All Faculty Profiles
Esther Hayes
by Zoe Katinos
“The beauty of writing is accessing that little electric part of being human,” says Gotham teacher Esther Hayes.
The close relationship between writer and reader exemplifies what Esther finds special about writing: “Doing the insane thing of scribbling symbols on a page, and translating emotion from me to you,” she says. “When I started, I liked the intimacy between the two, the act of writing and the act of reading.”
While completing an undergraduate degree in fine arts, Esther caught the writing bug in a fiction writing class. “I really liked it and was like, oh no, this is my senior year, it’s my last chance to take a class, and I figured out I really like something.”
When she moved to New York City the following year, she worked in film and tested her newly formed love of the written medium. “I took a lot of Gotham classes,” Esther says. “Which is sort of sweet to think about, because after that, I moved across the country, got an MFA, did all this stuff, and now I’m teaching at Gotham. I know what it really feels like to be a Gotham student, because I was one.”
Now, Esther lives in Northern Colorado and is currently working on a collection of short stories and a novel. The novel, her first, is set in her home state, rural Northern Nevada, and explores the impact of a familial secret on multiple generations of women in a family.
“Writing a novel is like you’re given a jigsaw puzzle,” Esther says, “and you don’t know the image, but you know it’s vaguely about the beach, and you are expected to do the puzzle while holding all the pieces in your hand at the same time.”
Her own struggles with novel writing and revision have deeply informed Esther’s teaching practice. “I really understand what it feels like to be working at something that just takes a lot of faith, like fiction. You just work on something, work on something, work on something, and then hope eventually someone wants to read it.”
Esther observes that what makes her Gotham classes special is the varied life experiences of her students. She says her classes consist of “adult people with full lives that are committed to writing. I think that is very cool. The dedication to trying to figure out how to get fiction into your life is something that every writer has to figure out.”
