“Creatively, music’s biggest impact is attention to sound—mainly rhythm. A sentence always needs a certain number of syllables in it. And my characters have soundtracks.” Steven Wingate talks with Chris Harding Thornton about her debut novel, Pickard County Atlas.
“When you say that I’m prolific, I never think of myself that way because I really don’t spend all day writing for the most part. But I do write almost every day. It just adds up.” Leigh Camacho Rourks talks with John McNally about his new collection, The Fear of Everything.
“I loved researching this book, finding out about chronophotography, pictorialism, the 1906 earthquake, and the artists of the time.” Ron Nyren talks with Margot Livesey about his debut novel, The Book of Lost Light.
“In contemporary life, sports are a lot like politics or religion in that they activate these very deep-seated affinities, which we re-enact continuously, and often without examination.” Melissa Scholes Young talks with Katherine Hill about her new novel, A Short Move.
“I don’t feel compromised by the genre.” Jennifer Pashley talks with Barrett Bowlin about her first thriller, The Watcher, out now from Crooked Lane Books.
“I wish I had a great answer to the question of finding the right mix of pursuing activism and art, but it comes down to simply using one’s time as effectively as possible.” Steven Wingate talks with David Heska Wanbli Weiden about his novel Winter Counts.
“How many breakthroughs like that can a writer have?” Pamela Painter chats with Steve Yarbrough about her work over the years and her new collection, Fabrications: New and Selected Stories.
“I think the South is worth fighting for, with all its issues. I think it’s worth fighting for change here.” Eleanor J. Bader interviews Kasey Thornton about her debut collection, Lord the One You Love Is Sick, the writing process, and life in the contemporary South.
Shann Ray talks with Peter Geye about novels and people, water and existential erosion, human nature and the writing life, as well as his new novel, Northernmost.
“I wrote out of a kind of homesickness, I guess, and out of a sickness of spirit over what was happening at the border, the dehumanization of children.” Melanie Bishop interviews Beth Alvarado about her new collection, Jillian in the Borderlands, out this week from Black Lawrence Press.
“When we connect to the personal story we understand the macro-story. The history. The bigger story.” Isabel Allende talks with Nina Buckless about her new novel, A Long Petal of the Sea.
Edward Hamlin talks with Rachel Swearingen about her debut collection, How to Walk on Water, as well as her roots as a writer and a Midwesterner, challenges women face in harmonizing public and private personas, and more.
