Letting Go of the Mentor Myth

There's no shortcut to creative success. But that's where your smart peers come in.

When I was 21, I left my tiny college in coastal Maine and moved to Edinburgh for a semester abroad. I arrived in January, when it was dark for nearly 18 hours a day. Wanting to feel like a real adult, I bought a long winter coat and enrolled directly in the university. 

What had I imagined for myself? Not the room I was assigned in a 1980s dorm suite with three freshmen who had spent the previous fall avoiding dishes and one other. Too often I’d see a mouse crawl over the unwashed pans in the communal sink. When my aesthetic intervention failed, I, like they, committed to silent retreat. The commons ruined, we ate alone in our rooms. Mine was freezing, but it had a window into an apartment courtyard where I watched adults—real ones!—hang laundry and smoke cigarettes. Too cheap to buy additional pillows or blankets, I tucked myself in each night beneath a vintage shearling coat I'd bought on the sidewalk for 15 pounds. Was I sad? Only if I told myself I was! 

The courtyard I could not access, which is, of course, a metaphor.

On the sidewalk, I avoided eye contact with the American study-abroad students who moved in noisy packs with bright lanyards. They were so annoying; I could not bear my envy. When I was not walking the city, I was, obsessively, reading. When was the last time you read with a survivalist’s fervor? I craved other people’s plots to escape the disappointment of my own. 

I needed new friends, but secretly, I wanted a more obliterating sort of relationship. I was open to romance, but ideally, I hoped for a mentor. A professor who would welcome me into their office, hand me a cup of tea, and tell me in a hushed, urgent tone that after reading my first paper, they had determined I had it. That I would be able to make it as a writer. Straightening their blazer, the professor would, in hushed tones, tell me xyz. This was the magic formula that would help me achieve publication, perseverance, and better sentences. Over the course of the semester, the professor would stand by, nudging, convivial, proud. I would housesit their cats and meet for wine at their house. In June, buzzing on their faith, I’d depart, but we would keep in touch. I’d visit every few years. One day, they’d officiate my wedding.

Desire for a mentor is, more than anything, a desire to be chosen. To be given a journey under someone’s wing—a trapdoor to bypass the mundanity of the creative slog. In the competitive, rejection-strewn path toward artistic success, the mythology of the mentor looms large. I grew up hearing of writers whose mentors had connected them with agents, or sent along their stories to magazine editors. I once met a woman whose advisor had sent her thesis to an editor. When she got the call about a book deal, she was shocked. She had not even known another’s eyes would be on her manuscript. It would take years for me to understand why this, to her, was an unpleasant anecdote. She had not felt ready for her book to be a book. Her mentor had deprived her of a sense of control.

Creative life is a crapshoot. Success is a cocktail of talent and timing and grunt work and privilege, of good luck and good connection, of one having enough ego to persist in the churn of rejection but not too much that you ever stop realizing how much you still have to master. I did not understand the cocktail at 22. Though I would never have admitted it to myself, I thought all I needed was a lucky break. A mentor, reaching a hand across a roiling stream, telling me to jump. 

I met Nuzha on the first day of fiction workshop. I was struck by her hair (a bleached pixie cut), her accent (familiarish, due to a Palestinian father, English mother, and relatives in the U.S.), her stylish drape of bright scarves and cardigans, her fine-tuned, generous attention to the short stories splayed on the table. Nuzha was not the professor. The professor was unsmiling and American (I wrote a little bit about her here), and she did not seem interested in being my, or anyone else’s, mentor. I sense now that she was just a woman trying to finish her novel. The grind had made her ruthless about what parts of herself she would and would not give us. Back then her boundaries struck me as unkind. 

Nuzha, on the other hand, was warm. My favorite people are both quick to smile and quick to roll their eyes, and Nuzha did both. Many of the full-time students regarded us study-abroaders with polite skepticism, but Nuzha was cheery and chatty. And then her writing—how did she do it? I crawled inside her stories and did not want to come out. We soon realized we liked the same books, were both interested in writing the intersections of intimate and public life, and shared a deep appreciation for food. One day, we ran into each other on the sidewalk and realized we lived off the same street. She invited me to come eat cheesy pasta in the high-ceilinged flat she shared with roommates. That was when I knew my semester was going to be okay.

2013! Babies! Friends in prose, pros of the glow stick.

Nuzha took me dancing in stone tunnels beneath the city, where she introduced me to my first Jager Bomb (or three), then texted that I was going to be okay when, the next morning, my heart was still sprinting in my chest. We went to a fancy laboratory-themed coffee shop and drank from beakers, alternating between relentless self-doubt about our own writing and gushing praise about the other’s. When I met a man I liked on a dance floor—a Scottish architect! I told her, breathless—she let me invite him and his architect-friend to her birthday party, and when the friend then slept over in her bed, we joked, giddily, about a life where we married them both and became neighbors, writing perfect words in perfectly designed houses.

And then the semester was over: I flew home. Nuzha and I fell out of touch the way young and busy people do. I was consumed by a new romance, but also by working closely with a college professor who had very strong ideas about how I should and should not steer my life. I thought the long-awaited arrival of a mentor would come like an unequivocal gift. Instead, I left our meetings dizzy and raw. He made me feel both very smart and very stupid at the same time. He was offering me faith, expounding on that xyz, but the terms made me flinch. He said I should end my relationship, stop being so social, stop thinking I could be “both a writer and a normal person.” I wanted to believe his compliments, so I had to believe his criticism, too. 

A few years later, when I was in graduate school, I got a research grant to go back to the U.K. Nuzha was now living in London, an overworked assistant, and when we met for Indian food, the cliches were true: her hair was now long, back to its caramel brown, but otherwise it was as if no time had passed. Fast forward two more years. I got a summer job teaching American teenagers in Oxford, and by then Nuzha was in Oxford too, working toward a sociology PhD, living a block from where I was staying. Now, when we met up to eat sandwiches on the lawn, both of our writer-lives had inched forward. We both had agents. Though Nuzha had propelled herself toward a different career, she had also, on a whim, submitted a short story to a prestigious international competition. To no surprise of my own, the judges shortlisted her.

Soon we had both sold nonfiction books at auction, where, independently, we each picked the same Edinburgh-based UK publisher. Both of our books were essayistic mixes of research and personal writing, and both of us were neurotically horrified by the prospect of publication itself. Back in our respective countries, we began to meet regularly on Zoom. Sometimes we workshopped our in-progress manuscripts; sometimes we just swapped stories about how long to wait before sending a follow-up email to busy people in publishing, or how to deal with our fears of getting things wrong, of being trolled, of disappointing those who had paid for our books. 

Alongside the renewed thrum of our friendship was the unignorable reality of all that had changed. COVID-19 had altered the whole world, but Nuzha’s more than anyone I knew. Sometimes she was home with family, in East Jerusalem, other times at her apartment in London, but often she was in bed, in pain, in brain fog. And still she wrote. Recognizing her book, Namesake: Reflections on a Warrior Woman, for a work-in-progress prize, Homi K. Bhaba said: “Nuseibeh confronts the divisive and discriminatory issues that dog our times with a cosmopolitan ethic of justice and equality that seeks to build arguments, rather than to win them… Namesake explores vulnerability, fragility, anxiety, and ambivalence as ways of beautifully coming to terms with the wounds and worries of the world.” 

Nuzha was the first person to read a full draft of Wolfish, offering me the sort of gentle-yet-rigorous feedback that made me want to weep. During milestones and meltdowns we mailed one another books and plants. The day I submitted the final manuscript, she ordered me a pie. 

The question I am asked most by fellow teachers is: What is your top advice for young writers? The question young writers ask me most is: How do I find a mentor?

I will not say good mentors do not exist. They do. I have benefited deeply from their care and advice; I have, I would like to think, tried to be one myself. But when I think about the person and writer I have become, it is the voices of peers—of friends like Nuzha, whose lives and words entwine alongside my own—that have propped me up and kept me going. Who have held me accountable on and off the page. 

To care deeply about the writing of a peer, when neither of you is published, is an act of faith and love. You do not do it because it will get you anything, you do it because you love your friend, and you love what they are doing on the page, and you want to be a part of it. I am so confident in this calculus: that showing up for peers matters as much, or more, than cultivating connections with important people a few career-steps ahead of you. 

Since October 7, our chats have been less frequent. Nobody sleeps, she told me a few months into the war. How can we? One day I got a WhatsApp from her mentioning how many of her Palestinian relatives had been killed. But how are you! she asked. Tell me something nice that has happened to you! For once in our friendship, I struggled to find words. Another day we scheduled a Zoom and had to reschedule it because of air strikes. To say that I think of Nuzha and her family every day is, of course, an understatement.

Next month, her collection of linked essays—which brilliantly explores gender and identity and inheritance and history—will be published in America. Read this rave review in the Guardian, then preorder it.

In late May, 11 years ago, I moved away from Edinburgh. During our last walk there, Nuzha took me to a tunnel of cherry blossoms. I remember that we laughed and clutched dripping ice cream cones, and that I felt very sad our lives were splitting. I don’t remember the kernel of our conversation, but I realize now it doesn’t matter. That conversation has never stopped.

A few weeks after this photo was taken, I went on my first research trip for the project that would become Wolfish. How pleased this old self would have been to know that one day Nuzha would be the first person to read it as a book.

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I’ve had a busy spring of travel, which—in case you need the reminder that I did—can be very good for the brain and body even if it is bad for some things (like writing regular newsletters). Since my last dispatch:

Wolfish won an Oregon Book Award! The judges called it “pure alchemy.” I have not recovered from this honor. You can order a signed copy here.

I published an essay in Electric Literature about why writing the self is also writing the world.

I really enjoyed having this conversation about wolves, desire, violence and dreams with Irish novelist Connor Habib for his podcast Against Everyone with Connor Habib. I talked to Portland Monthly about my favorite pocket-sized indie bookstore hidden in a courtyard. I did an interview on Colorado radio (KVNF!) about Wolfish.

Last week, I went to Pendleton, Oregon, for an Oregon Humanities “Consider This” conversation about fear and belonging in the natural world.  Watch it on YouTube. While you’re there: My True Stories Book Club conversation with

Katherine May

is now on YouTube, too!

I was grateful to find my Aeon essay (about being an animal!) referenced in Thomas Klaffke’s beautiful essay on the idea of “planetarity”: “a new condition in which humans recognize not only that we are not above and apart from “nature,” but that we are only beginning to understand the complexities of our interdependencies with planetary systems.”

Join me for a writing workshop this summer in Oregon at the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, or in New York at the Orion Environmental Writers Workshop. A few spots are still available; let me know if you have questions.

Thank you for reading, and for your continued support. Those who fund this newsletter make it possible for others to read it free. I am so grateful.

Sending all late-spring cheer from atop my mountain of just-pulled yard weeds,

xxE