A Conversation with David Milch

I expect that most of the human journey is involved with figuring out what the borders are and determining which one to cross and which ones to stay away from and things like that.

A Conversation with China Miéville

This interview is not currently available online.

A Conversation with Dan Chaon

Things are changing really fast in terms of even what the reading experience is. I stand by the claim that short stories and poems tend to be pretty far outside of the purview of mass culture. You’d be hard pressed to talk to a man on the street who could tell you a story that had been written in his lifetime. He might be able to mention Jack London or O’Henry or something like that. But at the same time, I don’t think the fact that fewer people read them or that they’re not part of the center of mass culture makes them any less vital.

A Conversation with Stuart Dybek

We worry, as we should, about First Amendment censorship, but each of us ha s his own personal level of censorship going on. For all the lip service paid to the imagination, getting to it isn’t always easy. The imagination can be a very subversive force, and both society and the individual can be wary of that.

A Conversation with Brian Turner

This text is not currently available online.

A Conversation with Jo Ann Beard

This interview is not currently available online.

A Conversation with Michael Byers

Interview conducted by Polly Rosenwaike. This text is not currently available online.

A Conversation with Aimee Bender

Brian Beglin conducted this interview over the phone and through e-mail with Aimee Bender in May and June 2010.

A Conversation with Natasha Trethewey

This interview was conducted in March 2010 at the University of Missouri, where the poet participated in writing residencies with the graduate students of the creative writing program.

A Conversation with Robert Wrigley

If you don’t love stories, then what takes the place of that desire? We live by stories; they are the bedrock of articulate human existence. It’s not possible to imagine a world in which there are no stories. The problem comes in the telling, of course. In my family, stories were a kind of spendable currency, and everyone told them. I suppose if one were determined to forget where he came from, that would require a kind of militant denial of one’s own past, and while such a denial might be eff ected, it’s really a species of pathology.

A Conversation with Pattiann Rogers

I’ve spent much of my life being attuned to watching for an image or a phrase that can trigger what might be a poem-could become a poem. What triggers a poem for me is not the same as what triggers an essay. My mind is geared now to looking for, or to watching out for, the image that attracts my attention or the phrase or the strange juxtaposition that strikes me bodily, or an odd question or supposition. If I’m excited by something bodily, and curious about it, I generally want to delve into it and explore it with poetry. That’s the way I ordinarily watch the world around me.

A Conversation with Aleksandar Hemon

It becomes part of your memory, and there is this porousness between the narrator’s mind and the reader’s mind. At some point, it literally shares space, narrative space. To me, that’s the exciting thing, that somehow, out of nothing, I as a writer create a space into which you as the reader can step.

A Conversation with Ellen Bryant Voigt

This is a culture that does not honor the arts, increasingly does not honor the arts, does not honor literacy, does not honor intelligence, does not honor contemplation. That’s what we’re swimming in. I think you have to find whatever it is that drove you to begin writing in the first place, and you have to feed it.

A Conversation with Benjamin Percy

Believability is in minutiae, those small details that rise up. If you’re referencing a sunset-Chekov points this out-it’s often a waste of language to talk about things generally: the way the sunlight filters through the sky and over the forest. Instead focus on a bunch of broken glass on the ground. . .

A Conversation with Rodney Jones

I grew up four miles outside of a town of six hundred, and by the time I was thirteen, I knew most of those people. My father knew all of them and others for miles around, men and women, black and white, and when he met a person he did not know, it was not long before he made a connection with someone that they both knew. In fact, most of the talk in the country was about people, and not just the living or the recently dead. There was a kind of web, a legending and a curiosity that enclosed us. I take that with me, and I imagine that the longer cultural habit does go back to Chaucer, but not just through books and not just through language.

A Conversation With Chuck Klosterman

It is very difficult and kind of stupid to be confident about something that is inherently unknowable. Let’s say I think a band is better than another band: I might really believe that, and maybe it’s true. Maybe it’s true. Maybe I’m wrong. I probably think it’s probably true, in my opinion. So I don’t know why it would be better writing if I removed the “probablys” and made it a “stronger” statement. Criticism is an unclear world, and the major critics, or rather the ones who’ve seemed to establish the tone of how criticism is written, have concluded that having an authoritative voice is better, even if that fabricated authority doesn’t match the way they think. I use qualifiers because I think things need qualification.

A Conversation with Charles Baxter

This generation takes in more information daily than my parents and grandparents ever had to. With the Internet and the screen culture, we’re all living in a period of data smog. Part of what it means to write a story now involves noticing that environment. I’m really interested in the way people do not pay attention to certain things anymore. People listen much more selectively than they once did. It’s a feature of our time that you see people walking down the sidewalk talking on the phone. That’s amazing! They’re on the phone! These things remain a feature of our lives that our grandparents would never have believed.

A Conversation with Julian Barnes

[On the genesis of his novel Arthur & George] You think someone’s guilty, you believe they’re guilty, but how can you know they’re guilty, how can you prove they’re guilty? This tied in, I realized, with Conan Doyle’s black hole of emotions, this secret area of his life, which had never been written about before, probably because there was no documentary evidence — these ten years when he was involved with another woman while his wife was suffering from tuberculosis.

A Conversation with Terrance Hayes

The full text of this interview is currently not available online.

And [Thelonius] Monk says, Man, every time you play you’re rehearsing! And I thought, That’s profound. It’s true, every poem is a rehearsal for the next poem, which is a rehearsal for the next poem. The idea of improvisation, rehearsal, movement, experiment–that’s what I’m interested in as an artist.

A Conversation with Jeffrey Eugenides

The first ten years of my writing life were spent thinking about voice, tone, control of language, precision of language. Then I had to teach myself to plot. The Virgin Suicides doesn’t have a whole lot of plot. It’s a book that’s carried on its voice to a large measure. With Middlesex, I taught myself plot.

A Conversation with Sven Birkerts

“I am looking for the bigger, deeper, more sustaining project. But so far all I have are inklings. One is in a mental file called ‘the death of the imagination….’”

A Conversation with Jonathan Lethem

[I]f every admirable result from setting a story in the future or from using images of the fantastic or extrapolative concepts isn’t science fiction — because it’s too good — then all that’s left to represent the label are the failed attempts to use those motifs. So of course the genre is contemptible.

An Interview with A.M. Homes

“There’s a big difference between creative nonfiction and journalism.  Creative nonfition seems to be that blurry ground where memoir lives, and where a lot of personal narrative lives.”

An Interview with Zakes Mda

As a gangster, that’s when I actually earnestly became an artist as well. I had already been writing since the time I was six years old. When not fighting in the street, I would be somewhere painting pictures, writing poems, …

An Interview with the Writers of America the Book

We didn’t really concern ourselves about how informed our audience was going to be. What we wanted was for you to open the book and see the naked Supreme Court justices, and you laugh at that, on a certain level independent of your knowledge of who these people are. We wanted to make sure that the book had a lot of pretty accessible, fun stuff that wasn’t dependent on your level of education or knowledge. On the flip side, some of us are kind of nerdy in our love of history and literature, so we put in jokes for us. One of the things I laughed hardest at was a sidebar in the Supreme Court chapter, the landmark case of V v. V settled on fifth appeal (V v. V V), which was a reference to a miniseries and a Thomas Pynchon book, so not a lot of people are going to get that joke, but we didn’t worry about it because we know that you turn three pages and you’ve got Scalia’s dong.