Poets & Writers Theater

“Be very patient, even patient with chaos,” Lydia Davis advises writers in this compilation of interviews by Louisiana Channel. Seasoned writers from around the world, including Alaa Al Aswany, Umberto Eco, Richard Ford, Patti Smith, and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, also offer their thoughts on how to keep writing.

“It was in the autumn—it felt like the perfect time to do this ritual, when everything’s changing to go to sleep for the winter....” In this interview at the 2018 Louisiana Literature festival in Denmark, CAConrad talks about how performing rituals after their boyfriend’s death gave rise to the poetry in their collection While Standing in Line for Death (Wave Books, 2017), which won the 2018 Lambda Literary Award in Gay Poetry.

“Everybody feels ashamed when they write. It’s a shameful practice.” In this 2018 interview with Louisiana Channel, Zadie Smith, author most recently of Swing Time (Penguin Press, 2016), discusses the positive aspects of shame and how it can be productive for the writing process.

“The lyric is a kind of small gift, and the fiction is more like putting on a theatrical production.” In this Louisiana Channel interview, Michael Ondaatje speaks about the differences in writing a poem versus a novel, his mentors, and what he discovers through the research that goes into his novels. Ondaatje recently won the Golden Man Booker Prize for The English Patient, and his novel Warlight (Jonathan Cape, 2018) is longlisted for the 2018 Man Booker Prize.

“I think physicists and poets are not as different as we like to think. The same unconscious processes are at work in both.” In this interview from the 2017 Louisiana Literature festival in Denmark, Siri Hustvedt talks about her background in neuroscience, the experiences of writing both nonfiction and fiction, and the value of approaching questions from different interdisciplinary perspectives.

“I narrate in such a free manner that, I hope, inspires the reader.” In this interview for Louisiana Channel, Olga Tokarczuk talks about air travel and how it influenced the story structure for her most recent novel, Flights (Riverhead Books, 2018), translated from the Polish by Jennifer Croft, which is longlisted for the 2018 Man Booker International Prize.

“I became a writer once I realized no one liked my stuff. I just had no choice but to keep going and start a new novel.” In an interview for Louisiana Channel, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Colson Whitehead talks about how rejections of his first manuscript pushed him forward to pursue writing and why he enjoys exploring different genres.

“I work on the paragraph as if it’s a little poem, as if it’s a musical composition...” In this interview with Louisiana Channel, Paul Auster talks about his writing habits, aging, creative obsession, his recent and upcoming projects, and the one-on-one intimacy that makes books different from other art forms.

“At some point I feel that the characters do exist...they become independent.” In this video from Louisiana Channel, Egyptian author Alaa Al Aswany speaks about how the characters in his novel The Yacoubian Building (American University in Cairo Press, 2004), translated from the Arabic by Humphrey Davies, began to take on a life of their own as he wrote them.

In this Louisiana Channel interview, Imbolo Mbue speaks about her love of New York City and the challenges of being black and working-class in America, which she explores in her debut novel, Behold the Dreamers (Random House, 2016). Mbue is one of the debut authors featured in “First Fiction 2016” in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“Usually I find something that won’t seem like an unfair end.” Novelist and translator Clemens Setz speaks with Louisiana Channel about the importance of the final sentence in a book, and the various ways authors like Jack Kerouac, John Irving, and Thomas Bernhard have written their last sentences.

"For me, there's something about habit that is elemental." Rachel Kushner, author of The Flamethrowers (Scribner, 2013), a finalist for the 2013 National Book Award, speaks with Louisiana Channel about the importance of persistence in her writing life.

In an interview with Tonny Vorm, Umberto Eco speaks from his home in Milan about the "pleasure of spending six, seven, eight years to prepare a story" and shares other words of wisdom and advice to offer to aspiring young writers. Eco's latest novel, Numero Zero, translated from the Italian by Richard Dixon, was published in November by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

“That’s the moon—it’s the ghost of the sun wandering the sky at night,” says Daniel Kehlmann. In this video from Louisiana Channel, Kehlmann and fellow writers CAConrad, Georgi Gospodinov, Guadalupe Nettel, Delphine de Vigan, and Yoko Tawada discuss the moon’s mysterious presence and why writers are drawn to it as we watch visuals of the moon captured by NASA paired with Claude Debussy’s “Clair de Lune.”

Poet and painter John Giorno gives a tour of his home on the Bowery in New York City and points out William Burroughs’s former bunker bedroom, kept intact with his bed, typewriters, and a bull’s-eye target. The building was a frequent hangout of artists including Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, Mark Rothko, and Robert Rauschenberg.

"Every human being has a creative impulse, and we all have the right to exercise this creative impulse." At the 2012 Louisiana Literature Festival, Patti Smith, whose new memoir, M Train, will be released on October 6 by Knopf, talks about creativity and what inspires her to write.

"There are two kinds of writing: One is very passionate and impulsive, and it can be extremely emotional. Then the other writing is more cool and maybe classical and more carefully shaped.” Joyce Carol Oates, whose memoir The Lost Landscape was published this month by Ecco, describes the different states of mind that have inspired her work.

“Do what you want to do, and don’t worry if it's a little odd or doesn’t fit the market.” Lydia Davis, whose latest collection of stories, Can't and Won't, was released in paperback by Picador in March, offers practical and reassuring advice for writers.

The Northern Irish novelist and poet reads from his poetry collections at the Louisiana Literature festival in Denmark in 2013. Laird's debut collection, To a Fault (Faber & Faber, 2005), won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. His latest collection, Go Giants, was published by Norton in 2013.

"I'm drawn to the beauty of sentences, I'm drawn even to the beauty in how emotion is portrayed in fiction." The award-winning author meditates on the idea of beauty in literature, as well as in life, and how it inspires her writing.