Interviews

“I do think a lot about musical structures, and call and response. There is a common source to both writing and music—some of these patterns that we digest and metabolize as musicians about structure and callbacks. I love telling my…

The distinctions we make between ourselves and our animal brethren tend to be very self-flattering. We have unique skills and capabilities, to be sure, but they’re just fractionally different from those of many animals, and our primal drives are essentially…

“I wanted to do a heroic crown of sonnets to try to encapsulate the bigness of his life, but also the bigness of his loss. That was a lot to deal with. So, knowing that I at least could focus…

“This book hopes to challenge the myth that there is any one right way to be an artist, primarily by showing how many contradictory answers people try to give you to that question. What works for any one person is…

“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…

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…

“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,…

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…

“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…

“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…

“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…

“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.”