All Faculty Profiles

Dalia Pagani

by Samantha Dunne

Gotham Fiction Writing Teacher Dalia Pagani has spent her whole life traveling. She’s done it all, from bouncing country to country as the child of a military family to traversing the waters between the Caribbean and Africa in a sailboat.

But, in the classroom, the world comes to her.

“I love having people from different backgrounds (in my Gotham classes)–the Netherlands, Hong Kong, Singapore, Brooklyn,” Dalia says. “That kind of stuff I just like because I don't travel anymore. It's like all these travelers come to me, and they usually write a little bit about who they are and what they've seen. It all comes out.”

It’s something that Dalia understands quite well, since her travels and the start of her own writing journey are very much intertwined.

“I’ve always been writing since I can remember because I’m an Army brat, so we traveled around a lot, and there wasn't any kind of continuity ever in anything. So one of my sisters gave me a diary, a five-year diary, a little diary, and I only had like three or four lines to put my day's events in it, and I used it religiously, and that's when the habit started.”

When that diary was full, she’d just get another one and fill it up with more musings, using this as a way to document her childhood through Italy, Germany, Taiwan, Panama, Puerto Rico, and 20 U.S. states.

But the nomadic life didn’t end there for Dalia.

As a young woman, she decided to live on a friend’s boat… with no knowledge of sailing. It took her three years, and navigating through two hurricanes, but she eventually got the hang of it. In that time, the novice seafarer met people along the way that helped broaden her perspective as a writer.

“Because I've been exposed to so many different kinds of people and cultures and languages,” she says. “I can tap into that, and that helps, I think, because I'm not just confined to writing about a couple living in an apartment in New York City.”

That innate curiosity in others is what led to her first published novel, Mercy Road. In it, Dalia explores a wounded family from the foothills of Vermont whose lives come apart when the matriarch leaves for New York.

It’s loosely inspired by her own neighbors in Vermont, a state she and her family settled in after selling their sailboat.

"The novel is not autobiographical but about my observations of a family who lived a life that was very different from mine. We both lived in a small rural village in Vermont and they were known to be hunters and trappers — they worked the land. I was fascinated by that and the novel is what I imagined their life was like.

At first, it was just a love letter to the hunters and trappers that comprised this New England landscape, but she developed the family’s dynamic to make the read more compelling.

And according to Dalia, while the novel is the albatross, following you everywhere, the short story is the footnote.

“Short stories come in when I'm done with the novel. I can't stop writing, but I don't want to take on another big, heavy project, and short stories are just so rewarding,” she says. “You start them, you're free. They're very liberating. There's no rules. I can do whatever I want to.”

And Dalia’s passion for the craft and teaching it to students, so many of whom inspire her in turn, shows in the number of people who keep returning to her class.

“Some of them are repeats–they come back again and again. So that's nice knowing that there's a connection between a few people–that we've worked together, and they like how we work, and they're getting something out of it. That's very gratifying.”