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“It doesn’t interest me to know how a book will end, I have to discover that for myself.” In this video from the National Centre for Writing, Eimear McBride, who won the 2014 Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction for her debut novel, A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing, speaks about how character and story and the process of discovery are the keys to her writing process.
Writers and editors Victor Dwyer and Charlotte Gill discuss how they determine good writing from bad writing, what they look for in a first read, and the changing landscape of writing in this 2014 conversation moderated by journalist Ian Brown at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity in Alberta, Canada. “There’s the sense that the writer is being completely frank with their audience and yet at the same time, they’re completely in control and utterly trustworthy,” says Gill.
“It came to me one night as I was falling asleep / that I had finished with those amorous adventures / to which I had long been a slave.” In this video from the 2014 National Book Award finalists reading, Louise Glück reads her poem “An Adventure,” which appears in her National Book Award–winning collection Faithful and Virtuous Night (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014).
In this 2014 interview, Celeste Ng talks with Amazon senior editor Chris Schluep about becoming a mother while writing her debut novel, Everything I Never Told You (Penguin Press, 2014), elements of story inspiration, and the setting of her second novel, Little Fires Everywhere (Penguin Press, 2017). Ng is one of the honorees for the 2023 Poets & Writers Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award.
“It seems to me that prose, it may be lyrical, but it isn’t meant to be sung.” In this 2014 Academy of American Poets event, Edward Hirsch discusses the history and practice of poets writing prose with Toi Derricotte and Claudia Rankine.
“My friend Michael and I are walking home arguing about the movie. / He says that he believes a person can love someone / and still be able to murder that person.” Marie Howe reads her poem “After the Movie,” which appears in her collection The Kingdom of Ordinary Time (Norton, 2008), in this 2014 video for the Page Meets Stage series in New York City.
“I met Muriel at Sarah Lawrence in 1963.” In this short film produced for the 2014 Ashfield Film Festival, renowned author Alice Walker talks about her friendship with Muriel Rukeyser and her influence as a poet. “It’s because of poets like Muriel that some people do survive as whole,” says Walker.
“There is no before. Only now.” Watch this trailer for Station Eleven, an HBO limited series based on the 2014 novel of the same name by Emily St. John Mandel. Adapted by Patrick Somerville, the series stars Mackenzie Davis, Himesh Patel, and Gael García Bernal.
“The art of poetry for me is the art of composing a sequence of vowels, consonants, and sentence sounds that will seem moving, meaningful,” says former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky in this 2014 episode of Cortland Review’s Poets in Person series, in which he discusses his beginnings as a poet and his philosophy behind writing.
“I was born passing / off the problem of the twentieth century: I was born.” In this 2016 video, Gregory Pardlo reads “Written By Himself” from his Pulitzer Prize–winning poetry collection, Digest (Four Way Books, 2014), accompanied by the Finnish jazz combo Hot Heros at the Annikki Poetry Festival in Finland. For a writing prompt inspired by this poem, visit The Time Is Now.
