Archive for the ‘Interviews’ Category
Telling the Untold Story: Leslie T. Chang’s “Factory Girls”
“…what I wanted to do was start out inside the mind of a factory girl and describe the world: What it was like when you met a woman from another factory, what it was like when your friend helped you because you lost your job, what it felt like on payday when everyone crowded into the post office to send money home… I felt like I had gotten to know enough of these young women well enough that I felt confident to write the beginning of the book in this way, thrusting you into this world.”
The Meaning of Words: Rob Riemen on Art and Communication
Posted: August 26, 2009
Tags: Joseph Frank, nonfiction, Fyodor Dostoevsky, philosophy, Daniel Goldhagen
“When words no longer tell the truth, when words turn into lies, language dies, and we with the language. It is the first and foremost task of every poet, of every novelist, to write meaningful words, to write truthful words. You don’t have to be religious, or a philosopher, or a great expert on Plato to realize that a language cannot be without truth.”
The Architecture of Persona: Steven Price Writes Houdini
Posted: July 21, 2009
Tags: Dennis Lee, Kenneth Sherman, Michael Ondaatje, Margaret Atwood, Gwendolyn MacEwen
“I didn’t want to just hit the peaks of his life, I wanted to hit a number of the troughs too, small moments that aren’t necessarily talked about or discussed or described in the biographies but that he, of course, experienced. They tend to be incredibly important to us as individuals. Just that flicker of sunlight on the grass that you remember from your childhood, which means nothing to you except it’s such an extraordinarily warm, protective moment. Houdini would have had these too.”
Sculpture of Meaning: Karla Kelsey’s Language Arts
“I think I’m very infatuated with perception, where language and perception meet, and how language creates our perception while perception creates our language.”
The Alchemy of Composition: Jamie O’Neill’s Literary Magic
“When you’re writing you’re that bird on the wing, you’re soaring and you’re plummeting but you’re not telling the wings to do anything. When you’re describing afterwards what’s happened you’re applying logic to something that really is intuitive. You’re talking about ailerons and that sort of thing, like you’re moving an airplane rather than the eagle.”
