Interviews
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The Problem and Gift of Writing from Memory: A Conversation with Preeti Vangani
“I think people have started reading poetry as memoir, and I think fiction writers also suffer from that kind of readership, where everything that happened to the character has happened to the writer as well. I want to continuously challenge…
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Fiction as Containers for Memory: A Conversation with Rainbow Rowell
Rainbow Rowell writes a lot of things—comic books, graphic novels, fantasy stories with a distinct Drarry undertone (yeah, Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy kiss in certain corners of the internet)—but she doesn’t write “romance.” At least, not in the traditional…
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“Like a Bowl Picked Up in the Dark”: A Conversation with Brian Trapp
“I had this very intimate and intense relationship with my brother and thought I knew him best. So I could dramatize that by having it in dialogue, and then thinking about ways in which, if that’s the one true thing,…
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“At first, everything was just ugly and scary:” A Conversation with Amanda Quaid
That reminds me of my former student, the poet Max Ritvo, who had a great image about radiation being like a just-for-you soup can. He said the first time he heard the beam, he was like, “They made it just…
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Who Deserves Your Compassion? A Conversation with Megha Majumdar
“Kolkata is one of the cities in the world which is most severely affected by climate change. It has grown hotter. It is predicted to endure more storms, and more severe storms. How does it feel to read that this…
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Trauma, Healing, Radiant Transformation: A Conversation with Karen Malpede
“I wished to take readers with me where we are all afraid to go, into deep love, and into dying. I don’t offer solutions. This is not a “how-to” book for dealing with whatever. The experiences I write about have…
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On the Versatility, Physicality, and Morality of Verbs: A Conversation with Sarah L. Kaufman
“We can easily fall into more interiority—what a person’s thinking, how they’re feeling—but how revealing it can be to get them moving! Show us the character being a free spirit, or how they’re an introvert, how they’re observant, how they’re…
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Redaction Driven by Revelation: A Conversation with Crystal Simone Smith
“As poets there’s the option to reach beyond our internal afflictions and we don’t need to go very far. Historical documents offer us more than what’s rendered. I think of them as a tool to disrupt domination.”
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A Conversation between R.F. Kuang and Tochi Onyebuchi
“I’m a very mercenary reader. Everything is homework to me.”
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Investigation Moves the Interior Life Forward: A Conversation with Patrick Cottrell
“ I actually had a much different ending when I did the first draft. For this novel, it needed to have a sense of something happening. It couldn’t just fizzle out or neatly resolve everything. I needed something decisive but…
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Writing the Shit Out of Your Darlings: A Conversation with Ramona Ausubel
“Thinking about the way a river moves while thinking about plot is really helpful, for example. It’s not a straight line. The same way an early draft doesn’t go from page one effortlessly and straightforwardly to page two-hundred and fifty.…
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The Grand Performance of Womanhood: A Conversation with Caro Claire Burke
“A lot of the experience of writing a novel was not unfamiliar to me. And I think, at least for me, so much of writing is just figuring out mental tricks to stick with it, because so much of it…