DMACC One Book author speaks at Ankeny campus

Nikk Erlick, the author of “The Measure,” spoke to a full audience at the DMACC Ankeny campus on Tuesday, November 4, in Building 5 at 10 a.m.

“The Measure” is the 2025 selection for the DMACC Library’s “One Book, One College, One Community.”

Erlick spoke about how she was inspired to write “The Measure,” her experiences in childhood and college, her job as a travel writer, and why she dedicated her novel to her grandparents. 

In 2020, Erlick wrote “The Measure” after the pandemic caused layoffs, including her own. With no job, she was able to explore the Greek myths that inspired her. While writing the novel, she was also inspired by the events happening around her during the time of the global pandemic.

At the end of the event, there was a Q&A session with questions that were submitted by the students. Erlick was able to go into depth about the reasoning behind certain aspects of the novel.

The following is a Q&A with the author, which took place after the event. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

How many colleges have you visited to talk about your books, and how have your books resonated with Gen Z?

I don’t know the exact number, but I’ve done a lot of visits with libraries around the country, some colleges, and a handful of high schools as well.

 I think it’s probably resonated slightly more with college students, opposed to high school students, because they are closer to the age that the boxes arrive in the book.

 College students are at that time in their lives when they are exploring many different paths and shaping the person they are going to become, and really thinking about what they want to spend the rest of their lives doing. Not whatever you choose at 22, you’ll be stuck with. 

Is travel writing the dream job people think it is? What are the most challenging aspects?

Travel writing was a dream job. I will say I did it for like three years, and it was just incredible because a couple of weeks prior, I would just get told you’re going to this country. And you’re going to spend four days there. 

The challenges, I would say, though the times that you’re traveling were much fewer than when you were at your desk in the office, writing. So in many ways, it was still a normal job. When I wasn’t traveling, I was just writing articles, editing, proofreading, sending newsletters, doing social media, and kinda traditional job work. So, when you weren’t traveling, you were dreaming of traveling.

 It’s also really hard to capture a place on paper and capture the sights and the sounds and the tastes and smells. You’re taking pictures and videos and writing notes, and when you come home to write an essay about the place, it just feels so thin compared to the actual experience. I feel like it was always hard for me to capture the place on paper in a way that was like the experience I actually had.

Which college class or professor stands out to you as impactful on your career/writing journey?

Definitely the creative writing class I finally took my last semester at school, and it was one of the workshops were two students would write each week then you come and everybody would critique you and as somebody with a thin skin and anxiety about stuff coming into a workshop day was extreme for me but it helped expose me to the process of getting notes and getting feedback on something I had written. And actually letting people I had written for the first time ever outside of, like, my mom, and I just found that I loved the writing.

 But, my experience on the newspaper was probably a huge impact for me in college because it just really made me a better interviewer and editor, and helped me write more cleanly and clearly, but also then showed me how to structure a story and keep the readers engaged and things like that.

 It felt very practical and real-world in college; a lot of my classes were really theoretical, and just the fact that I got to college and was able to not take a math class and just read for four years.

I think the more you read, the better you are as a writer. So that was helpful.

In the age of AI, college students lean on apps like ChatGPT to help with their writing… What advice do you have for using it, or do you advise working without it?

Obviously, it was not around when I was in college, but I don’t use it right now in my writing because I just think the power of writing is humanity and especially writing fiction.

I think there’s probably a place to help with research, and I think there is a place for it to just streamline things for productivity in general.

But for me, as a fiction writer, I’m always pulling from my personal experiences and emotions and conversations I’ve had with other people about their experiences and emotions, and so that’s what I want to use; I don’t want a machine to tell me how I feel.

If you could recommend one or two books for college students, what would it be?

I think before I got to college, our whole campus read “Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error,” by Kathryn Schulz, and it was just an entire book about people making mistakes. And like some very big mistakes and very small mistakes. And I think that was helpful going into college, so much of a perfectionist, and was very anxious about a place and failing and not being perfect. And so to have an entire campus reading a book about being wrong and making mistakes and how it’s okay and we learn and it’s human, I think, was very comforting, although I still remain a perfectionist today. So I don’t know how much of a lasting impact it had on me.

Then, I would also say George Saunders’s “Congratulations, by the way: Some Thoughts on Kindness.” It was inspired by a compensating speech he gave that I thought was a really fantastic speech about kindness, and he is a phenomenal writer.

His book “Lincoln in the Bardo” would be a great book. It’s more experimental and unlike anything you have ever read before, but I think it would appeal to people who like history, who like literature, and who just want to read something fantastic and unique.