Archive for the ' Interviews ' Category

• July, 2010 Jericho Brown Writes What’s On His Mind

  Tags: abuse, line breaks, love, music, poetry, punctuation
  Published in Interviews

  

  “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.”
• May, 2010 Documenting Discovery: Lisa Olstein on the Art of Observation

  Tags: animals, naturalist, observation, poetry, prose poetry, titles, writer's notebook
  Published in Interviews

  

  “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.”
• February, 2010 On Listening: Salvatore Scibona Tunes in to Detail

  Tags: Community, detail, fiction, immigrant, Italian, narrator, non-linear narrative
  Published in Interviews

  

  “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.”