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“There are no rules to writing...and if there are rules, really they’re there to be broken.” Colum McCann, author of Letters to a Young Writer: Some Practical and Philosophical Advice (Random House, 2017), speaks to Jeffrey Brown about the challenges and excitement of writing today at the 2017 AWP conference and book fair.
"I set out in this book to write beyond my experience. As Colum McCann says...'Write towards what you want to know.'" Sunil Yapa recounts wisdom he learned from his mentors, and describes the inspiration for his debut novel, Your Heart Is a Muscle the Size of a Fist (Little, Brown, 2016), which is featured in Page One in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
In this 2009 video Colum McCann discusses his novel Let the Great World Spin; he also answers the question, "Do you believe you're a writer yet?" McCann's latest novel, TransAtlantic, was recently nominated for the 2013 Man Booker Prize.
The National Book Award-winning author of Let the Great World Spin recently spoke with the PBS NewsHour's Jeffrey Brown about his latest novel, TransAtlantic, which features a fictional braiding of the narratives of Frederick Douglass traveling through Ireland in 1845, the first nonstop flight across the Atlantic in 1919, and Senator George Mitchell in 1998 trying to forge a peace treaty in Northern Ireland. (Check out Brown's retake at the beginning of the clip.)
