Back in the fall of 2012, Sebastian Matthews hosted Russell Banks as Visiting Writer for Warren Wilson College’s Harwood-Cole Lecture Series. Knowing he’d be in town for a few days, Matthews arranged to interview Banks, who is a long-time family friend, on Jeff Davis’ radio show Word Play. What follows is Part II of their conversation.
Back in the fall of 2012, Sebastian Matthews hosted Russell Banks as Visiting Writer for Warren Wilson College’s Harwood-Cole Lecture Series. Knowing he’d be in town for a few days, Matthews arranged to interview Banks, who is a long-time family friend, on Jeff Davis’ radio show Word Play. What follows is Part I of their conversation.
Meet State of the Book presenter Ellen Airgood, author of South of Superior.
Debra Spark on what’s funny in fiction–and what’s not. “The humor that works in literary fiction, the humor I like, is female. I mean ‘female’ in a pretty stereotypical way here. I don’t mean that the literary work is by women per se, but that it is relational.”
We live on the edge of a continent. Our world teeters between land and sea, washed in whimsical coastal weather. Here, cusp is truth. Liminal is how things are, and the World is a story we make up. And tear down. And make up again.
Cristina García talks about her newest novel, King of Cuba, “total Fidel Castro immersion,” the centrality of poetry to her life and work, and how her scholarly and journalistic background has helped her writing.
Natalie Bakopoulos’s debut novel, The Green Shore, is just out in paperback in the US, and has been recently released in Bulgaria as Зеленият бряг. Bistra Velichkova talks with Bakopoulos about her recent time in Bulgaria as a Sozopol Fiction Seminar Fellow, and the historical events of the military dictatorship of Greece (1967-1973) that inspired her novel.
Acclaimed fiction writer Rick Moody speaks with debut author Jonathan Callahan, author of The Consummation of Dirk, which won the 8th Starcherone Prize for Innovative Fiction, about “conventional” writing, accomplishing something that makes one “feel worthy to be alive,” and influences, among other things. They have never met.
On a recent trip out of New York, headed home to Seattle, where my wife and I share a house and also where much of my writing is done, I found myself on the jet-way leading from the terminal to the airplane. The passengers were backed up single-file along the tunnel, not in any uniform way, but in that impatient, lean to the right then lean to the left then look down the row toward where they should have been five minutes before kind of way. It’s intimate in a way only elevators are intimate. Everyone so close you can […]
Any writer who desires to get at the truth of human experience should read poetry, because it contains a multitude of possibility. Poetry is the mud that grows the seed that becomes the forest. It is the clay that makes the brick that forms the building. It is the blood that moves the body that holds the spirit. Poetry has the essence of life in it. Poets voice that which has no voice in this world. They speak in tongues, and hope their words reach the ears and touch the hearts of those who know what it means to live. […]
