Archive for the ‘Interviews’ Category
First, Do No Harm: John Pipkin Re-visions History
Posted: January 26, 2011
Tags: character, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Jonathan Edwards, American Evangelicalism
“I often tell my creative writing students that the biggest challenge in writing is that we really haven’t created any new emotions in the last 2000 years, that the same things that people are experiencing now are the same set of emotions that human beings have always experienced, we just talk about them in a different way and we experience them in a different context […] so the challenge in writing historical fiction is then to figure out what the contexts were in which these experiences were encountered.”
Jericho Brown Writes What’s On His Mind
“I think we’ve been telling our students so long, ‘Write what you know. Write your lived experience,’ and I think our students have this idea that that means write about the time A, B, and C happened to me, but that’s not really it. It’s more, write what you can’t stop thinking about. Write what’s on your mind.”
Documenting Discovery: Lisa Olstein on the Art of Observation
“We all love to receive something either really beautiful or really intelligent, but what’s most exciting or engaging is when a work of art stimulates in you a new kind of thinking, or a new set of questions, or a new set of ideas that are happening in your own brain but that were instigated by the art.”
On Listening: Salvatore Scibona Tunes in to Detail
Posted: February 21, 2010
Tags: Joan Didion, fiction, free indirect style, Norman Rush, non-linear narrative
“I think for a writer you don’t see a thing until you use the word for it and the more precise the word you can use the more precisely you see it. On the other hand, the word is an instrument in order to lead you to the thing and you can spin a whole lot of words around yourself for years and years and years, as the jeweler does, until it gets to the point where your primary relationship is with the language and not with the thing.”
The Literary Horologist: Paul Harding “Tinkers” With Time
Posted: December 19, 2009
Tags: Age of Reason, magical realism, fiction, Bowdoin College, Julio Cortázar
“… I don’t write the book in any order, I just literally wake up and wonder about whatever immediately strikes me as interesting. Usually I have a question about something: ‘What does she think at that point?’ Or, ‘What does he do?’ Or, ‘What does the cemetery look like in the autumn?’ And I just start writing.”
