In Part II of Philip Graham’s interview with John Warner, Warner talks about living a literary life online: “I seem to be congenitally incapable of making plans. This is often to my benefit. . . but it also has meant an extremely ad hoc career.”
John Warner talks to Philip Graham about giving his characters an extra graceful breath: “I see mankind basically as a pestilence, bent on destroying each other and the Earth itself. . . And yet, sometimes we can break free of our monstrousness and be genuinely good and kind.”
“Each story is a kind of on-the-job training”: Bret Anthony Johnston talks with Sarah Anne Johnson about his debut novel, Remember Me Like This.
“I would be doing a great disservice to my fiction, to my readers, and to myself if I ever wrote about any other place”: David Armand talks with Dixon Hearne about landscape, Southern Louisiana, and his forthcoming novel, The Gorge.
“Fiction writers have a serious responsibility, especially when writing about something that others view as sacred”: Jon Keller with Tyler McMahon on Of Sea and Cloud, his debut novel about Maine lobstermen.
Nichole Bernier talks to E.B. Moore about publishing her debut novel at 72: “The Amish life is exotic to behold and comforting, a little like going to a habitat zoo to watch the slow march of elephants cropping grass with their trunks and blowing dust over their backs.”
“I’ve been a high school English teacher for ten years, and I think being surrounded by kids all day has helped me to remember what it’s like to be young. I certainly wouldn’t want to go back to those years, but I still think it’s such a cool age. When you’re fifteen, everything is new and fresh; so much life happens.”
Maureen O’Brien talks to Robin Parks about the rules for writing a good short story, searching for fact in fiction, and creating a cohesive collection.
“Here’s the thing about writing historical fiction: you’re not trying to reconstruct or mimic history, which would be altogether boring even if it weren’t impossible. What you’re trying to do is to create a new version of it that will tell a good story while simultaneously capturing something essential, not only about the period, but also about contemporary life.”
“I usually feel like an aesthete, just trying to write decent sentences. But with this book I was aware of being a white guy consciously setting out to write about race and about certain feelings buried in white people and I wouldn’t be much of a writer if I was going to go into all of that and come out the other side having given it a trivial treatment and being okay with that.”
“More than anything, I wanted this book to take on the processed food industry. As a satirist, I wanted my novel to serve as a kind of corrective to it, if only by asking readers to question what it is they’re eating. But the food industry doesn’t exist in a vacuum, so it’s what it reveals about American life that is really at the center of the novel.”
“I barely scraped the surface of the vast bank of medical cases I had at my disposal”: David Bajo talks with Tyler McMahon about the world of medicine, literary plotting, and Mercy 6, his latest novel.
