From the Archives: “My overall feeling is that it likely took a lot of energy just to keep track of what was going on around me at home—to make sure everyone was okay and the day wasn’t going to veer off into territory that felt fraught and unstable.” Paula Saunders talks with Steven Wingate about her novel The Distance Home and the winner-take-all emotional violence that underpins America.
“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.
“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.
“I count on memory to work as a kind of filter, and I trust that what sticks in the filter, even if I don’t know why it’s there, is there for a reason.” Michael Welch talks with Larry Watson about his new novel and a career of writing the High Plains.
“I come from patriarchy, and I would like to have written myself out of it. Strong female forces commanded several generations. The women were bent and sometimes destroyed by the pressure to submit, and the stories, the narrative drives, kept coming up male.” Terese Svoboda talks with Steven Wingate about her new short story collection and our species’ long-term relationship with the open spaces of the Midwest.
“The great pleasure of reading is to be able to fill in and anticipate, and I want to provide that pleasure to my readers as well”: Adrian Koesters talks with Steven Wingate about Baltimore in the 1950s and writing her debut novel, Union Square.
“Twenty-five years ago, serious writers in Idaho were denying the [regional] label in any way they could. Today the climate has changed. One of my students complained, ‘You’re from Montana. I’m just from New Jersey and I have nothing to write about.’” Mary Clearman Blew talks with Steven Wingate about writing the West and her new novel, Ruby Dreams of Janis Joplin.
