From the Archives: Shawn Andrew Mitchell beams in from the future of a quiet Sunday morning in South Korea to chat with Charles Yu on a quiet Saturday evening in Los Angeles.
From the Archives: Leah Falk talks with A. Van Jordan about his fourth poetry collection, The Cineaste, his intentions for this new work, and what’s changed about the way we go to the movies.
From the Archives: “I think characters resist being known in the way real people do. When I start to construct a character, I never begin with their deep dark secrets or biggest fears or hidden shame. I usually start with the surface details—physical features, occupation, interests—and over time, I learn the things the character secretly wants or hates or tries to hide.”
From the Archives: “I have always felt that scientists don’t get written enough as real people”: Eileen Pollack and Allie Tova Hirsch discuss sex scenes, melodrama, and Eileen’s novel A Perfect Life.
From the Archives: Emily McLaughlin converses and laughs with author Mary Gaitskill, a fellow University of Michigan alum, on her visit to Ann Arbor. Gaitskill opens up about writing as a woman in 2011, her take on her own characters, writing sex, publishing her first stories, and lasting fifty years.
From the Archives: Christopher Mohar talks with Anthony Doerr about the politics of writing, the importance of curiosity, the role science plays in his fiction, why he likes the novella as a form, and how we can successfully inhabit characters different from ourselves.
From the Archives: “But for me that liminal quality, neither one thing nor the other, is exactly the point”: Peter Ho Davies with Eric McDowell on writerly patience, all manner of hybridity, and his novel The Fortunes.
From the Archives: Travis Holland talks with fiction master Tobias Wolff about the pleasures and anxieties of influence, the changing societal role of writer-celebrities, and the reasons Wolff has “always been attracted to the incisiveness, velocity, exactitude, precision of the short story.”
From the Archives: Ana Menéndez’s story collection Adios, Happy Homeland! shadows people on the run from their circumstances and themselves.
From the Archives: Philip Graham speaks with his former student Rosalie Morales Kearns about her debut collection, as well as how to enter different points of view, the legacy of colonialism in Caribbean history and Caribbean literature, and why the trickster answers so many questions.
From the Archives: Why invent a dystopia when there are so many real dystopias out there in the world already?
From the Archives: Manil Suri gets into the nitty-gritty of novel writing—throwing out hundreds of pages, rewriting histories, and choosing between plot and character—with Nawaaz Ahmed.
