Writers At Cornell

Interview: Crystal Williams

2009-05-07T07:04:00.003-05:00

Note: due to a scheduling problem, this interview and two others are text-only. Audio podcasts will return in the fall.

Crystal Williams’ third collection of poems, Troubled Tongues, was chosen by Marilyn Nelson for the 2009 Long Madgett Poetry Award and was short-listed for the Idaho Prize. It is forthcoming in January 2009. Her poetry appears in the American Poetry Review, 5AM, Callaloo, Court Green, Luna, Fourth River, The Indiana Review, and in the anthologies American Poetry: The Next Generation, Poetry Nation, Sweet Jesus, and Beyond the Frontier, among others. Raised in Detroit, Michigan and Madrid, Spain, she is currently working on two plays and a collection of essays. She holds a Bachelor of Arts from New York University and a Master of Fine Arts from Cornell. Williams is Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, and lives with her adopted standard poodle Oliver. They spend as much time as they can in Chicago, Illinois, roaming the lake front and keeping tabs on the stars. Williams read at Cornell's Goldwin Smith Hall on April 19, 2009, and answered J. Robert Lennon's questions via email the previous week.

Though your second book came close on the heels of the first, I see a real transformation between the two--"Lunatic" seems less tentative, more free with the rhythms of natural speech, more comfortable with long lines and snatches of dialogue. It seems as though the poet is allowing herself to be more obscured, to serve as a conduit for the sounds of the world. Do you see it this way?

The short answer is: Yes. I do see it that way. I think what you’re describing is growth and hope that in each of my books growth—artistic, intellectual, spiritual--is evident.

It is true that in my second book, Lunatic, my interest in and fascination with various modes of storytelling began to crystallize in such a way that I was more conscious of and deliberate with the types of languages I employed. And it is also true that prior to the publication of that second collection, I’d been labeled a “code-switcher,” which, from the labeler was meant to be pejorative. And yet, I do code-switch. I do it purposefully and all day and every day. And so that was of interest, the ways in which African-Americans in particular, or perhaps more broadly, minority communities in this country, move back and forth between what I’ll call a “home language” and an “away language.” Investigating, challenging, and documenting that duality is of deep interest to me. There is so much about American identity to be found in those crossings. So the poems in Lunatic were a beginning of sorts. In Troubled Tongues, that same fascination with modes of telling is more overtly addressed and is, really, the book’s primary goal. Another goal of the third book was to challenge myself to become more artistically agile and to become better able to cross aesthetic boundaries.

It's easy to make a facile comparison of your poems, with their elevated colloquial language, political engagement, and of course all the ampersands, to the work of Amiri Baraka. But I was listening to the radio show "Bookworm" the other day and heard a group of poets talk about their relationship to Walt Whitman, and now I can't help hearing something of his long, wild litanies in your poems, too. What's your relationship to Whitman, and for that matter the many other seminal American poets who could never have conceived of such a thing as a forceful black woman writer?

Well, first, thanks for thinking I’m a forceful writer. That’s great. Secondly, it’s an interesting thing to think about Baraka as a forefather. I don’t really place myself firmly in his continuum, though I admire his artistic trajectory, and the power of the BAM. Of Baraka’s work, I am most enthralled by “Preface to a Twenty-Volume Suicide Note,” which I think is a gorgeous, gorgeous poem. To your question to do with seminal poets: Margaret Walker, Nikki Giovanni, Langston Hughes, and Sonia Sanchez influenced me in my early-reading life. As an adult reader (and a poet) I find deep lessons in Clifton, Gilbert, Gluck, Everwine, any poet, really, who deals masterfully with metaphor. I also value tenderness and compassion in poems. So I often find lessons/poems to do with grace and generosity the most helpful as I think about what I’m driven to say. But that list of seminal American poets is too long to engage, I think.

There is a thing we poets sometimes do: We pontificate, typically over some sort of liquor, about who our forefathers and foremothers are. Sometimes this can get pretty rowdy, especially if it’s a group of my friends and we’re at, oh, I don’t know, a conference or something. Mostly, Whitman and Dickinson seem to be the two folks talk about most commonly. And though I’d love to be really clever or interesting, Whitman is the poet upon whose door I most consistently knock. It’s true. So in those conversations or jonesing sessions (whichever you like to call it), I just say “Whitman’s my guy” and leave it at that.

The title of "Lunatic" puts me in the mind of the oft-cited connection between madness and art. I certainly don't think you've got to be crazy to be a good writer, but it seems to me the poet needs to be able to break conventional patterns of language and thought--to rip them apart, down to their rudiments, and reassemble them in new and surprising ways, which outside the confines of art could be construed as lunacy. Do you feel that you have access, when you write, to some small kind of madness?

Yes. But lunacy is triggered and manifests multifariously. For me, a heightened state of emotion is a tremendous artistic catalyst. If I am annoyed or disturbed or joyful, then I am gnashing and gnashing means thinking and that means a poem isn’t far away.

The poems in "Kin" are full of physicality: bodies touching, kissing, eating, dancing; there are lots of mentions of hair, and hips, and skin. "Lunatic," while still aware of the body, seems more inward, more about consciousness. Can you comment on this shift in focus?

Kin was a book that tried to document a group of people, a series of relationships from whom I often felt alienated. In order to document I needed to describe. So the bodies were a way of describing fully the external world. Lunatic is exactly about interiority versus exteriority, consciousness manifested in either realm. As a writer I am much more interested and invested in interiority than exteriority. It’s one of the reasons I’ve never written fiction. I could care less what the body is doing in the room or how it gets from the door to the car. I’m much more interested in the internal machinations, which is why my favored poets are people who write, principally, in metaphor.

In Troubled Tongues, the body reemerges as a focal point. But here, a focal point by which I try to get at the more spiritual sense of who we are. Questions to do with race and beauty, for example, depend on the external because the external is the primary means by which we define one’s racial identity or one’s aesthetic value. Part of the book’s project is calling into question the value in the external and relating that to our use of language, as language is the manifestation of the internal.

In "Lunatic" you write, "We are a conglomeration of memories--some real, many not." I like the notion of the writer as a person who takes this natural process of self-mythologization and bends it to her will. To what extent is your writerly impulse an exercise in elevated self-expression, and how much of it is focused outward? And has the balance between the two changed over time?

Aren’t all writers simply engaged in the act of “elevated self-expression”? I’m not sure I understand this question fully other than to say that my work is projective work. That is, I approach the page in an attempt to say something to someone other than myself. This, however, doesn’t mean that I’m not also speaking to myself or that I don’t often surprise myself. But the reason I approach the page isn’t, primarily, self-reflection. I’ve done most of that work prior to saying, “Okay, I’m going to write a poem about this.”

I know there are writers who do not have this outwardly impulse. I have friends like this and we have rich conversations. But I’m just not one of them. I am an outwardly focused writer. Indeed. This is a result of many colliding factors—the fact that I come from an artistic heritage that suggests art should be functional, the fact that the writers I read when little were deeply engaged in social justice and political movements, and the fact that I was trained in theatre and engaged performance before being published. Combined those factors made it almost impossible for me to be anything other than a projective poet. (Is that even a thing, really? Yikes, making stuff up, John.)

I don’t think the balance has changed over time and it may well never change. This is, fundamentally, at least to me, to do with what I think art is and is for. However, the way in which I express myself outwardly has changed and probably will continue to change. This has to do with temperament, maturity, interests, etc. The older I get, the less likely I am to stomp and shout for example.

Nothing wrong with making stuff up, not on my podcast anyway! One last question. There are lots of students and teachers in your poems, and this leads me to as you what I've been asking all writers visiting as part of our "centennial plus five" celebration: what impact has your schooling at Cornell, and your connection to academia, had on your work?

I had a great time at Cornell. In the first week I got to Cornell I met A.R. Ammons. Archie, though he had just retired, was tremendously influential to the way I thought about writing as a career, something that has a trajectory and is changeable. Archie was able to assuage my fears and related to me, I think, as an outsider-to-the-academy—he from the South, me from Detroit--though he was clearly not an outsider at that point. The fears I had to do with leaving the community from which I gathered artistic impulses was something we frequently talked about. We talked about what it meant to be a writer among scholars. His viewpoint was incredibly helpful in giving me context and the authority to say to folks, “Back off.” On the other side of things was Ken McClane who really did serve as my primary mentor; he showed me ways of seeing and hearing my work that I had not. And, he’s just a tremendous human being and so served as a model for the kind of teacher and person one can be in and outside of academia. So, firmly settled between those two beacons, I found Cornell to be a tremendous place.

As for my connection to academia: I enjoy teaching. I enjoy being surrounded by people who are engaged in the life-of-the-mind. I like my students. Though, I do sometimes worry that the poems I want to write aren’t as easily found walking the halls of Reed College as they might otherwise be if I were, oh, I don’t know, doing some other sort of work. And yet, “aren’t as easily found,” is not “cannot be found.” And so, I stay until something more interesting comes along.

Interview: Stewart O'Nan

2009-04-09T09:10:00.003-05:00

Note: due to a scheduling problem, this interview and two others are text-only. Audio podcasts will return in the fall.

Stewart O'Nan is the author of more than a dozen books, including the novels Snow Angels, A Prayer For The Dying, Last Night At The Lobster, and Songs For The Missing. He is a 1992 graduate of the Cornell MFA, and presently lives in Connecticut. He read at Cornell's Goldwin Smith Hall on April 19, 2009, and answered J. Robert Lennon's questions via email the previous week.

You've entered a period of great popularity and critical success after years of slaving away in the midlist. I wonder if it's taken so long because your books are so different from one another--sometimes you almost seem like a new writer every time. Is this a conscious effort on your part? And do you think there is, beneath the diverse range of styles and approaches you've tried, a consistent underlying aesthetic?

I just try to find the best approach to whatever I happen to be writing about. In the fiction, I'm in service to the characters, bringing their emotional world across to the reader, so it only makes sense that I use different forms and voices and points of view. That may confuse editors and marketing people more than it confuses readers. Across the books, I think there's a focus on the American soul--innocence and optimism colliding with atrocity and failure, the lone/strange individual vs. the ruling social group. I'm sure it stems from growing up in the late '60s/early '70s in Pittsburgh.

Like a lot of writers I like, you've borrowed a bit from genre fiction, particularly crime and horror--you even wrote one novel in which Stephen King plays an important role, and later collaborated with him on a nonfiction book. Maybe you could talk a bit about the overlap of literary and genre fiction, in your work and in general.

Hey, thanks. I grew up reading widely and enthusiastically, enjoying horror comics and Ray Bradbury and Stephen King and Shirley Jackson and Richard Matheson and Edgar Rice Burroughs and Harlan Ellison before I ever heard of Woolf, Kafka, Joyce, etc., so when I started reading what we call serious work, it naturally bonded with the stuff that was in my head already. The earlier novels owe their big, bloody climaxes and Gothic excess to that marriage of low and high art, while the later books seem to be moving towards a quieter, less crazy place.

You've had the fortunate--or perhaps horrifying--experience of having your work transformed into film. I think film is the dominant narrative form of our era, but it doesn't serve the same purpose as the novel, and has different strengths and weaknesses. How did you feel about the transformation of your narratives (if I'm not mistaken, Snow Angels and now Lobster) into film, and did you learn anything new about them, and about narrative, as a result?

I was very lucky. I like David Gordon Green's movie of Snow Angels very much. I'd read an early script, so I knew it would share little with the book. And that's right--it has to stand on its own. Like The Shining. Stephen King has never liked Kubrick's version, because it's not his book. I love the book and I love the movie, and I'm glad both exist, but I'd never confuse the two. I guess the worry is that most people will, or do.

What I learned about narrative is that that framed and cross-cut between two mostly-separated storylines is almost impossible to pull off in film, while in novels it's absolutely natural. Simultaneity, or the illusion of simultaneity, is far easier to produce on the page. Moving time or stopping time is easier on the page, you can go deeper on the page--basically, it reminded me of how flexible the novel is.

If most of your books have one thing in common, perhaps it's that they share an interest in "ordinary" people and their sometimes extraordinary struggles. I put that in quotes because, if I'm reading you right, you don't necessarily subscribe to the whole notion of ordinariness--that perhaps your mission as a writer is to show the strangeness in the ordinary. True?

True. Everyone's life is deep and broad and strange. On top of that, some people are asked to bear more than others. But of course, I've worked with a wide range of people. Certainly no one would call Marjorie in The Speed Queen or Jacob in A Prayer for the Dying ordinary.

Fair enough. Actually, A Prayer For The Dying is probably my favorite book of yours. It's a midwestern literary-horror experiment that draws from the great nonfiction book Wisconsin Death Trip to create a highly unusual and gripping second-person narrative. Do you continue to experiment with unusual narrative techniques? If so, how often do they grow into novels?

Some of the later books have been experimental in that they haven't been plotted. While they appear to have storylines, they're actually fitted together by juxtaposition--by tone and point of view, by dynamics (loud-soft-loud) and tempi--rather than the old set-up, build-up, pay-off of conventional fiction. The idea is from John Gardner: that if a character is worthy of and capable of love, the reader will follow them anywhere. I'm hoping that in letting the reader become intimate with the characters in moments of great stress and stillness that I'm bringing the reader closer to their own private emotions. Or, as I often joke with writing students: dare to be boring. I think there's a thinness to a lot of fiction out there--experimental and mainstream--because it's too concerned with surface busyness and thematic bookkeeping rather than the much more elusive human heart.

Since you're reading here as part of the Cornell writing program's "centennial plus five" celebration, could you talk a little bit about Cornell's impact on your life and career?

Simply by sharing their favorite books, my professors and fellow students at Cornell led me to other authors whose work transformed my own--James Salter, William Maxwell, Alice Munro, Margaret Atwood, Richard Yates (thanks, Lorrie Moore!). Before I came to Cornell, I was working in aerospace and had little contact with other writers. Once I got here, everything accelerated, everything fed into the writing. I was here for three years and wrote three novels, two of which (Snow Angels and A World Away) were eventually published. So, thank you, everyone!

Interview: Lisa M. Steinman

2009-02-26T09:58:00.002-05:00

Lisa M. Steinman's fifth volume of poetry is Carslaw's Sequences, from the University of Tampa Press. Steinman teaches at Reed College, in Portland, Oregon, and for twenty years has co-edited the poetry magazine Hubbub. She has received NEA and Rockefeller fellowships and has also published two books about poetry, Made in America (1987), and Masters of Repetition (1998). Her poems have been published in The Massachusetts Review, Prairie Schooner, Notre Dame Review, The Women's Review of Books, and elsewhere.

Steinman read from her work on February 26, 2009, in Cornell's Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day.

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN (20MB MP3)

Interview: Helen Schulman

2009-02-26T09:53:00.005-05:00

Helen Schulman is the author of the novels A Day At The Beach, P.S., The Revisionist and Out Of Time, and the short story collection Not A Free Show. P.S. was also made into a feature film starring Laura Linney, with a script co-written by Schulman. She co-edited, along with Jill Bialosky, the anthology Wanting A Child, and her fiction and non-fiction have appeared in such places as Vanity Fair, Time, Vogue, GQ, The New York Times Book Review and The Paris Review. She is presently the Fiction Coordinator at The Writing Program at The New School, and she lives in New York.

Schulman read from her work on February 26, 2009, in Cornell's Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day.

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN (17MB MP3)

Interview: Julie Schumacher

2009-02-20T12:10:00.003-05:00

Julie Schumacher is the author of many works of fiction, novels and stories for adults young and old; these include The Body is Water, An Explanation for Chaos, Grass Angel, and her newest novel, Black Box. Her stories have appeared in both the O. Henry Awards anthology and Best American Short Stories. She's a graduate of Oberlin College and of Cornell's MFA program, and currently lives in St. Paul, where she is the Director of the Creative Writing Program and a professor of English at the University of Minnesota.

Schumacher read from her work on February 20, in Cornell's Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day.

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN (16MB MP3)

Interview: Melissa Bank

2009-02-12T10:15:00.006-05:00

Melissa Bank is the author of the international bestseller The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing (1999) and The Wonder Spot (2005). Her work has appeared in a wide variety of publications, including The Chicago Tribune, Cosmopolitan, Epoch, Glamour, The Guardian, O: The Oprah Magazine, Ploughshares, Seventeen, and The Washington Post, and has been broadcast on NPR, PRI and the BBC. She is the 1993 recipient of the Nelson Algren Award for the Short Story, and her work has been translated into 30 languages. Bank is a graduate of Cornell's MFA program in creative writing, and is also Visiting Writer in that program during the spring semester of 2009.

Bank read from her work on February 20, in Cornell's Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place the previous week.

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN (16MB MP3)

Interview: Alice Fulton

2008-11-20T14:17:00.003-05:00

Alice Fulton is the author of eight books of poetry, fiction, and essays, including her first story collection, The Nightingales of Troy (2008). Her most recent book of poems is Cascade Experiment: Selected Poems. Her collection Felt was awarded the 2002 Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry from the Library of Congress, and was selected by the Los Angeles Times as one of the Best Books of 2001. Her other books include Sensual Math, Powers Of Congress, and Palladium. She has received fellowships from the MacArthur Foundation, The Ingram Merrill Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and others, and she's been included both in Best American Poetry and Best American Short Stories. She is presently the Ann S. Bowers Professor of English at Cornell University.

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN (22MB MP3)

Interview: Brenda Hillman

2008-11-07T09:28:00.004-05:00

Brenda Hillman has published seven collections of poetry: White Dress (1985), Fortress (1989), Death Tractates (1992), Bright Existence (1993), Loose Sugar (1997), Cascadia (2001), and Pieces of Air in the Epic (2005), all from Wesleyan University Press, and three chapbooks: Coffee, 3 A.M. (Penumbra Press, 1982), Autumn Sojourn (Em Press, 1995), and The Firecage (a+bend press, 2000). She has edited an edition of Emily Dickinson's poetry for Shambhala Publications, and, with Patricia Dienstfrey, co-edited The Grand Permisson: New Writings on Poetics and Motherhood (2003). She teaches poetry at St. Mary's College in Moraga, California.

Hillman read from her work on November 6, 2008, in Cornell's Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place the following day.

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN (24MB MP3)

Interview: Terrance Hayes

2008-10-30T12:42:00.005-05:00

Terrance Hayes is the author of three books of poetry: Muscular Music, Hip Logic, and Wind in A Box. He has received a Whiting Award, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, a National Poetry Series Award, a Pushcart Prize, and an NEA Fellowship; he has also been selected for the Best American Poetry anthology. He lives in Pittsburgh, where he teaches at Carnegie Mellon University.

Hayes read from his work on October 30, 2008, in Cornell's Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day.

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN (20MB MP3)

Interview: Charles Simic

2008-10-02T14:22:00.002-05:00

Charles Simic is the fifteenth Poet Laureate of the United States. He was born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, in 1938, and immigrated to the United States in 1953, at the age of 15. He has lived in New York, Chicago, the San Francisco area, and for many years in New Hampshire, where until his retirement he was a professor of English at the University of New Hampshire. A poet, essayist and translator, he has been honored with Wallace Stevens Award, a Pulitzer Prize, two PEN Awards for his work as a translator, and a MacArthur Fellowship. His nearly thirty books include The World Doesn't End, Walking the Black Cat, and the recent The Monster Loves His Labyrinth.

Simic read from his work on October 2, 2008, in Cornell's Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day. (Note: the audio contains a few accidental clicks and pops--sorry about that.)

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN (23MB MP3)

Interview: Patrick Somerville

2008-09-18T14:20:00.004-05:00

Patrick Somerville grew up in Green Bay, Wisconsin, went to college at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and later earned his MFA in creative writing from Cornell University. He has taught writing at Cornell University, Auburn State Correctional Facility, and The Graham School in Chicago. His work has appeared in One Story, Epoch, GQ, Esquire, and Best American Nonrequired Reading, and his book of short stories, Trouble, was named by Time Out Chicago, as 2006's Best Book. His first novel, The Cradle, will be published by Little, Brown in March of 2009, when he will also be serving as the Blattner Visiting Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Northwestern University.

Somerville read from his work on September 18, 2008, in Cornell's Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day.

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN (26MB MP3)

Interview: Shauna Seliy

2008-09-11T10:16:00.001-05:00

Shauna Seliy is the author of the novel When We Get There (Bloomsbury 2007). She has a BA from the University of Pennsylvania, and an MFA from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst; she has also received fellowships from Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony. From 2003 to 2004 she was the Writer-in-Residence at St. Albans School in Washington, DC. Her work has appeared in Other Voices, Meridian, the New Orleans Review, and the Alaska Quarterly Review. She teaches creative writing at Northwestern University.

Seliy read from her work on September 11, 2008, in Cornell's Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place the previous day.

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN (20MB MP3)

Interview: Irakli Kakabadze

2008-09-05T09:17:00.007-05:00

Georgian writer, poet, and playwright Irakli Kakabadze has published more than 50 short stories since 1990 in Georgian, Russian and English publications; he's also published five books. His celebrated play “Candidate Jokola,” which was published in 2005, is a story of love between a Georgian man and Abkhaz woman. In his country, he is also known as a political activist; he was one of the first writers in Georgia to write about drugs and violence. In 1990 Kakabadze was awarded an award by “Tsiskari” magazine for his novel Allegro, and he is presently living in Ithaca as part of the Ithaca City of Asylum Writers Project.

Kakabadze read from his work on September 4, 2008, in Cornell's Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place the following day.

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN (24MB MP3)

Interview: Sarah Mkhonza

2008-05-08T12:39:00.003-05:00

Sarah Mkhonza was forced to leave her native Swaziland in 2003 following a campaign of harassment against herself and her family. An outspoken voice for women’s rights under the monarchical Swazi regime, Dr. Mkhonza wrote newspaper columns for The Observer and The Swazi Sun that told of the daily struggles of Swazi women and children ejected from their land. In her columns, she employed a “journalistic fiction” style intended to foster a writing culture among Swazi women. As her popularity as a critic of the government’s repressive policies grew, she was told to stop writing. Her refusal resulted in threats, assaults, and hospitalization. At the University of Swaziland, where she was professor of inguistics and English, her office was robbed and vandalized on two occasions -- her computer and diskettes destroyed and tossed in the mud.

Dr. Mkhonza has published two novels, What the Future Holds and Pains of a Maid, and is currently working on a third. She has also published several chapbooks of fiction and poetry with Ithaca's Vista Periodista press. She co-founded the Association of African Women, and the African Book Fund Group at Michigan State University, which has sent over 1000 books to the University of Swaziland and other African institutions, and she is presently living in Ithaca through the Ithaca City of Asylum program.

Sarah Mkhonza read from her work on February 28, 2008, in Cornell's Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place the following May.

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN (21MB MP3)

Interview: Eavan Boland

2008-04-25T10:30:00.002-05:00

Eavan Boland was born in Dublin, and is the author of many books of poetry, including The Lost Land, Code, Against Love Poetry, Domestic Violence, and the new New Collected Poems. Her other work includes a collection of prose writings, Object Lessons; and she has edited two poetry anthologies. Her awards include a Lannan Foundation Award in Poetry, and an American Ireland Fund Literary Award. A member of the Irish Academy of Letters, she is currently Professor in Humanities at Stanford University, and divides her time between California and Dublin.

Eavan Boland read from her work on April 25, 2008, in Cornell's Rockefeller Hall. This interview took place the following day.

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN (20MB MP3)

Interview: Alison Bechdel

2008-04-11T10:51:00.003-05:00

Alison Bechdel is the author of the comic strip Dykes To Watch Out For. A countercultural institution, the strip is syndicated in dozens of newspapers, translated into several languages and collected in a series of award-winning books. Utne magazine has listed DTWOF as “one of the greatest hits of the twentieth century.” And Comics Journal says, “Bechdel’s art distills the pleasures of Friends and The Nation; we recognize our world in it, with its sorrows and ironies.” In 2006, Houghton Mifflin published Bechdel's graphic memoir, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. The bestselling coming-of-age tale has been called a “mesmerizing feat of familial resurrection” and a “rare, prime example of why graphic novels have taken over the conversation about American literature.” Bechdel lives near Burlington, Vermont.

Alison Bechdel read from her work on April 10, 2008, in Cornell's Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place the following day.

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN (18MB MP3)

Interview: Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, Ernesto Quiñonez, J. Robert Lennon

2008-04-02T08:15:00.006-05:00

Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon received her B.A. from Washington and Lee University and her M.F.A. from Penn State. Her work has appeared in such journals as African American Review, Callaloo, Crab Orchard Review, Rattapallax, and Shenandoah, and in several anthologies, including Bum Rush the Page and Role Call. A semi-finalist in the "Discovery"/The Nation Contest in 1999 and 2001, she was one of 20 writers featured in the 2005 PSA Festival of New American Poets. Her first book, Black Swan, was awarded the 2001 Cave Canem Poetry Prize.

Ernesto Quiñonez is the author of the novels Bodega Dreams, which was chosen as a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers title as well as a Borders Bookstore Original New Voice selection, and Chango's Fire.

J. Robert Lennon is the author of six novels, including Happyland, serialized in Harper's in 2006, and the forthcoming Castle. He is also the author of Pieces For The Left Hand, a collection of 100 anecdotes.

All three writers are members of the Cornell University Creative Writing faculty. They delivered the Richard Cleveland Memorial Reading on March 28, 2008, at the Hollis Auditorium in Cornell's Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place the following day. Leading the conversation were three Cornell Lecturers in English: Stephanie Gehring, Jon Hickey, and George McCormick.

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN (41MB MP3)

Interview: Paul Lisicky

2008-03-05T12:05:00.003-05:00

Paul Lisicky is the author of a novel, Lawnboy, and Famous Builder, a collection of essays. His work has appeared in Ploughshares, Short Takes, Open House, Boulevard, Flash Fiction, and many other anthologies and magazines. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, he's the recipient of awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the James Michener/Copernicus Society, the Henfield Foundation, the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, where he was twice a fellow. He lives in New York City, and has taught at Cornell University, NYU, Sarah Lawrence College, Antioch University-Los Angeles, The University of Houston, and The Bread Loaf Writers Conference. A new novel, Lumina Harbor, is forthcoming.

Paul Lisicky read from his work on February 15th, 2008, at the Schwartz Auditorium of Cornell's Rockefeller Hall. This interview took place two weeks later.

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN (24MB MP3)

Interview: Mark Doty

2008-02-20T13:01:00.004-05:00

Our first interview this semester is with poet and essayist Mark Doty. Doty has written more than ten books of poetry and prose, and for his efforts has won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Martha Albrand Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, a Whiting Writers' Award, a Lila Wallace–Reader's Digest Writers' Award, and the T. S. Eliot Prize. His new and selected poems, Fire To Fire, will be published next month. He lives in New York City, but this spring is one of three visiting writers spending the semester at Cornell.

Mark Doty read from his work on February 15th, 2008, at the Schwartz Auditorium of Cornell's Rockefeller Hall. This interview took place the following week.

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN (23MB MP3)

Interview: Lee Smith and Hal Crowther

2007-11-15T13:47:00.000-05:00

Today's podcast features two writers: novelist and short story writer Lee Smith, and journalist and essayist Hal Crowther. Smith is author of more than a dozen works of fiction, including the recent nove On Agate Hill; she has won numerous awards for her work, including the Southern Book Critics Circle Award, a Lila Wallace / Reader's Digest Award, and the Robert Penn Warren Prize for Fiction. Hal Crowther has written three books of nonfiction, and his work has appeared in a great number of newspapers, magazines, and journals, including the Oxford American, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Time, and Newsweek. His most recent book is Gather At The River: Notes From The Post-Millennial South. The two live in North Carolina.

Crowther and Smith read in Cornell's Goldwin Smith Hall on November 15, 2007. This interview took place earlier the same day.

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN (18MB MP3)

Interview: William Kennedy

2007-11-01T14:41:00.000-05:00

William Kennedy was born and raised in Albany, New York, and later worked as a journalist there, giving him the background for his celebrated works about that city and its history. He has published eight novels and several works of nonfiction and drama; he's also a screenwriter, and the recipient of both a MacArthur grant and a Pulitzer Prize. His books include The Ink Truck (1969), Legs (1975), Billy Phelan's Greatest Game (1978), Ironweed (1983), and Roscoe (2002).

Kennedy read in Cornell's Goldwin Smith Hall on November 1, 2007. This interview took place earlier the same day.

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN (25MB MP3)

Interview: Gabrielle Calvocoressi

2007-09-27T15:13:00.000-05:00

Poet Gabrielle Calvocoressi grew up in central Connecticut, and her poems have appeared in The New England Review, Ninth Letter, and The Paris Review (which awarded her the Bernard F. Connors Prize for the Long Poem). A recipient of the Rona Jaffe Award for Emerging Women Writers, she has been both a Stegner Fellow and a Jones Lecturer at Stanford University. She lives in Los Angeles, California, and her first book is called The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart.

Calvocoressi read in Cornell's Goldwin Smith Hall on September 27, 2007. This interview took place earlier the same day.

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN (25MB MP3)

Interview: Willie Perdomo

2007-08-30T11:42:00.000-05:00

Willie Perdomo is the author of Where a Nickel Costs a Dime (Norton, 1996) and Smoking Lovely (Rattapallax, 2003), which won the 2004 PEN American Beyond Margins Award. His work has been included in several anthologies including Poems of New York, The Harlem Reader and Metropolis Found. His work has also appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Bomb, and PEN America: A Journal for Writers and Readers. He is also the author of Visiting Langston, a Coretta Scott King Honor Book for Children, illustrated by Bryan Collier. He has been featured on several PBS documentaries including Words in Your Face and The United States of Poetry and has appeared on HBO's "Def Poetry Jam" and BET’s "Hughes’ Dream Harlem." Perdomo is the recipient of the New York Foundation for the Arts Fiction and Poetry Fellowships. He currently teaches at Friends Seminary and Bronx Academy of Letters.

Perdomo read in Cornell's Goldwin Smith Hall on August 30, 2007. This interview took place earlier the same day.

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN (18MB MP3)

Interview: Heather McHugh

2007-04-20T12:02:00.000-05:00

Heather McHugh was born to Canadian parents in San Diego, California, in 1948. She was raised in Virginia and educated at Harvard University. Her books of poetry include Eyeshot (Wesleyan University Press, 2003); Hinge & Sign: Poems 1968-1993 (1994), which won both the Boston Book Review's Bingham Poetry Prize and the Pollack-Harvard Review Prize, was a Finalist for the National Book Award, and was named a "Notable Book of the Year" by the New York Times Book Review; Shades (1988); To the Quick (1987); A World of Difference (1981); and Dangers (1977).

She is also the author of Broken English: Poetry and Partiality (1993), and two books of translation: Because the Sea is Black: Poems of Blaga Dimitrova (with Niko Boris, 1989) and D'après tout: Poems by Jean Follain (1981).

Her honors include two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Griffin Poetry Prize, and a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship. In 1999 she was elected a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets. Heather McHugh teaches as a core faculty member in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, and as Milliman Writer-in-Residence at the University of Washington in Seattle.

McHugh read in Cornell's Goldwin Smith Hall on April 19, 2007. This interview took place the following day.

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN (23MB MP3)

Interview: Alice Friman

2007-04-12T08:36:00.000-05:00

Alice Friman is author of eight collections of poetry, most recently The Book of the Rotten Daughter and Zoo, winner of the Ezra Pound Poetry Award from Truman State University and the Sheila Margaret Motton Prize from the New England Poetry Club. Her poems appear in Poetry, The Georgia Review, Boulevard, The Southern Review, The Gettysburg Review, and Shenandoah, which awarded Friman the 2002 James Boatwright III Prize for Poetry. She's received fellowships from the Indiana Arts Commission and the Arts Council of Indianapolis and has been awarded residencies at many colonies including MacDowell and Yaddo. She was named Writer in Residence at Bernheim Arboretum and Research Forest in 2003-04. Friman is the winner of three prizes from Poetry Society of America and in 2001-02 was named to the Georgia Poetry Circuit. Professor Emerita at the University of Indianapolis, she now lives in Milledgeville, GA where she is Poet-in-Residence at Georgia College & State University.

Friman read in Cornell's Goldwin Smith Hall on April 12, 2007. This interview took place earlier the same day.

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN (21MB MP3)