Meet Luke Rolfes

We recently connected with Luke Rolfes and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Luke, appreciate you sitting with us today to share your wisdom with our readers. So, let’s start with resilience – where do you get your resilience from?

In my experience, publishing a first book (for a writer) is the toughest hill to climb. I remember the day I nearly quit. I had a full manuscript that I was trying to publish as a collection of stories. At the time, I had entered about twenty short story collection contests, and they were fairly expensive to enter—a reading fee of 25 to 30 dollars. After a full year of rejection, I told my friend I was throwing my money away on these contests that I had no chance of winning. I thought extensively about quitting—about what kind of life I would lead if I stopped trying to be a writer and writing professor. It wasn’t happening for me, I decided. It simply wasn’t in the cards. And then, later that night, I was driving home, and I wondered aloud, “Is this the best you can do?” My mind was telling me “yes.” But my gut was telling me “no.” The next day, I changed the title of my manuscript. A week later I finished a story that would serve as the opening piece. I went with a new order. Changed some stories in and out. Revised and revised. A couple months later, everything still felt futile, but then I received a notification in the mail. I hadn’t won anything. But my manuscript had been recognized as a finalist. I knew then that my gut was right. I didn’t want to quit. It took another year. And I was a finalist nine more times after that. But I kept after it. I didn’t stop. My best guess is that resilience comes from somewhere deep inside. Maybe it’s not so much the gut as it is the heart, or maybe the soul. Something inside that can overrule the mind and body.

Great, so let’s take a few minutes and cover your story. What should folks know about you and what you do?

I am a Midwestern writer, and I teach at a university in the middle of the country. I write books that are set in the Midwest, which I think is important because not as much literature and film are set in this region. I experiment with different form and length. Everything from surreal to realistic fiction. From micro to novel length.

As an instructor, my goal (and privilege) is to help students find their own writerly voices. And I also want them to fall in love with literature and writing. I show them that being a writer is as much about reading as it is writing. By reading the works of others, we learn how to read our own work with a critical eye. Above all, I want to instill in them that their writing matters—that they matter—and that creating art means something, even if the work reaches one person as opposed to one million.

Another one of my responsibilities is to run GreenTower Press with my co-editor John Gallaher. We publish several things, including the biannual literary journal LAUREL REVIEW, small books of poetry called chapbooks, and a yearly anthology of military veteran writing called PROUD TO BE. Our students work with us as interns to publish these works, and this hands-on experience has been a great way to introduce them to the world of editing and publishing.

If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?

These three things were integral for me, and I recommend them to anyone trying to be a writer.

1. LEARNING TO LOVE REVISION: This is the number one quality I see in successful writers. A lot of new writers can write good (sometimes amazing) first drafts, but revision is usually ninety-plus percent of the work. It’s kind of like professional athletes. The games look fun. But the real works comes in practice, in the gym, etc.

2. DEVELOPING A THICK SKIN: Rejection happens to everybody. It’s part of being a writer. Even the people we look up to. The best of the best. I’ve seen major award winners question their abilities on social media because they’ve received a string of rejections. Rejection hurts if you let it, so having a thick skin is vital. But your skin can’t be too thick either. If you think you can do no wrong, then you won’t be open to criticism. You need to find a balance: receptive to feedback but also trusting the self.

3. CHANGING THINGS UP: Writer’s block is real. It helps sometimes to switch things up. When I first started out, I was writing realistic short fiction, and, after a while, I was essentially writing the same story over and over. Finally, I started to switch up form and length. I began to work from prompts. Challenging myself to end pieces as quickly as possible. To fit ideas together that really didn’t go together. Changing things up took the pressure off, and it made writing so much more fun.

If you knew you only had a decade of life left, how would you spend that decade?

I’m fairly worried about Artificial Intelligence and what it means for the writing community. (I think most writers and writing professors are worried about it.) If AI continues to develop and get better at text generation, will our society find less value in writing and developing our own thoughts? Will AI devalue art? Will we start to allow submissions at literary journals from “prompt engineers”? Will we care if students write their essays? It’s all very new, and I don’t think we know how to approach these challenges yet.

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