“I think for a work to really ascend, there has to me something magical in the creation of it. It’s the difference between the art and the craft. The craft we can teach…The art is the stuff that only comes from inside the heart and the soul of the creator.”
“Is there ever enough solitude? I think I’ve always been alert to the competing tugs between togetherness and separateness, especially with regard to family life.”
“I don’t think poets have a responsibility to do anything, which is the great thing about being a poet. And the competing but equally true fact is that to write good poems poets have a great number of responsibilities.”
“I knew I wanted the book to have one foot in the past and one in the present. It was the only way to really explore the themes that interested me, namely how much impact does the past have upon our present? “
Adam Rapp—novelist, playwright, musician, and director—on creating scenic tension: “Asking questions about exits and entrances and trying to keep people in rooms is the ultimate goal.”
“Then you sit back one day and think, ‘Who really will care about this? It’s just another story that’s been told so many times, just in different ways.’ Yet there is that illogical reasoning, or rather lack thereof, that makes you continue.”
“All the pieces finally came together for me when I figured out what was at the heart of the novel: why Anna could see her son’s imaginary friends and what the significance of that was, both in terms of plot and theme.”
Chloe Benjamin speaks with her mentor and friend Judith Claire Mitchell about A Reunion of Ghosts, which took ten years to write. Mitchell says of the process, “When students are struggling with their own novels, I do understand what they’re going through and I think I’m often able to give them perspective on the nature of this massive, unwieldy, impossible enterprise that keeps them from giving up.”
Aida Zilelian on discovering that her novel The Legacy of Lost Things was about longing: “You know when you dream something, and you’re like, ‘I had such a weird dream,’ and as you’re saying the words out loud, you realize what the dream was actually about. When I read through the final version, I realized it then.”
Bich Minh Nguyen talks to Sarah Layden about her latest novel, Pioneer Girl, and moving from the Midwest to the West Coast: “For me, writing is always about looking back and looking forward in the same moment. It’s living within more than sphere, identity, and place, and trying to understand that—trying to find a few moments of stillness and clarity.”
“I think writers live in a state of constant contradiction”: Susan Tepper interviewed by Richard Fulco.
“Good writers manage to stay curious despite the mind-numbing bullshit that laps upon our adult doorsteps. The kinship to our childhood is that curiosity.”
