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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.
“You don’t have to have an MFA to be a writer, you’re a writer by writing.” In this 2017 Talks at Google event, Grant Faulkner, author of Pep Talks for Writers: 52 Insights and Actions to Boost Your Creative Mojo (Chronicle Books, 2017) and The Art of Brevity: Crafting the Very Short Story (University of New Mexico Press, 2023), discusses tips to boost creativity and endurance when writing fiction with author Anthony Francis. For more from Faulkner, read his essays on writing from our Craft Capsule series.
“I never felt that I wrote [my poems] anyway. I would feel them coming from way off, and then they would come toward me and if I didn’t catch them, they went through me and went on. So I just figured they were part of the universe and not me.” In this excerpt from the 2017 film In Person: World Poets, a collaboration between Bloodaxe Books and filmmaker Pamela Robertson-Pearce, the late poet Ruth Stone reads her poems from her home in Vermont.
In this 2017 interview, Rabih Alameddine discusses the themes and motifs present in his novel The Angel of History (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2016), which won the 2017 Arab American Book Award in fiction and the 2017 Lambda Award for Gay Fiction, with poet Kamelya Omayma Youssef for the Arab American National Museum.
“The best writing advice I ever got was, don’t give up and you can be a writer, if you work really hard and don’t stop writing.” In this Audible interview, New Yorker staff writer and author Ariel Levy speaks about finding her voice, writing about women’s lives, her experience with maternal grief, and her memoir, The Rules Do Not Apply (Random House, 2017).
“Scientists say the average human/ life gets three months longer every year. / By this math, death will be optional,” reads Nicole Sealey from her poem “The First Person Who Will Live to Be One Hundred and Fifty Years Old Has Already Been Born,” which appears in her collection Ordinary Beast (Ecco, 2017), in this reading with Morgan Parker, author of Magical Negro (Tin House Books, 2019), at Scripps College.
“What persuades in poetry, what moves, what transforms—and what is memorable—starts with music.” Jorie Graham talks about the importance of musicality and the influences of American modernist and English romantic poetry on her writing in this Big Think video. Graham’s collection Fast (Ecco, 2017) is featured in Page One in the May/June 2017 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
In this Knopf video, Kazuo Ishiguro, who was awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize in Literature, speaks about what he calls “double-cross metaphors” and how “tilting the reality of the world just a little bit” in his stories provides inspiration. For more Ishiguro, read “Never Let Me Go: A Profile of Kazuo Ishiguro” by John Freeman from the May/June 2005 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
In this 2018 92nd Street Y event, Valeria Luiselli reads from her book Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions (Coffee House Press, 2017) and speaks with Maria Hinojosa, executive producer and founding anchor of Latino USA on NPR, about what she witnessed as a volunteer court translator for undocumented Latin American children facing deportation.
“I should share with you that I did not intend to be a fiction writer, I did not intend to write a historical novel…I did intend to always, however, tell the truth,” says Min Jin Lee about writing her novel Pachinko (Grand Central Publishing, 2017), which has been adapted into a television series, in this 2018 reading and conversation with Claire Messud at Harvard University.
