Theater video tags: in memoriam

A Conversation With N. Scott Momaday

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“Words are the intricate bonds of language. Words make a family, a tribe, and a civilization. Language is the context of our experience.” Poet, novelist, and Native American scholar N. Scott Momaday speaks about the power of storytelling and his extensive writing career in a conversation with Dean Nelson from his home in New Mexico for the 2023 Writer’s Symposium by the Sea at Point Loma Nazarene University. Momaday died at the age of eighty-nine on January 24, 2024.

Crossroads by Louise Glück

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“My body, now that we will not be traveling together much longer / I begin to feel a new tenderness toward you, very raw and unfamiliar / like what I remember of love when I was young.” In this video, Nobel Prize–winning author Louise Glück reads “Crossroads” from her collection A Village Life (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009), which was shortlisted for the 2010 Griffin Poetry Prize. Glück died at the age of eighty on October 13, 2023.

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John Updike on The Early Stories

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“I saw a writer who was quite new to the craft, but excited by it, and sort of experimental, and there’s a freshness to these stories that surprised me.” In this 2003 PBS NewsHour interview, renowned author and critic John Updike speaks about looking back on his early career and the stories included in his collection The Early Stories: 1953-1975 (Knopf, 2003) with correspondent Jeffrey Brown.

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Martin Amis on Inside Story

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“Don’t waste your life reading stuff that isn’t giving you pleasure.” In this 2020 CBS Mornings interview with cohost Jeff Glor, novelist Martin Amis talks candidly about his deep friendships with writers, grief and death, and his autobiographical novel Inside Story (Knopf, 2020). Amis died at the age of seventy-three on May 19, 2023.

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Elegy by Linda Pastan

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“Last night the moon lifted itself / on one wing / over the fields.” In this 1992 recording for Howard County Poetry and Literature Society’s The Writing Life, Linda Pastan reads her poem “Elegy,” which appears in her collection Imperfect Paradise (Norton, 1989). Pastan died at the age of ninety on January 30, 2023.

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Remembering Charles Simic

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“The best things that happen in poems are discoveries, they’re accidents; what comes out of our imagination, out of our deepest self, out of our memory.” In this 2007 PBS NewsHour interview, Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Charles Simic speaks about his childhood in Yugoslavia, writing about war, becoming a U.S. poet laureate, and the freedom in poetry. Simic died at the age of eighty-four on January 9, 2023.

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Summer Morning

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“I know all the dark places / Where the sun hasn’t reached yet...” Charles Simic reads his poem “Summer Morning,” which he says needs no introduction, in this video for an installment of Poetry Breaks, a series created by Leita Luchetti in the 1980s and 1990s presented in partnership with the Academy of American Poets. The Pulitzer Prize–winning poet died at the age of eighty-four on January 9, 2023.

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Hilton Als on Joan Didion

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“Joan Didion taught me that family was always part of the story, along with place, and that the writer’s job was to face the terror, beauty, banality, and truth inherent in being a citizen of both.” In this video, Hilton Als speaks about Joan Didion’s influence on his writing at a celebration of her life and work held at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York.

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