“Writing the surfing scenes terrified me. I worried about pushing readers away—writing passages that would only connect to surfers and not to the larger audience. But the bigger concern was just what you describe: the inability to translate such a physical sensation onto the page.”
“There came a day, about ten years ago, when I stood with my father in front of an elevator in Denver—we were helping one of my brothers move—and he had no idea what it was for.”
“I would be sitting there typing, typing, typing and saying, ‘Die, die, die'”: Jane Smiley talks with Mary Camille Beckman about practice novels, Dickens, and her forthcoming trilogy.
Twenty years after its initial publication in Britain, Geoff Dyer’s The Search appears in American print.
Travis Kurowski talks to Jen Michalski about writing in every form, from comic book poetry to the novel (and back again).
“Writing is nothing but entering the memories of the body”: Bulgarian writer Viriginia Zaharieva talks with Steven Wingate about her novel Nine Rabbits.
“I wanted the reader to feel wounded that these souls had been taken from us,” Patrick Hicks says of the minor characters in his new novel, The Commandant of Lubizec.
Kim Church told me she was writing a novel titled Byrd the first time we met. We were at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (VCCA) in Amherst, walking a lane after dinner, cows grazing in the adjacent pasture. I’m sure I heard “Bird” even when it became clear that Byrd is a character. The surprise of homonyms captured me. “This novel,” I thought, “will be poetry.” Now, four years later, the novel is almost out; I have read the galley and, I’m thrilled to say, I was right. Sparse and complex, Byrd (Dzanc Books, 2014) makes rich use of extended […]
Michelle Hoover talks with novelist Lisa Borders about the pleasures and anxieties of crafting a novel.
“I can only write if I have stolen something valuable that day”: Shawn Andrew Mitchell asks Jesse Ball about lies, dreams, and his latest novel, Silence Once Begun.
