Poets & Writers Theater

“Don’t worry about whether you’re writing anything, worry about if you’re sitting there attempting to write something or not.” Mohsin Hamid speaks to Granta about his most recent novel, Exit West (Riverhead Books, 2017), the job of being a writer, and what he has learned from Douglas Adams.

Melissa Broder, author of the debut novel, The Pisces (Hogarth, 2018), talks about changes in her writing process, astrology, unlikeable female protagonists, and writing about “the way things that we desire can kill us.”

“The main advice I would have is to be really easy on yourself, to shut off as much as you can the voice that’s saying maybe you’re wasting your time, and maybe everything that you do is stupid.” Elif Batuman, a finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for her debut novel, The Idiot (Penguin Press, 2017), talks to Granta about the literary model of Charles M. Schulz’s Snoopy and the blurred boundary between fiction and nonfiction.

“I look back, just with a little wonder. Wonder that I stuck with this thing.” In this 2004 interview with Jeffrey Brown for PBS NewsHour, Philip Roth reflects on his writing career and the role of a writer. Roth died at the age of eighty-five on May 22, 2018.

In this short film, Eve L. Ewing talks about her writing process and reads one of her poems for AIR Serenbe, the nonprofit artist residency program of the Serenbe Institute in Georgia. Ewing is the author of Electric Arches (Haymarket Books, 2017) and is featured in “The Whole Self: Our Thirteenth Annual Look at Debut Poets” in the January/February 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.