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In this 2013 video, Nobel laureate Alice Munro talks about her fascination with reading and writing at an early age in Canada’s countryside, how she can become “desperately consumed” with writing, and the ways in which her writing life changed throughout her long-standing career. Munro died at the age of ninety-two on May 13, 2024.
In this 2014 Louisiana Channel interview from his home in Brooklyn, Paul Auster talks about how a chance meeting with legendary baseball player Willie Mays led him to become a writer and what he has learned about writing. “The essence of being an artist is to confront the things you’re trying to do, to tackle it head on, and if it’s good, it will have its own beauty.” Auster died at the age of seventy-seven on April 30, 2024.
“If I must die, / you must live / to tell my story…” In this video filmed for the Palestine Festival of Literature, actor Brian Cox reads “If I Must Die” by the late Palestinian poet and English literature professor Refaat Alareer, who died after an Israeli airstrike on Gaza on December 6, 2023. Alareer’s posthumous book of the same name will be published in September by OR Books.
In this 2001 Lannan Foundation event, John Barth speaks about the ways in which self-confidence and temperament play a role in his writing in a conversation with literary critic Michael Silverblatt. Barth died at the age of ninety-three on April 2, 2024. For more from Barth, read “All Trees Are Oak Trees: Introductions to Literature” from the January/February 2004 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
In this 2013 video, Lyn Hejinian reads from her book The Book of a Thousand Eyes (Omnidawn, 2012) for the Lunch Poem reading series at the University of California in Berkeley, where she was Professor and John F. Hotchkis Chair Emerita. Hejinian died at the age of eighty-two on February 24, 2024.
In this 2022 virtual reading hosted by the Frostburg Center for Literary Arts in Maryland, Elizabeth Arnold reads a selection of poems from her books, including her most recent, Skeleton Coast (Flood Editions, 2017), and discusses dream poems and her writing career. Arnold died at the age of sixty-six on February 24, 2024.
“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.
“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.
“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.
“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.
