England in the early eighties. It’s a masterful document of a very awkward time in life. But it was cool because this was not a landscape my students were familiar with. There’s tons of British slang. It’s a long book, and we read it slowly, but for the most part they found it really rewarding by the end. The emotional payoff was high. Teaching has helped with writing fiction and otherwise because you’re reading really good stuff, and you’re taking it apart, dismantling it, talking about it in the most granular way you can. And at Mountainview, it’s so wonderful to work with so many passionate writers who just love to write and love to read. My students are amazing. Teaching reminds you that you are part of a community. It’s not quite as lonely as you think. Other people are reading things closely and as passionately as you, if not more so.

LW: You’ve published a lot of great book reviews. Do you approach a book differently if you know you’re going to review it? What is that process like?

GS: That’s a great question. I typically read it twice and mark it up less analytically than emotionally. If I don’t really believe something the writer has said, if it feels thin, I’ll express my impatience in the margins or vice versa. I remember I reviewed Priestdaddy for the Times, and that book was covered in my handwriting because Patricia Lockwood is just so wonderful. I was so moved and excitedly articulate in the margins of that book. It had a very conversational feel.

LW: What are you working on now?

GS: I’m revising short stories that I worked on at Iowa. It’s not a full-length manuscript, so I need to do some more writing as I continue to revise. I also wrote a television pilot, and I’m heading to L.A. to talk to people about writers’ rooms and TV writing and how to get involved in that. I’m interested in that. I think it would be hard but fun.

This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Laura Whitmer is currently developing her fiction craft at the Mountainview Low-Residency MFA. She currently lives in Massachusetts.