“Eventually, I made peace with the artifice: all of it is manipulated, all of it designed to form a cohesive whole. And then I really began to figure out potential connections between characters and events.”
“It was tempting to allow those two characters in ‘Body Asking Shadow’ to find a way to communicate with actual language in the final scene, but in the end it felt both truer to the story and more interesting to let them communicate only through unlikely means, and to have that nonetheless suffice.”
On her most recent collection, Almost Famous Women: “I was fascinated by the orbit of fame, the way it influences a power dynamic, or the way we are so quick to be reverent of greatness.”
“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.”
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.”
“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.”
Johanna Skibsrud talks to Molly Antopol about Quartet for the End of Time‘s musical legacy and the political and personal histories at the heart of her latest novel.
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.”
