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"Number 1: Don't write what you know. Start with what you don't know, what you don't understand." In her craft talk at the 2012 Colgate Writers' Conference, novelist Dana Spiotta explains how she wrote Stone Arabia (Scribner, 2011) in six (not-so-easy) steps. Her new novel, Innocents and Others (Scribner, 2016), explores a friendship between two female filmmakers.
"He always had very intense intellectual pursuits in his personality...today people don't really realize that truly sophisticated artists thought a lot." Novelist and poet Stanley Crouch, a recipient of the 2016 Windham-Campbell Prize for Nonfiction, talks about Charlie Parker, the subject of his most recent book, Kansas City Lightning: The Rise and Times of Charlie Parker (Harper, 2013), the first in a planned two-volume series.
"The world is always a little bit slippery and strange, and what we think of as real is something that's always contingent in some way." Brian Evenson, author of the story collection A Collapse of Horses (Coffee House Press, 2016), talks about dreams, truth versus fiction, the strangeness of horses, and psychoanalysis before a reading at Skylight Books in Los Angeles.
"You have to research the type of people your characters are—you're getting to know them, and you're also discovering the contours of their stories...." Belinda McKeon, author of the novel Tender (Lee Boudreaux Books, 2016), talks to Frank J. Cunningham about her writing background and process at the 2015 Nantucket Book Festival.
"The moon barely showed itself, the river cut a trail between the fields, the cold changed to numbness the deeper I went in." In this book trailer, an excerpt of Michelle Hoover's new novel, Bottomland (Grove Press, 2016), is animated by Laura Harrison.
"This is my secret weapon: this large, red-brick building is the Hatcher Graduate Library at the University of Michigan." Scott Ellsworth, author of The Secret Game: A Wartime Story of Courage, Change, and Basketball's Lost Triumph (Little, Brown, 2015), which was named the winner of the 2016 PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing, gives a tour of his writing space at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
Kwame Dawes talks about the importance of literary activism at the National Book Foundation's 2016 "Why Reading Matters" conference in New York City. Dawes is the founder of the African Poetry Book Fund, which was an honoree of the National Book Foundation's 2015 Innovations in Reading Prize.
Raphael Montes is featured in this book trailer for his English-language debut, Perfect Days (Penguin Press, 2016), a crime novel translated from the Portuguese by Alison Entrekin. Montes was a finalist for both the Benvirá Literature Prize and the Machado de Assis Prize from the Brazilian Academy of Letters for his first novel, Suicidas (Saraiva/Benvirá, 2012).
"I didn't have any intention of representing India accurately or inaccurately. I had a story in mind and I pursued the story ruthlessly." Karan Mahajan speaks about his debut novel, Family Planning (Harper Perennial, 2008), and the creative challenges faced by a new generation of Indian writers. His second novel, The Association of Small Bombs (Viking, 2016), is featured in Page One in the March/April issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
“A lot of poems for me begin in the sense of feeling annihilated in some way or another.” Idra Novey discusses her poetic beginnings at the Academy of American Poets’ 2014 Poets Forum. Her debut novel, Ways to Disappear (Little, Brown, 2016), is featured in Page One in the March/April issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
