Scott Spencer | Writers' Voices

Scott Spencer has a pretty impressive writing resume. “An Ocean Without a Shore” is his twelfth novel. Two earlier novels were National Book Award Finalists, and four have been made into movies. He has taught writing at several universities, including Columbia and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and at Eastern Correctional Facility as part of the Bard Prison Initiative. He has also worked as a journalist, writing for Rolling Stone and Travel & Leisure, among others.

In this conversation, Scott shares how he became a writer, why he believes the novel is important, and what draws him to writing about romance, albeit not in a typical way. “An Ocean Without a Shore” is a story of unrequited love, from the perspective of a gay man, which Scott is not, set in the late 1990’s to early 2000’s. Nevertheless, as Scott says, “I didn’t really doubt that I could do that, because we are all pretty similar. The historical experience of a hetero-normal man is very different than the historical experience of a gay man, but what we are deep inside is not that different – what brings us pleasure, what brings us pain. It’s called human nature, and that’s what novels are about.”