All Faculty Profiles
Jon Gingerich
by Kasey Noss
“When it comes to writing, I’m always having a hard time,” says Gotham teacher Jon Gingerich.
The same Jon Gingerich whose work has been published in publications from the Guardian to Grist; whose debut novel, The Appetite Factory, was described as “wonderfully wicked” in a five-star Seattle Book Review; whose short story, “Thornhope, Indiana,” won The Saturday Evening Post’s 2020 Great American Fiction Contest.
Indeed, the same Jon Gingerich who has been teaching writing at Gotham since 2014, says the process is a “minefield.”
“I can count on one hand the amount of times where I've come up with an idea, I've sat down, knocked out a short story, it's been a joy and a pleasure to do, and then sent it out and gotten it published,” Jon says. “That's only happened, really, two times in my life. Every other time that I've tried to write something, it has been an arduous slog.”
That’s not to say Jon doesn’t love writing. He does. In fact, the thing that makes it so difficult is the very thing he finds so rewarding about it: creating something from nothing.
“That should be impossible,” Jon says. “That is really damn hard…I think recognizing that is the first step.”
The second step, according to Jon, is doing it anyway.
“It takes a certain pedigree of stubbornness to keep cracking away at something when the world keeps telling you that, you know, essentially sending you every sign that you're not good enough yet,” Jon says.
That stubbornness is just as vital to a writer’s practice as talent, if not more. Of course, it doesn’t always come naturally, especially in today’s instant-gratification-driven world.
“The quick fix is very alluring,” Jon says. “But unfortunately, it's not very substantive. There are those of us who want something more.”
For Jon, writing is that “something more.”
“Writing is also a very rewarding pursuit in itself,” he says. “It's not just the reward of publication. It's not just the monetary reward, which, let's, let's face it, that's a joke in the publishing world. But it's also the end in itself, and that reward is communication, fellowship, community.”
The reward is also the cultivation of one’s unique voice, which Jon finds to be the soul of writing.
“It's this, you know, this irreducible, kind of mysterious, mix of your experiences and things that you've seen or overheard, just your own unique way of seeing the world, things that you’ve thought about,” Jon says. “There is a fundamentally mysterious part of us that comes out when we write.”
It’s one of the reasons Jon strongly opposes the use of AI in writing.
“AI only tries to simulate what it thinks writing sounds like. But good writing isn't supposed to sound like writing,” he says. “It's supposed to sound like you. It's the idea of you doing what no one else can do, and that's the reason, ultimately, why we love you and love that voice.”
Fortunately for writers who don’t feel they’ve yet developed a voice, Jon feels it is absolutely learnable through repetition and dedication.
“If you spend enough time working on writing and trying things out and experimenting, you eventually discover what you sound like,” he says. “It's like Toni Morrison said: once you have the right voice, you can't have the wrong words.”
