Ten Questions for Jana Larson

“I can’t imagine myself without this book.” —Jana Larson, author of Reel Bay
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“I can’t imagine myself without this book.” —Jana Larson, author of Reel Bay
Eight authors—Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Mark Wunderlich, Rachel Eliza Griffiths, Samantha Hunt, Edward Carey, Juan Felipe Herrera, Darcey Steinke, and Terrance Hayes—offer a glimpse into their notebooks and their creative process.
The author describes her failed attempts at sitting down to write, and turns to the lives and methods of famous writers, as well as her experiences as a mother, to find a way to write with a sense of spontaneity and play.
Benjamin Percy cautions beginning writers to avoid overusing backstory in their fiction, offering strategies for moving the story forward by slipping a character’s history into the dramatic present.
When I stepped off the plane in Aspen, Colorado, in June 1997, I found a 60-year-old Hunter S. Thompson waiting for me in a convertible Cadillac blasting Norman Greenbaum’s “Spirit in the Sky” at full volume. I was terrified; he was giddy. He was playing the song because it was a part of the soundtrack put together for the film version of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas that was scheduled to hit theaters the following summer, and he could not have been happier.
Novelists Caroline Leavitt and Jonathan Evison discuss the books that just didn’t work.
In the wake of the Charlie Hebdo massacre, a French scholar and literary translator discusses the need for translators to be well versed in intersectional knowledge of culture and history.
A personal and in-depth look at the life and poetry of John Berryman, with particular focus on The Dream Songs.
A writer learns that letting go of the need for perfectionism and allowing the creative impulse to guide the mind fluidly and freely can revitalize the practice of writing.