“One of the things that was really important to me was to find a structure that was different in order to talk about nature, to talk about climate change.” Alexander Tilney asks Madeleine Watts about writing climate change and her debut novel, The Inland Sea.
“If the book strides beyond the noir conventions, as you suggest and certainly I hope, it does so especially to please a couple of ideal readers I had in mind as I wrote it, readers who loved language as much as they ever loved anything….” Charles Lamar Phillips talks with James Whorton, Jr. about his novel Estranged.
“There are those who think comic novels are not serious novels. Tell that to Chaucer, Dickens, Heller, Vonnegut, among others. Tell it to Shakespeare! Humor is just a different way to tell a story.” John Blumenthal talks with Nina Buckless about his new comic novel, The Strange Courtship of Abigail Bird.
“The writer has no expiration date. I left my corporate career at fifty-six and turned to writing full time. I had no illusion it would be easy.” Dawn Ryan talks with Paul Vidich about his new novel, The Mercenary.
“My goal is to make fiction that doesn’t read too much like ‘life,’ stories that repress the urges and impulses of characters.” Aaron Hamburger and Avner Landes discuss Landes’s debut novel, Meiselman: The Lean Years, out this week from Tortoise Books.
“There’s plenty of great fiction about belonging to a place and being part of a community—with the opportunities and obligations this brings—but that’s not a state of being I understand well.” Steven Wingate talks with Melissa Scholes Young about The Leave-Takers.
Amy Gustine talks with Kate Reed Petty about the structural features of her new novel, True Story, exploring not just what kind of story she’s written, but how she pulled it off.
“More broadly, the book, and the short story form in general, is interested in the way that certain choices preclude others.” Danielle Evans talks with Melissa Scholes Young about her new collection, The Office of Historical Corrections.
Rachel Swearingen talks with Caitlin Horrocks about her new collection, Life Among the Terranauts, as well as her thoughts on the short story form, childhood and the imagination, and writing in these fraught times.
Eleanor J. Bader talks with Jon Sealy about his third novel, The Merciful, as well as morality, ethics, the state of Southern literature, the business of publishing, and the pandemic.
“We need to stop pretending the story just comes on its own and isn’t within the writer’s control.” Matthew Salesses and Ayşe Papatya Bucak talk craft, workshop, and his new book, Craft in the Real World, out now from Catapult.
“Fiction is my first love, especially novels. While I also love history, my focus must be to tell stories about people, their lives, their loves, their struggles, and then I can tell how politics and political events impact them.” Eleanor J. Bader talks with Marisel Vera about her new novel, The Taste of Sugar, as well as Puerto Rican history, Hawaiian sugar plantations, the legacy of colonialism, and more.
