Charles McLeod. Photo courtesy of the author.

An introduction to Charles McLeod, author of the novel American Weather and a collection of stories called National Treasures (Outpost19/Random House UK). His fiction has appeared in publications including Conjunctions, DOSSIER, Eleven Eleven, The Gettysburg Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Iowa Review, The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses, and the Norton anthology Fakes. McLeod was born in Texas, grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, California, and now lives in Colorado. Since 2000, he’s held eleven addresses in eight states.

Quick Facts on Charles McLeod

• Home: Western Colorado
• Comfort food: donuts
• Top reads: Some favorite books include Elbow Room by McPherson, On Evil by Eagleton, The Posthuman Dada Guide by Codrescu, The Waves by Woolf, The Mezzanine by Baker, and everything by Joy Williams and Sebald.
• Current reads: Television by Jean-Philippe Toussaint

What are you working on at the moment?  

Edits for the California Prose Directory, edits for my second novel, and stories for my second collection.

Where did the idea come from for American Weather?

From feeling like late American consumer capitalism is a death sentence.

What do you hope readers will take away from this book?

“We are to such an extent estranged from man’s essential nature that the direct language of this essential nature seems to us a violation of human dignity, whereas the estranged language of material values seems to be the well-justified assertion of human dignity that is self-confident and conscious of itself. …Our mutual value is for us the value of mutual objects. Hence for us man himself is mutually of no value.” -Marx

Where and when do you prefer to write?

I only write at home, either early in the morning or late at night.

Do you listen to anything while you write?

I don’t.

It’s been said writers can do their work from any place, where would you most want to live and write?

I’ve lived too many places to have a place.

Do you have a philosophy for how and why you write?

I write as a mode of penance for the arrogance inherent in my despair.

How do you balance content with form? How does the structure of the book influence the story?

Kandinsky speaks to this well: “All methods are sacred if they are internally necessary. All methods are sins if they are not justified by internal necessity.”

What do you find most challenging about writing?

If one were to think of any/every manuscript as a ten-page story, pages six and seven.

How have your goals as a writer changed over time?

Broadly, I think I used to write toward something that I am now trying very hard to write away from.

Is there a quote about writing that motivates or inspires you?

“For in all adversity of fortune the worst sort of misery is to have been happy.” -Boethius

What advice would you give to aspiring writers?

Never give up.

What’s the best advice you’ve been given as a writer?

Never give up.

Is there something that you wish people would ask about your work more often?

No, I’m pretty happy just writing.

When you’re not writing, what do you like to do?

Reading outside, somewhere quiet, in the warm sun, is a wonderful thing.

About Charles McLeod

Charles McLeod is the author of a novel, American Weather, and a collection of stories, National Treasures (Outpost19/Random House UK). His fiction has appeared in publications including Alaska Quarterly Review, Conjunctions, CutBank, DOSSIER, Eleven Eleven, Five Chapters, The Gettysburg Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Iowa Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses, and the Norton anthology Fakes.

Buy American Weather.

[Toffoli, Marissa B. "Interview With Writer Charles McLeod." Words With Writers (May 15, 2013),  http://wordswithwriters.com/2013/05/15/charles-mcleod.]

American Weather by Charles McLeod (Outpost19, 2012).

Peter Mehlman. Photo courtesy of the author.

An introduction to Peter Mehlman, author of Mandela Was Late: Odd things & essays from the Seinfeld writer who coined yada, yada, and made spongeworthy a compliment (The Sager Group, 2013). Mehlman is a multiple Primetime Emmy Award nominee, known for his work on the sitcom Seinfeld. He has won acclaim for his NPR commentaries and hilarious and poignant op-eds and personal essays in the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Huffington Post, and Esquire. Host of the Webby-nominated YouTube series Narrow World of Sports, Mehlman grew up in Queens, New York, graduated from the University of Maryland, and now lives in Los Angeles.

Quick Facts on Peter Mehlman

• Website: www.pmehlman.com
• Home: Santa Monica, California
• Comfort food: pizza
• Top reads: John Updike, Philip Roth, Lorrie Moore, Don DeLillo, Joseph Heller
• Top movies and TV shows: The Graduate, Manhattan, Network, Three Days of the Condor, Taxi, Get Smart, Thirtysomething, Midnight Cowboy, All the President’s Men, Dog Day Afternoon, Talk to Her, Magnolia, American Splendor
• Current reads: Thinking, Fast And Slow by Daniel Kahneman, and short stories by Don DeLillo

What are you working on at the moment?   

One pilot, a slow developing novel, and a few essays.

How did your book, Mandela Was Late, come together?

It wasn’t originally planned as a book. After Seinfeld and my years at Dreamworks, I felt like going back to writing full sentences and started writing lots of essays, articles, and op-ed pieces for newspapers and magazines. After awhile, it just felt like there were some threads that would make the pieces combine into a whole.

What do you hope readers will take away from this book?

“A lot of laughs between

unexpected moments of seriousness.”

Hmm. It would be nice if they got a lot of laughs between unexpected moments of seriousness. And, it would be really nice if they see an overall point of view on life that I’m not even aware of.

Where and when do you prefer to write?

In my home office overlooking my quiet street in the morning after coffee. Then again in the mid to late afternoon. And maybe again late at night. The best thing is being able to do it whenever.

Do you listen to anything while you write?

No.

Where would you most want to live and write?

Right where I am. At home in LA.

Do you have a philosophy for how and why you write?

Not really. I just like it and do it and try not to analyze it.

How have your goals as a writer changed over time?

Having been writing for different media makes it impossible to not have them change. But recently, I’ve been trying to not think about goals beyond doing the best job I can do on whatever I’m working on at the moment. I’m coming around to thinking that goals can be limiting. Any minute, a new thought can enter your head, leading to a new project, which changes your goals and can even make your last goal unmet.

“I’m coming around to thinking

that goals can be limiting.”

How has your background writing for the screen influenced your other writing work?

They all influence each other. Writing for The Washington Post required a set of demands—observation, concise writing—that helped somewhat at Seinfeld, which in turn, helped in essay writing. Seinfeld ideas came mostly from monitoring your own thoughts, while newspaper writing was about looking outward. So Seinfeld plus journalism combined to help with essays.

What do you find most challenging about writing humor pieces?

Getting from a funny concept to fleshing out a full humor piece is really tough. Sometimes they just “write themselves” but not often. It’s also tough to know if your little notions are actually even worth a full piece. I try hard to avoid “one-joke” pieces. It’s also tricky deciding if your ideas are relevant to readers.

Is there a quote about writing that motivates or inspires you?

Eudora Welty said something about how the biggest adventures happen in your head—that you don’t have to do a bunch of world travelling and have a slew of exciting experiences to write creative stuff. Not sure if that’s motivational or inspiring so much as comforting, but it makes me feel better about being a homebody.

What advice would you give to aspiring writers?

Write a lot and read a lot. Find out who your favorite writers are and figure out why. Keep your mind open for business all the time, you never know when your tiniest thought—or a story in the paper, or an overheard comment on the street—can spark a whole project.

“Keep your mind open for business all the time.”

What’s the best advice you’ve been given as a writer?

“Write for love, not for money. But try to get paid for it.”

When you’re not writing, what do you like to do?

Play basketball, go out to dinner, ski, read.

About Peter Mehlman

Peter Mehlman, after whom a hypochondriacal giraffe was named in the Madagascar movies, lives in Los Angeles where he writes essays, screenplays, NPR commentaries, and hosts the Webby-nominated YouTube series Narrow World of Sports. A multiple Primetime Emmy Award nominee, Peter Mehlman has coined such Seinfeld-isms as “spongeworthy,” and “double-dipping,” and is probably most famous for the Emmy nominated “Yada Yada” episode of Seinfeld, arguably one of the most popular and iconic sitcoms of all time. He grew up in Queens, New York, and graduated from the University of Maryland before writing for the Washington Post and ABC’s SportsBeat with Howard Cosell. He has written for Esquire, GQ, The New York Times Magazine and virtually every Conde Nast women’s magazine because of his powerful grasp on what women want. He was also a writer and co-executive producer of Seinfeld.

Buy Mandela Was Late.

[Toffoli, Marissa B. "Interview With Writer Peter Mehlman." Words With Writers (April 17, 2013),  http://wordswithwriters.com/2013/04/17/peter-mehlman.]

Mandela Was Late by Peter Mehlman (The Sager Group, 2013).

Aaron Shurin. Photo by Marissa Bell Toffoli (2013).

An introduction to Aaron Shurin, whose latest poetry collection is Citizen (City Lights Books, 2012). Shurin is the author of over a dozen books, both poetry and essay collections. He has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Gerbode Foundation, the San Francisco Arts Commission, and the California Arts Council. He cofounded the Boston-based writing collective Good Gay Poets and was the director of the MFA in Writing program at the University of San Francisco.

When asked if he has a philosophy for how and why he writes, Shurin answered, “Poetry is attention, and it is the means of attending experience. Attention is the key word both for what it requires and what its nature is.” And that sense of attention comes through when you read his work. One of the pleasures of Shurin’s poetry is the focus on sound and rhythm. It makes for a powerful experience to hear him read. He doesn’t rush the words—each phrase has its own breath, deliberately chosen to add meaning, and momentum builds throughout the poem. Shurin graciously read some poems exclusively for this interview.

Listen to Aaron Shurin’s poems

• “Gloria Mundi” from Citizen (City Lights Books, 2012)
• “Tilt,” a new poem

Quick Facts on Aaron Shurin

• Shurin online: Poetry Foundation profile
  
• Home: San Francisco, California
• Comfort food:  Russian food, kasha varnishkes (buckwheat groats and pasta shells or bow ties mixed together with mushrooms, onions, and lots of butter).
• Top reads: Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, HD, Robert Duncan, Michael Palmer
• Current reads: Robert Duncan, The Ambassador from Venus: A Biography by Lisa Jarnot, and Jarnot’s new book Joie de Vivre

What are you working on at the moment?  

New poems, and a collection of essays and talks assembled from about thirty years of work.

Where did the idea for Citizen come from?

The genesis of Citizen was an event that I participated in with some other poets at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SF MOMA) in response to a show by the sculptor Martin Puryear. I felt like I was asked not for a paper response, but a poetic response. I went to the show and I started writing down words that I saw as his materials, from the museum tags describing the pieces. It could be wagon—there was a wagon, cedar—which the wagon was made of, yellow—the color something was painted. I just wrote those words down and then took a break and went to eat. While I was having lunch, I just started writing. I felt like for this show my response was that I would write poems using the same materials that he used, except that my materials were the words of his materials. I think I wrote the first two or three poems that way, by writing down a little grid in my notebook of these words and being led by those words. For the presentation at SF MOMA, I did my one and only PowerPoint presentation, showing the poem, and then showing my notebook and the words. So that became the structural model of Citizen, it’s cohering element, and I wound up adhering to that. For many years, I have often pulled in derived language to my work. I didn’t plan it, the procedure arrived; I found it, and it stayed interesting to me so I followed it through.

What do you hope readers will take away from Citizen?

I hope they take extreme pleasure in the sensual and intellectual synthesis of language at play. I’m not sure I can say much beyond that.

Well, I’ll tell you a little bit more about the background of Citizen. There were several threads within the book, and one was the structural one I just described. Another was that I wanted it to be permeable to the world, as narrative is inclined toward the world. I was traveling a bunch, mostly to Mexico and some to Arizona, and so I made the decision to let the sights, sounds, artifacts, and experiences of my travels come through. As for what people take away, everything that I put in, I wish for them to get—the meeting point of the imagination and the world.

“Everything that I put in,

I wish for them to get—the meeting point

of the imagination and the world.”

One of the things that I talked about with my publisher is the title, and it has occasionally given some readers trouble. Some people had pre-formed ideas of what a book called Citizen should be in this climate. In my view, Citizen had multiple layers. It was also situating myself as a citizen of the imagination, which seems to me the primary locus of poetry, and also as the cover suggests, that I am a citizen of the book, of the language of poetry. I would love for all of those layers to be active for readers.

How would you describe the ideal reader of your work?

Anybody who loves poetry is my ideal reader. 

Where would you most want to live and write?

In this beautiful new home of mine, absolutely. I’m very portable, actually. I often write longhand in a little journal, not fragments as many people do, but the poems, whole poems in the journal. I frequently write outside, in parks, wherever I am. It’s not locked in. I write that way more than at my desk.

Do you have a writing routine?

No writing routine. Sometimes there are very long periods between books. I’ve gone a year, year and a half, two years recharging or gestating. That’s proved to be not so unusual. When I’m on it, I’m on it at kind of white heat and I’ll write all the time everywhere constantly. If I’m in a poem, I’m really in it, thinking about it, walking around with it and attending it.

Do you listen to anything while you work?

“I’m so interested in the music of language

that I never ever want to be distracted from it.”

No, never. I’m so interested in the music of language that I never ever want to be distracted from it. I know many people who do, but it would be an interference for me. The musical component of language is crucial for me.

When you’re stuck getting started on a poem, where do you look for inspiration?

So much of my work in the last twenty years has involved derived language, but I don’t go to derived language when I’m stuck. I go to derived language as a continual process. I don’t get stuck in that way; either I write or I don’t write. I write good poems or I write bad poems. Even though it can be two years between writing a book, I usually don’t feel stuck during that period, I’m just not writing. Stuck isn’t something that actually sticks with me.

I think it was after Involuntary Lyrics that I had the first long caesura. I figured out that I didn’t feel depleted, I felt completed. I saw that I wasn’t writing, but I that I didn’t want to be writing, so what’s wrong with that? You’re only stuck if you want to be writing and can’t.

How have your goals as a writer changed over time?

Well, when I started putting together this new collection of essays and talks from over thirty years, I expected the early pieces to creak a little bit more. I was surprised and gratified that they didn’t really. Everyone has juvenilia, but from the point in which I came to some focus in understanding what I wanted to do in 1980, I am surprised that it hasn’t shifted very much. Questions of identity, gender, and subjectivity were there, and in many ways they still are. The interest in saturated language, both sonically and in terms of texture and interplay—that’s an abiding interest. The counter-play of fragmentation within the framework of complicated embroidery—that tension was there at the beginning and still is. Things have gotten more complicated and more refined, richer. I have a sense that I can do many things at the same time; that’s maturing, I suppose.

I’m surprised at how consistent my interests have been. What I tell my students when we talk about style is that it’s not something you create. Style is retrospective. If you stay by the things that you’re interested in, and keep staying by them, that becomes your style. Style is the figures, lures, limitations, and refinements that are your interests. I think of Creeley, for example, not inventing a style to have a style, but having theoretical concerns around the line and speech. Those were his concerns over and over again, and so his style is what we see as the repetition of his interests and concerns. 

What advice would you give to aspiring writers?

Mostly it’s about paying attention. Push harder. One of the things I started talking about in these last years of teaching was disposition, which is almost like position as in the posture of writing: how to adopt the posture of what writing will be so you can enter it most complexly and richly. You have to learn to want there to be that much, learn to have the space through which the line can sink all the way down to the bottom. Anything less is less. I talked a lot with my students about how you create the disposition, how you frame that.

“Anything less is less.”

Is there a quote about writing that motivates or inspires you?

In Robert Duncan’s The H.D. Book, he discusses the poet’s responsibility to glory. In a way that’s what I mean by disposition. If you adopt the posture that suggests that you have a responsibility toward glory, what does that mean that you have to write?

When you’re not writing, what do you like to do?

I love to walk in the hills and woods, and I’ve had many literary-minded walking companions.

About Aaron Shurin

Poet and essayist Aaron Shurin was born in Manhattan, New York, and grew up there, in eastern Texas, and in Los Angeles, California. He earned a BA at the University of California, Berkeley, where he studied with poet Denise Levertov, and an MA in Poetics at the New College of California. Influenced by Robert Duncan and Frank O’Hara, Shurin composes lyric poems that explore themes of sexuality and loss.

Shurin is the author of more than a dozen books, including the poetry collections The Paradise of Forms: Selected Poems (1999), a Publishers Weekly Best Book; Involuntary Lyrics (2005); and A’s Dream (1989), as well as the essay collections King of Shadows (2008) and Unbound: A Book of AIDS (1997). Shurin has won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Gerbode Foundation, the San Francisco Arts Commission, and the California Arts Council. He cofounded the Boston-based writing collective Good Gay Poets and was the director of the MFA program at the University of San Francisco. (Biography source: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/aaron-shurin.)

Buy Citizen, preferably at your local independent bookstore.

[Toffoli, Marissa B. "Interview With Writer Aaron Shurin." Words With Writers (March 31, 2013),  http://wordswithwriters.com/2013/03/31/aaron-shurin.]

Citizen by Aaron Shurin (City Lights Books, 2012).

Erica Bauermeister. Photo by Susan Doupe.

An introduction to Erica Bauermeister, author of the novels The School of Essential Ingredients, Joy For Beginners, and The Lost Art of Mixing (Putnam Books, 2013). Bauermeister’s new book brings back a few familiar characters from her first book and introduces some fresh faces. At Rakestraw Books last month, Bauermeister talked about her writing process and how this novel came together in bursts and small sections, like fireworks building toward a finale. It pulls the reader in effortlessly, even if you haven’t read The School of Essential Ingredients. Each chapter explores a different character’s perspective, and readers gain insight into every side of the story. Add in the delectable descriptions and details that pepper Bauermeister’s prose and you’ve got an elegant and fulfilling read. You’re in for a treat with Erica Bauermeister.

Quick Facts on Erica Bauermeister

• Erica Bauermeister’s website  www.ericabauermeister.com | Facebook: www.facebook.com/EricaBauermeisterAuthor
• Home: Port Townsend, Washington
• Comfort food: To eat, rice pudding (with cinnamon, please); to make: pasta with ragu sauce.
• Top reads: E M Forster, Joanne Harris, Diane Ackerman, Alice Hoffman, Donald Hall [See EB's full list of favorite reads]
• Current reads: Population: 485 by Michael Perry

What are you working on at the moment?  

I’m actually shifting gears—I’m working on a memoir, about a trash-filled wreck of a house we bought eleven years ago in the small Victorian seaport of Port Townsend, Washington. The experience was such a combination of oddness and magic that I couldn’t have made it better by turning it into fiction, so memoir it is.

Where did the idea come from for The Lost Art of Mixing?

I had two images in my head—the first was of a middle-aged man, lying in bed with his wife, feeling her complaints rocking against him like waves on a docked boat. I had this instant feeling of affection, and I wanted more for him. A rebellion. An escape. A larger understanding of his life.

The other image was of a character from my first book, The School of Essential Ingredients. In my imagination I saw Lillian, the chef, standing in the restaurant kitchen doorway, overwhelmed by the smells and realizing through her reaction that she is unexpectedly and unsettlingly pregnant.

Over the course of a couple years, the connections between these characters became clear, six other characters joined them, and they turned into a book.

What do you hope readers will take away from this book?

“Everything I write has to do with compassion.”

I have come to realize that everything I write has to do with compassion. The Lost Art of Mixing consists of four pairs of characters, each pair in the midst of misunderstanding. Each chapter takes the reader into the perspective of a different character. It is my hope that readers will learn to understand and perhaps love each of these very human characters—which raises an interesting question: what happens when we empathize with both sides of a disagreement?

What role does food play in The Lost Art of Mixing?

As far as I am concerned, everything begins and ends with food. It is one of the first things we search for when we are born. We prepare it for others. We share it with friends and family. It can bring us together or bring us to ourselves. In The Lost Art of Mixing, food creates the community that draws all those conflicted pairs of characters together.

Where and when do you prefer to write?

In general, I write in a big chair in front of the window in my office. But I have a laptop, so I am apt to move about the house. I have found it intriguing that I tend to write different characters in different rooms. Isabelle, my character with Alzheimer’s, always liked to be written in a kitchen. Tom liked to be by a fireplace. I wouldn’t really think about it when I was writing, I would just find myself there. It was only later that I saw the patterns.

Do you listen to anything while you write?

No. I need silence. The music is in the words, in the characters’ voices, and I want to be able to hear it as clearly as possible. My husband has mentioned, however, that I sometimes write out loud, so perhaps a little music would be a good cover.

Where would you most want to live and write?

This summer, we finally moved permanently to our house in Port Townsend. I sit in my office and look out at a 100-mile view. I can’t imagine anywhere better to write.

That said, I get fantastic ideas when I am travelling. I’m not sure if it’s that sense of being extra alert or shaken out of my routine, but I love the ideas that pop into my head when I’m in an airport or on a train. I take a small book I can fit in a pocket and I jot down notes constantly. I feel like a squirrel, collecting nuts for when I get home and can figure out where they might fit in a book.

Do you have a philosophy for how and why you write?

When I was in college, I discovered a short story called “I Stand Here Ironing” by Tillie Olsen. I was in the midst of taking a literature course that featured men writing about war and big white whales—but here was this small, intimate story of a woman standing at an ironing board, thinking about her life. It took the “unimportant” things in life and made them beautiful. Ever since then, that is what I have wanted to do.

“It took the ‘unimportant’ things in life

and made them beautiful. Ever since then,

that is what I have wanted to do.”

How do you balance content with form? How does the structure of the book influence the story?

Structure is critical when it comes to interconnected short stories. It is almost like creating a musical composition. All of the pieces have to fit together; they need to be presented in an order that builds meaning in each story, and then add up to something greater as a whole. It’s incredibly tricky work, and I find it deeply satisfying. I love the idea of readers sitting above the pages of a book, seeing the whole of the book and the ways the individual characters and stories are influencing each other, while at the same time the characters can only see their own parts.

But on the other hand, within each story, content is king. That’s the chance to dive into a character, to live in their skin. To be with them and only them.

I enjoy the combination of the strictness of structure and the fluidity of content. In the end, it is a great deal like bones and blood. You can’t have one without the other.

What do you find most challenging about writing?

Honestly? Making the time. I started out as a writer who was also a young mother and it seems to me, even now that the children are grown and gone, that I will most likely always be writing in snatches of time. Only these days those snatches are grabbed in between book tours, or answering letters, or writing blog posts. It’s a good thing I got trained early to focus quickly and in bursts.

How have your goals as a writer changed over time?

Oddly enough, they haven’t. I have always wanted to explore the intimate parts of people’s lives—the things they don’t say, the wishes they didn’t even know they had. I’ve wanted to pay attention to the subliminal things that are continually affecting who we are. And I’ve always wanted to learn about new things—how perfume is made, how to pick a lock, how to get bread to rise. Being a writer is a wonderful thing for someone with a wandering mind—you get to explore and appear focused at the same time.

Is there a quote about writing that motivates or inspires you?

“Let yourself be silently drawn by the stronger pull of what you really love.”  —Rumi.

It’s not a quote about writing per se, but it’s what writing feels like to me. It reminds me to follow my instincts in my writing, to be careful not to shove the words and characters around but to let them show me what the story needs.

What advice would you give to aspiring writers?

 “It is how you see the world—

in images, in dialogue, in stories.”

A writer is who you are. It is not dependent upon whether or not you make money with your words. It is how you see the world—in images, in dialogue, in stories. It is how you notice a gesture between two strangers in the park. It is the hours you spend thinking about the best words to describe the way your character walks. It is the fact that these things are thrilling and fill you with a kind of joy and power that you can’t get from anything else. It is who you are—whether it is your full-time job or the thing you do in your head while you are cleaning the deep-fat fryer at the restaurant or sitting at the stoplight while driving carpool. The rest is just logistics.

What’s the best advice you’ve been given as a writer?

I met an author once at a reading. She talked about her characters with such personal knowledge—the way they would talk to her and hijack the stories, take them in a direction she didn’t expect. I didn’t believe that was possible and when I went up to have her sign my book I said (I was young, and I am still embarrassed by it)—“I’m a writer, but no characters have ever talked to me.”

She was kind, and smiled, and simply said: “Well, perhaps you aren’t listening.”

She was utterly, completely right. It took twenty more years before I was able to listen, but when I finally did, everything changed.

Is there a question you find surprising that people ask about your work?

I suppose it shouldn’t be surprising by now, but it seems the first question everybody asks is whether the characters are people I know in my real life. They aren’t; they never are. I wonder sometimes why that would matter. My characters are perhaps more real to me precisely because they are not anyone I know.

Is there something that you wish people would ask about your work more often?

I really love the readers who dig deep into the images and interconnections in my books, who see the subtle things I slip in there, sometimes just to see if anybody catches them. Those conversations are my favorites because they involve taking a book apart and seeing it for the beautiful, intricate machine that it is. I can understand why some readers wouldn’t want to do that, as it might break the magic for them, but as a nerdy reader myself, I love it.

When you’re not writing, what do you like to do?

Travel, read, cook, spend time with my family. The fact that almost all of these usually involve food just makes them better.

About Erica Bauermeister

Erica Bauermeister is the bestselling author of three novels: The School of Essential Ingredients, Joy For Beginners, and The Lost Art of Mixing. She is also the co-author of two nonfiction works: 500 Great Books by Women: A Reader’s Guide and Let’s Hear It For the Girls: 375 Great Books for Readers 2-14. She lives in Port Townsend, Washington.

Buy The Lost Art of Mixing, preferably at your local independent bookstore.

[Toffoli, Marissa B. "Interview With Writer Erica Bauermeister." Words With Writers (February 27, 2013), http://wordswithwriters.com/2013/02/27/erica-bauermeister .]

The Lost Art of Mixing by Erica Bauermeister (Putnam Books, 2013).

Ron Currie, Jr. Photo By Lisa Prosienski.

An introduction to Ron Currie, Jr, author of the novels Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles (Viking, 2013), Everything Matters!, and God is Dead. Currie has won the Young Lions Award from the New York Public Library, and the Metcalf Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His latest novel is a wild ride, full of heart and heat. When asked where the idea came from for Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles, Currie said, “From my life, mostly.”

Quick Facts on Ron Currie, Jr

• Follow Ron @rcurriejr on Twitter
• Home: Waterville, Maine
• Comfort food: Bushmills Irish Whiskey
• Top reads: Changes all the time, but there are mainstays—Raymond Carver, David Foster Wallace, Kurt Vonnegut, Grace Paley, Lorrie Moore
• Current reads: Assholes: A Theory, by Aaron James

What are you working on at the moment?

A few essays. One’s about Patrick Swayze, another is about mass shootings and intrusive thoughts. I’m sort of idly jotting down notes for a screenplay idea about a man who decides to do everything he can to make himself as close to the American average as possible, as well, and sorting through four or five concepts for a new novel.  

What do you hope readers will take away from Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles?

It’s the same hope with everything I write: that I’ll be able to say something of substance and entertain at the same time. I’m a firm believer in the author’s obligation to at least try to entertain his audience.

Whom would you describe as the ideal reader of your work?

I’ll preface this by saying I understand and accept that no matter how good a novel is, there are people for whom it will not work at all, but: everyone, is my ideal reader. As much time as we spend focusing on the borders between us—I’m black, you’re white, I’m male, you’re female, I’m from New England, you’re from Indonesia, I was born in the 20th century, you were born in the 18th—there are basic universalities, and good writers seek to tap into and illuminate them.

“There are basic universalities,

and good writers seek

to tap into and illuminate them.”

Where and when do you prefer to write?

It changes. While doing the heavy lifting on Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles, I was in a sort of self-imposed isolation on a small Caribbean island. Other times, I can usually be found on the love seat in my living room, with my feet propped up on the coffee table and the laptop right where you’d imagine.

Do you listen to anything while you write?

Sometimes. I find that certain music, under the right conditions, can sort of crack me open emotionally in a way that’s really good for the writing.

It’s been said writers can do their work from any place, where would you most want to live and write?

I feel like I should have a ready answer for this, but I don’t. I like the small Caribbean island quite a lot, and am thinking of it quite fondly now, since as I write this it’s about five degrees Fahrenheit here in Maine.

Do you have a philosophy for, or an approach to, how and why you write?

This is just one aspect of it, but I had a conversation with a very smart and celebrated writer whom I respect very much about how no matter how far afield a writer goes in terms of style, theme, plot, whatever, it all ultimately must exist in the service of a very plain, very human, very relatable story. The way he put it was that without this human aspect, there’s “nothing for the horses to pull.” Which I just thought was very sharp.

What do you find most challenging about writing?

Drumming up the motivation and courage to do it every day.

How have your goals as a writer changed over time?

They’ve become more modest. Just the other day, I realized that, at least right now, I feel like my only real ambition as a novelist is to leave behind an accurate record of what it was like to be a very particular kind of human being. No mean feat, that, but I think it’s doable.

Is there a quote about writing that motivates or inspires you?

“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” That’s Hemingway.

What advice would you give to aspiring writers?

“Don’t be lazy, not even for a single sentence.”

Don’t be lazy, not even for a single sentence. A corollary to that is: learn not to bullshit yourself about whether you’re being lazy.

Is there a question you find surprising that people ask you about your work?

I guess not, but once at a reading I was asked what I do at the gym to work on my forearms. That was a surprising question.

When you’re not writing, what do you like to do?

Watch baseball, work out, skulk in bars. Read, of course.

About Ron Currie, Jr

Ron Currie, Jr is the author of three novels, the most recent of which is Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles. He’s won the Young Lions Award from the New York Public Library, as well as the Metcalf Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His work has been translated into 17 languages. He lives in Maine.

Buy Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles, preferably at your local independent bookstore.

[Toffoli, Marissa B. "Interview With Writer Ron Currie, Jr." Words With Writers (February 11, 2013),  http://wordswithwriters.com/2013/02/11/ron-currie-jr.]

Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles by Ron Currie, Jr (Viking, 2013).

Virginia Bell. Photo by Ben Blustein.

An introduction to Virginia Bell, author of the poetry collection From the Belly (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2012). Bell is a Senior Editor with RHINO Poetry and an adjunct professor at Loyola University Chicago, where she particularly enjoys teaching courses on Women in Literature, Early American Literature, and Nationalism and Literature. Her poems have been published in numerous journals and anthologies, and are forthcoming in Spoon River Poetry Review. Throughout 2013, her poems will be heard on WGLT’s Poetry Radio.

When asked about the title of her new book, Bell shared that it “allowed me to group seemingly disparate poems together: ekphrastic ones and ones about the body generally, as well as the ones about food or the mother’s body. I think I liked the idea, too, of the belly as gut, as the place where poems come from.” Indeed, her poems are a gutsy, unflinching exploration of what it means to grow up, to be a woman and a mother, to remember, to tell stories—to live.

Quick Facts on Virginia Bell

• From the Belly website
• Home: Evanston, Illinois
• Comfort food: pasta
• Top reads: Anne Carson (especially Autobiography of Red), Carmen Boullosa’s Son vacas, somos puercos, Linda Bierds’ The Profile Makers, Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient, Marie Howe’s What the Living Do
• Current reads: Anne Carson’s Decreation, Ernesto Sabato’s El túnel, the poetry anthology The Open Door: 100 poems, 100 Years of Poetry Magazine, and The FSG Book of Twentieth Century Latin American Poetry

What are you working on at the moment?

I am working on some poems about a friend who recently survived breast cancer. I’ve written a few poems about her and our friendship during the past six months. I thought that she would hate me writing about her life, but she actually loves the poems, so that’s been neat—to write and share the poems with her.

The other thing I’m working on is moving beyond confessional poetry. I’ve been working on a series of poems based on the writings of Cabeza de Vaca. He was part of a multi-ship expedition to the Americas in the 16^th Century and was shipwrecked off the coast of what’s now Florida. Cabeza de Vaca and the other three men that survived walked for eight years, through what’s now the southern US, before they found Spaniards again. He wrote an account of the experience, La Relación. I had to read his account in college, and I teach it now, but I’ve become interested in exploring a poetic reaction to it instead of a critical reaction. Two of the poems in this series will be in the next issue of Spoon River Poetry Review.

“I’m fascinated by historiography,

the writing of history.”

I’m fascinated by historiography, the writing of history, and it’s part of what I wrote my dissertation about years ago. I recently heard about Agnes Nestor, a labor leader in Chicago in early 20^th Century. I found her autobiography in the stacks at Loyola University. No one had taken it out for decades; the spine was falling apart and crumbling. What’s interesting to me is how she represents herself by not representing herself. It’s supposed to be her autobiography, but she tells you almost nothing about her personal subjectivity. The book is more of a chronological list of her activism. I’m writing a series of poems that imagine her subjectivity and fill in the blanks of her autobiography.

Where did the idea for From the Belly come from? How did the book come together?

Let’s start with the title. It’s a phrase from the poem “Art History.” The poem is loosely based on an afternoon I spent walking around the art museum in Cleveland, Ohio with a college friend. You know how poems are—it’s sort of based on that afternoon, but it becomes its own fiction. This friend was an art major, and she still paints, but here we were walking around the museum, looking at all these famous paintings, by artists like the Impressionist masters, and for every painting we looked at she had something negative to say. She was being such a severe critic! The afternoon culminated with the two of us standing before one of Monet’s famous water lily paintings. She pointed to one tiny section in the middle (“the belly”) of the painting and said something like, “This is the part I like. If I were to hang this in my own house, I would cut out this rectangle and that’s the only part I would put on the wall.”

What interested me most was the violence of the idea of cutting out something from Monet’s lilies, but also the beauty of having that strong and irreverent an aesthetic opinion and desire. I’m answering your question with this story because I don’t want the word “belly” to mean only the literal belly that digests food, or the pregnant woman’s belly, although in some poems it definitely means these things. The title allowed me to group seemingly disparate poems together: ekphrastic ones and ones about the body generally, as well as the ones about food or the mother’s body. I think I liked the idea, too, of the belly as gut, as the place where poems come from.

What do you hope readers will take away from this book?

I feel like a beginner late in life, so this book was a learning experience for me. I recognize that many of the poems are narratives, or at least pieces of stories, and I just hope that some of the stories resonate with people, make them think about their own lives in some way that they hadn’t before. More specifically, I hope that some readers will think a little more about the experience of gender in the world—not just being a woman, but also being a boy or a man. There are a lot of poems about how gender frames our experience and how we think about gender, at least in my generation.

Where and when do you prefer to write?

I wish I had a better routine, that I were more disciplined. I write in my home office when my kids are at school on the days when I’m not teaching. I love to write in the morning because that’s when my head is most clear. Ideally, probably after exercising in some way; going for a run or a walk clears my head.

Where would you most want to live and write?

In a warmer climate than Chicago. Somewhere I could write outdoors, even though I always write indoors now. Barcelona in the spring and summertime, with an apartment with a view of the Mediterranean Sea and a little terrace. This is my fantasy. But, I actually am happy to write right where I am. I feel fortunate that I have space in my house where I can write, and time alone to work. Those are really the two most important things—space and uninterrupted time alone.

Do you listen to music while you work?

Sometimes, when I get started. Usually, once I get into a flow, the music starts to interfere so I turn it off. Even if it’s music without words. I think it’s the rhythm—if that starts to overtake the poem too much I have to turn it off.

Do you have a philosophy for how and why you write?

I write for a couple of reasons. One is that I always wanted to at earlier stages in my life and I didn’t let myself. When I was younger I think I always felt that I should be doing something more practical or career-driven. Even though what I was doing wasn’t all that practical, literary criticism just seemed more practical than writing poetry. It’s really just as arcane—there may be even fewer people who read literary criticism than read poetry.

“I write because I just think

too much about things.”

I write because I just think too much about things. If I don’t write them, I keep obsessively thinking about them. Exploring through writing, I can let certain things go. If I write enough about them, then they don’t occupy me as much. When I started letting myself write more, when my second child was a toddler, I really underestimated how pleasurable writing is. As difficult as it is, even if a poem doesn’t come out well, just trying to do it is a great way of spending time and being alive in the world.

When you’re stuck getting started on a poem, where do you look for inspiration?

Sometimes I put the poem away, for weeks, months, maybe even a year. For the Cabeza de Vaca poems, I started drafting them over a year ago and they weren’t working, so I put them away. I recently started working on them again and I realized that I needed to go back to the text that was inspiring me. I needed to reread the book, and that was enormously helpful. You think you remember everything, but you don’t.

The other thing I do is workshop poems. I ask people I trust to read them and give me feedback. There were a couple of poets I met in Washington, DC who were wonderful in this way. And when I moved to Chicago, I met more poets and moved in and out of writing groups, and I can’t imagine having written From the Belly without that process.

How do you balance content with form?

I don’t have an MFA, so when I started to take creative writing seriously, I had to teach myself. I would give myself the exercise of trying out forms. Most of the poems didn’t work out, but I learned a lot. The poem “No Words for These Matters” started out as a sestina, but I radically pared it down to make it work. The six words I had chosen for the sestina are still in it though.

A poet friend once told me that you need to keep playing with a poem for as long as you can before you consider it done. Even if you think it’s good the way it is. You should play with the form. Just try different kinds of lines and stanza breaks and you will see things emerge that you didn’t even realize were in the poem. I resisted that advice for a long time, but it’s so true.

How do images inform your work?

I’m going to interpret your question as an invitation to talk about ekphrastic poetry. I think I consciously started working with images because I always loved Sally Mann’s photography, even before I had children. I was fascinated by her work and the notion of being a photographer/mother and using your children as your subject. And then when I was writing poems about my own kids, it felt weird. I worried that I was misrepresenting them. But I picked up her book, and I could write about the relationship between parents and kids without having to write narrowly biographical poems about my own kids. And I love visual art—I have no training in it, no business writing about it, but I love it.

What’s the relationship between fact and fiction in your poetry?

“Memory is so fallible, so untrustworthy,

but in a beautiful way

because memory is imaginative.”

I think the key word to the relationship is memory. Memory is so fallible, so untrustworthy, but in a beautiful way because memory is imaginative. Many of the poems in the book seem to be about my childhood or my life, but fact changes into fiction from the get-go. I don’t really know if I remember things accurately, and I don’t really care. My memory has served as a kind of fiction machine.

There have been a few times when I’ve shown people a poem about an event they were a part of, and they were like, “That’s not what happened!” They remember it completely differently, and I think that’s fine.

Is there a quote about writing that motivates or inspires you?

Here are the two quotes from Dean Young in The Art of Recklessness:

“Let us forgive ourselves for writing poems that aren’t better than every other poem that has ever been written.”

On writing and revising: “It is and needs to be a messy process, a devotion to unpredictability, the papers blowing around the room as the wind comes in.”

What advice would you give to aspiring writers?

You have to be open to constructive criticism; don’t be afraid of it. Look at it as part of the fun, and keep working at your writing.

What do you find most challenging about writing?

Insisting that it deserves a place in my life, and carving out time and space to do it. Also, putting that hyper-critical voice to the side while you’re writing, but still being able to summon that other voice, which is not hyper-critical but careful. Being rigorous—paying attention to detail, and being willing to revise. 

When you’re not writing, what do you like to do?

I love to hang out with my boys and my husband, have dinner, go to movies, do whatever families do. One of my sons taught me how to play the Japanese game Go this winter. My other son loves to practice his card tricks on everyone in the family these days. I love to travel. I love to walk and hike. I like to cook. I like to be in the classroom teaching. And, as a Senior Editor of RHINO Poetry, I like to read submissions.

About Virginia Bell

Virginia Bell’s poetry will be heard on WGLT’s Poetry Radio throughout 2013, and two of her Cabeza de Vaca poems are forthcoming in Spoon River Poetry Review. Her first collection of poetry, From the Belly, was released by Sibling Rivalry Press in 2012. Her poetry has also appeared in CALYX, a Journal of Art and Literature by Women, The Mom Egg, Poet Lore, Pebble Lake Review, Wicked Alice, Ekphrasis, Contrary Magazine, Woman Made Gallery’s Her Mark: a Journal of Art and Poetry, and Beltway Poetry Quarterly, as well as in the anthologies Brute Neighbors: Urban Nature Poetry, Prose and Photography and A Writers’ Congress: Chicago Poets on Barack Obama’s Inauguration. Bell has a PhD in Comparative Literature and has published articles on activist writers such as Eduardo Galeano and Leslie Marmon Silko, and also the Instructor’s Resource Manual for Beyond Borders: A Cultural Reader (Houghton Mifflin 2003). She is a Senior Editor with RHINO Poetry and an adjunct professor at Loyola University Chicago.

Buy From the Belly, preferably at your local independent bookstore.

[Toffoli, Marissa B. "Interview With Writer Virginia Bell." Words With Writers (January 27, 2013),  http://wordswithwriters.com/2013/01/27/virginia-bell.] 

From the Belly by Virginia Bell (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2012).

Tom Carter. Photo courtesy of the author.

An introduction to travel writer and photographer Tom Carter, whose recent book CHINA: Portrait of a People is being hailed as the most comprehensive book of photography on modern China published by a single author. The book is organized by region with thoughtful descriptions for photos that offer a candid and moving glimpse of life in China. As Carter says in the introduction, “Where I have been, you will be; what I have seen, you will see.” Carter, who is originally from San Francisco, California, is now at work on a few books, including another photo book, INDIA: Portrait of a People.

Quick Facts on Tom Carter

• Tom Carter online: http://www.tomcarter.org | Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/chinaportrait | Amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com/author/china
• Home: From San Francisco, based in Shanghai.
• Comfort food: Back home: anything Mexican. In China: suan cai yu (sour spicy fish soup).
• Top reads: Aztec by Gary Jennings; anything by Pearl S Buck; anything by John Steinbeck; classic literature, in general.
• Current reads: Struggling to get through Tai-Pan by James Clavell (not nearly the page-turner that Shogun was).
• Tom Carter’s photos from China: 

What are you working on at the moment?  

I’m working on several different book projects concurrently: a photography book about India; an illustrated book about China; a nonfiction anthology about China; and a novel about China.

Where did the idea begin for CHINA: Portrait of a People?

I arrived in China in 2004 as an English teacher and saved my salary so that I could go backpacking across the 33 provinces. I took pictures just for fun along the way, and after another two straight years and 35,000 miles on the road, I had amassed a vast cache of photos. I found an independent publisher in Hong Kong who saw the potential in my work, which eventually became CHINA: Portrait of a People.

What do you hope people will take away from your work?

The photos that appear in my book were a mere afterthought while traveling the land and meeting people along the way. But after sifting through the thousands of images I had taken, what I found is that I had captured almost every aspect of life and humanity of modern Chinese society. In that regard, it offers readers a rare glimpse into “real” China that is not often portrayed accurately by the media.

“A rare glimpse into ‘real’ China.”

Do you have a philosophy for, or an approach to, how and why you write?

Writing is actually a painfully slow process for me. I love it, and I hate it. Inspiration either strikes me or it doesn’t; I’m not the type of writer who can just sit down and write. I agonize over every sentence, and sometimes take an entire day to craft one paragraph; and it’s impossible for me to move forward until that paragraph is perfect. This is especially true for my fiction writing; my nonfiction travel writing is a little easier. 

What do you find most challenging about travel writing?

Coming up with something original that hasn’t been written about ad nauseam already. Finding that unique perspective about a location that will say something new and different. More often than not, this comes about from the unique experiences I have while traveling, which are usually not a little exciting and dangerous. Readers like to hear about this stuff more than just the usual “facts and history” of a place.

As a photographer, how do images inform your writing?

It depends on the situation I get myself into, such as the adventures I have and the people I meet. I don’t like to stage photos or go somewhere with an agenda; I just let life happen naturally, and then the photos and writing follow naturally.

“I just let life happen naturally,

and then the photos

and writing follow naturally.”

What do you concentrate on when composing a shot? What are you looking for when you look through the camera lens?

I am simply trying to capture the moment. I prefer not to compose or frame shots according to some preconceived idea or conventions. Lots of my pictures are crooked or out of focus or grainy–just like life. So, I suppose you could say my work is a combination of street photography, travel photography and photojournalism.

Where and when do you prefer to write?

I write only when inspiration strikes. If it’s not coming to me, I don’t bother. I never write just to write. I am a very reluctant writer.

Where would you most want to live and write?

Somewhere where the internet doesn’t exist. I love exploring the net, but I find it to also be the biggest time-waster in the world, which usually kills my writing spirit. As far as geography, I’ve written in isolated villages and big noisy cities. I’m not particular about location.

Do you listen to anything while you write?

Oh, heck yes. I must, must, must have music in the background. Usually classical in the morning, jazz mid-day, and then electronica or trip-hop at night. As long as it doesn’t have words, I can write with it on. Or I should say, as long as it doesn’t have English words. I often play Chinese or Japanese pop music in the background, too, because I can’t understand any of it.

How have your goals as a writer changed over time?

I used to write just because I was inspired to be creative. Nowadays my goals are more professional: asking myself which publisher would be interested in this project.

Is there a quote about writing that motivates or inspires you?

None that I can think of. For inspiration I need only flip through any John Steinbeck novel.

What advice would you give to aspiring writers?

“Follow your heart, not trends,

when it comes to telling a story.”

Follow your heart, not trends, when it comes to telling a story. Nobody likes a copycat.

Is there something that you wish people would ask about your work more often?

I’d be flattered if people took the time to analyze the nuances and details of my photography. My book CHINA: Portrait of a People is rich with symbolism and pop culture references, and maybe someday someone will do a critical analysis of it.

When you’re not writing or taking pictures, what do you like to do?

Walk the streets, drink in the life and culture around me. China is perfect for that. So is India.

About Tom Carter

Travel photographer Tom Carter was born and raised in San Francisco, California and graduated with a degree in Political Science from the American University in Washington, DC. Following a political career with a number of high-profile state and national campaigns, Tom decided to “peek over the fence” and subsequently spent 18 months backpacking down the length of Mexico, Cuba, and Central America. Tom later spent one year in Japan, one year in India, and four years in the People’s Republic of China, traveling extensively throughout the country’s 33 provinces and autonomous regions. The result was his first book, CHINA: Portrait of a People.

Buy CHINA: Portrait of a People, preferably at your local independent bookstore.

Additional preview of Tom Carter’s photos from China: 

[Toffoli, Marissa B. "Interview With Writer & Photographer Tom Carter." Words With Writers (December 20, 2012), http://wordswithwriters.com/2012/12/20/tom-carter/.]

Mark L Arywitz. Photo by Caitlin Sanders.

An introduction to Mark L Arywitz, author of the novel The Legend of Little Great Grandfather (TheWriteDeal, 2012). Arywitz’s background in writing for the screen instilled in him that “it’s not only about good prose, I’m also going for a story that has some narrative drive.” His screenwriting credits include the feature film “Just Before Dawn,” the TV drama “Mozart’s Requiem,” and many commissioned screenplays, among them “Holier Than Thou.” Arywitz teaches in the Department of Film & Television in NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. The Legend of Little Great Grandfather is his debut novel, and the first in a trilogy in progress.

Quick Facts on Mark L Arywitz

• Arywitz’s The Legend of Little Great Grandfather: http://www.thewritedeal.org/bookstore/182
• Home: New York City, the NYU/Washington Square Park area.
• Top reads: I could list Kafka, Dostoyevsky, Hemingway, Garcia Marquez, Flaubert, Joyce, Murakami, but I would still be leaving out other favorite novelists and novels (such as The Great Gatsby). I would also be leaving out Shakespeare, and other favorite playwrights like Beckett, as well as poets like Rimbaud or T S Eliot.
• Current reads: These days, I’m mostly reading and re-reading plays (for example, Harold Pinter, Sam Shepard, Tracy Letts). The Tiger’s Wife by Téa Obreht is probably the last novel I read that kept me truly engaged from start to finish.

What are you working on at the moment?  

The Legend of Little Great Grandfather is the first book in a trilogy, so work on the second and third books is on the agenda. I’m also developing a couple of screenplay ideas, as well as working on the first draft of a play (working title: Painting Heather).

Where did the idea come from for The Legend of Little Great Grandfather?

I can’t really say in any exact “eureka moment” sense. In a general way, it came from a strong curiosity about family history and a desire to fill in some of the many blanks, which sometimes amounted to reinventing that history. Research into the history of Eastern European Jewish immigration to the US played an important part, too. No matter how terrible things were, the idea of people uprooting from a place that had been home for so many generations and leaving so much behind, including family they might never see again, and dealing with all the hardships of the journey and then of trying to make a new home in a foreign country and culture—I find that story compelling.

“The idea of people uprooting from a place

that had been home for so many generations

and leaving so much behind.”

What do you hope readers will take away from this book?

I hope they find something compelling in it, too. Especially as experienced through the journey of the unusual hero, Memmel, whose adventures run the gamut from tragic to comic.

Whom do you picture as the ideal reader of your work?

Is there such a thing? If so, I didn’t write with one in mind. In the case of this particular novel, Jewish Americans of an Eastern European background might relate to certain aspects of the story more easily, but I would hope that the overall story has a more universal appeal.

Where and when do you prefer to write?

I write at home, of course. I teach screenwriting at NYU, which can call for a good deal of time and attention. So the “when” is sometimes a tricky proposition.

Where would you most want to live and write?

At one point Hemingway lived a pretty good answer to this—one home in the mountains in Idaho and one home by the ocean in Key West (and lots of travel too). I wouldn’t choose the same places, but in an ideal world, something along those lines could be very nice.

Do you listen to anything while you write?

Not as much as I used to. When I do, it’s classical music more often than not. But sometimes I just need silence.

“Sometimes I just need silence.”

Do you have a philosophy for, or an approach to, how and why you write?

Samuel Beckett once said something like this, “Fail. Fail again. Fail Better.” That may not exactly constitute a philosophy, but it does amount to a kind of approach. As to the why, it’s hard to say for sure, but a lot of the time it seems to be a need, a “have-to” kind of thing.

How has your background in film influenced your writing for this book?

Someone who read The Legend of Little Great Grandfather said, “You really keep up the dramatic tension.” That is one of the most important things I’ve taken from screenwriting and film. For me it’s not only about good prose, I’m also going for a story that has some narrative drive. And this carries over to character, too. Not just strong detailed portrayal, but also characters dealing with conflict, and changing. These elements are meaningful to me and I think they’re meaningful to many readers.

What do you find most challenging about writing?

That “Fail. Fail again. Fail better” process can be frustrating. And, then there’s the issue of over-thinking and not trusting your intuition. Sometimes I have to tell myself, “Don’t think—just write!”

“Don’t think—just write!”

How have your goals as a writer changed over time?

Can we always identify our goals? I think sometimes that is a goal in itself—identifying our goals, especially any long-term ones. I do know that my writing process has changed over time, which has probably affected my “goals,” but I’m not sure I can sum up exactly how.

Is there a quote about writing that motivates or inspires you?

I don’t know about quotes motivating or inspiring me, but I have a number of favorites, including the Beckett quote I mentioned earlier, and Picasso’s remark about art being a lie that reveals the truth. Another is Hemingway’s saying, “The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof, shit detector.”

What advice would you give to aspiring writers?

“A lot of the best writing is re-writing.”

Like I said, I teach. To me, that’s not so much about giving advice as it is about the process of writing and giving people feedback. A lot of the best writing is re-writing. It’s not a sprint—it’s a long distance race. You learn by doing, but it’s different for everyone. So make your own mistakes, not somebody else’s.

What’s the best advice you’ve been given as a writer?

There isn’t any particular piece of advice that I could single out as the best. It’s pretty much a repeat of what I said above. It has to do with process and the feedback I’ve been given on my work by insightful readers and writers along the way.

When you’re not writing, what do you like to do?

I plead the 5^th. I refuse to answer on the grounds that—well, you know the rest.

About Mark L Arywitz

Mark L Arywitz holds a BA from Antioch College, and an MA from SUNY Buffalo. His screenwriting credits include the feature “Just Before Dawn” (PictureMedia Ltd. NY), the TV drama “Mozart’s Requiem” (Kel-Ben Inc.), numerous commissioned screenplays, as well as collaborations on several adaptations for the screen, most recently the script “Angel Fire, N.M.” Has made and publicly screened a number of short films, written and published film criticism, served as a script/story consultant on other projects, and written short fiction as well. Arywitz teaches in the Department of Film & Television in NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. The Legend of Little Great Grandfather is the first novel in a trilogy in progress.

[Toffoli, Marissa B. "Interview With Writer Mark L Arywitz." Words With Writers (October 20, 2012), http://wordswithwriters.com/2012/10/20/mark-arywitz/.]

The Legend of Little Great Grandfather by Mark L Arywitz (TheWriteDeal, 2012).

David Budbill. Photo by Joshi Radin (2011).

An introduction to David Budbill, author of the book Park Songs: a Poem/Play (Exterminating Angel Press, 2012). Happy Life, his most recent book of poems, was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2011. Two other Budbill books have also been published by Copper Canyon Press, While We’ve Still Got Feet and Moment to Moment: Poems of a Mountain Recluse. His latest play, A Song for My Father, premiered at Lost Nation Theatre in Montpelier, Vermont, in the spring of 2010 and will be produced again in Salinas, California, at The Western Stage in 2013. Budbill’s prizes and honors include The Vermont Arts Council’s Walter Cerf Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Arts, a National Endowment for the Arts Play Writing Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry, and The Dorothy Canfield Fisher Award for Fiction. When asked about the role of humor in Park Songs, Budbill said, “All I know is, I can’t live my life without humor and neither can my characters.”

Quick Facts on David Budbill

• David Budbill’s website
• Home: The southwest corner of Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom, five miles from blacktop and 35 miles from a traffic light in any direction of the compass.
• What’s your comfort food: Spaghetti and red sauce with a couple of glasses of red wine.
• Top reads: Ryokan, Han Shan, Wang Wei, Po Chu-i, and Wendell Berry
• Current reads: Two books by Ryokan, in translation.

What are you working on at the moment?

More poems for my next book of poems from Copper Canyon Press.

Where did the idea come from for Park Songs?

It started with a play years ago called “Little Acts of Kindness” that ran in Montpelier, VT, in 1993. I’ve generally changed things from that original production, added some characters, rewritten others—the usual tinkering and rewriting that any writer does. And before the play they were monologues spoken by characters in my imagination.

What do you hope readers will take away from this book?

“I am always interested in the down-and-out,

the forgotten people, the disenfranchised.”

I hope that people, readers or theatregoers, take away a sense of these characters, their lives and the situations they are in in the world. I am always interested in the down-and-out, the forgotten people, the disenfranchised. I want readers or theatregoers to remember these characters.

Whom do you picture as the ideal reader of your work?

Anybody who has some compassion and sympathy.

Where and when do you prefer to write?

Here at my desk in my room upstairs in my house here at home.

Where would you most want to live and write?

Right here where I am right now. I love it here and I don’t want to work anywhere else.

Do you listen to anything while you write?

No. When I listen to music, I listen. And I don’t talk while the music is playing. I talk after the music stops. Music is a conversation in another language; it is someone speaking directly to you, and, as your mother must have told you, it is impolite to talk while someone else is speaking.

How does blues music fit in with Park Songs?

“The blues can bring you up as well as down.”

I’ve been a jazz and blues fan since I was 12, that’s exactly 50 years ago. Blues seems like the natural music of the people in Park Songs, and not only because the Blues is sometimes sad—such as the lyrics to the blues tune I wrote called “The Life Hurts Blues”—but also because the blues can bring you up as well as down. The blues can release in you powerful feelings of sadness, foreboding and grief, and in the process, it can make you feel better, refreshed, lighter, even happier.

Do you have a philosophy for, or an approach to, how and why you write?

No. I just listen to the voices both inside of me and outside of me and try my damnedest to write down what they say.

What do you find most challenging about writing?

Getting down right what I want to say. I think there is a kind of platter circulating in myself somewhere, maybe it’s my head, maybe not. And on that platter are all the poems and characters that appear to me. They are constantly circulating inside of me. I’ve got to catch them when they come around. If I miss them, well, too bad for me, I just wasn’t quick enough or skilled enough or something to catch them. And when they come around again they might not be the same thing or be saying the same thing.

When you’re having trouble getting started on a poem, where do you look for inspiration?

I go for a walk in the woods, or I play some music to take my mind entirely off what I was trying to do.

How have your goals as a writer changed over time?

I have no idea. I never think about such things. Do I have goals? If I do, they are probably the same ones I had 30 or 40 years ago, and I’ve spent the last 30 or 40 years trying to get to those goals.

Is there a quote about writing that motivates or inspires you?

Here’s one I made up: “Don’t think. Listen.”

And my all-time favorite quote is from Ornette Coleman: “Most whites tend to think that it’s below their dignity to just show suffering and just show any other meaning that has to do with feeling and not with technique or analysis or whatever you call it.”

What advice would you give to aspiring writers?

Write something every day, even if it’s a grocery list. Use the language every day.

What’s the best advice you’ve been given as a writer?

“Don’t think. Listen.”

Don’t think. Listen.           

Is there a question you find surprising that people ask you about your work?

Yeah. They ask me where it comes from. It comes from out of nowhere, from my imagination, from the voices I hear, from somewhere. In short, I don’t know where it comes from, and I don’t care.

When you’re not writing, what do you like to do?

Cut wood, garden, play music, ride my mountain bike, watch TV.

About David Budbill

David Budbill has worked as a carpenter’s apprentice, short order cook, Christmas tree farm day laborer, mental hospital attendant, church pastor, teacher, and occasional commentator on NPR’s All Thing Considered. He is also the award-winning author of twelve books of poems, six plays, a novel, a collection of short stories, an opera libretto, and a picture book for children. His books include the bestselling Happy Life (Copper Canyon Press) and Judevine, a collection of narrative poems that forms the basis for Judevine: The Play, which has been performed in 22 states. Budbill was born in Cleveland, Ohio and now lives in the mountains of northern Vermont. David Budbill’s newest book of poems is Park Songs: a Poem/Play published by Exterminating Angel Press (2012).

Buy Park Songs, preferably at your local independent bookstore.

[Toffoli, Marissa B. "Interview With Writer David Budbill." Words With Writers (October 7, 2012), http://wordswithwriters.com/2012/10/7/david-budbill/.]

Park Songs by David Budbill (Exterminating Angel Press, 2012).

Bill Hutchinson. Photo by Lisa Amand.

An introduction to journalist Bill Hutchinson, the author of the memoir Sushi and Black-Eyed Peas (TheWriteDeal e-leaf, 2012). A senior writer for the New York Daily News, Hutchinson has also worked as a reporter for the Boston Herald, the Fresno Bee, the Contra Costa Sun and the Daily Ledger-Post Dispatch in the California Delta. Hutchinson grew up in Central California, the youngest son of an Okinawan mother and a Black, Irish Cherokee father. He began to write his memoir because “too many kinfolk were dying and taking great stories to their graves.”

Quick Facts on Bill Hutchinson

• Hutchinson online: Sushi and Black-Eyed Peas, Twitter @bill_hutchinson
• Home: Brooklyn, New York
• Comfort food: Sushi and black-eyed peas, burritos, and my own thin-crust pizza
• Top reads: A Drinking Life by Pete Hamill, The Book of Illusions by Paul Auster, The Color of Water by James McBride, On the Road by Jack Kerouac, Five-Finger Discount by Helene Stapinski
• Current reads: Great House by Nicole Krauss

What are you working on at the moment? 

I’ve just written six stories in one night shift for the New York Daily News; the subjects ranged from Kim Kardashian’s divorce mess, to skinny-dipping Congressmen, to moviemaker Tony Scott’s death plunge. I’m also writing the final 150 pages of Sushi and Black-Eyed Peas. So, I’m virtually writing 15 hours a day.

What made you decide to write Sushi and Black-Eyed Peas?

“Too many kinfolk were dying

and taking great stories to their graves.”

Death. Too many kinfolk were dying and taking great stories to their graves. Luckily, I got many of them on tape. Now they call out to me like pesky ghosts, saying, “When ya gonna finish that book, boy!” I feel a heavy obligation to them.

What do you hope readers will take away from this book?

A sense that a multiracial United States is not a new phenomenon, that some of our roots have been tangled since the 1920s. And, I hope readers draw inspiration from one Japanese-Cherokee-Irish-African-American’s drive to make it out of the American melting pot.

Whom do you picture as the ideal reader of your work?

Anyone who grew up in a small town feeling like a misfit, anyone from a disadvantaged background who remains optimistic about the chances for success.

Where and when do you prefer to write?

I write in the mornings, between 9am and noon. I write on a 7-year-old Dell Ispiron 1200, seated in my living room at a round, battered wooden table, next to a window with a view of the leafy backyards of Brownstone Brooklyn.

Where would you most want to live and write?

I’m exactly where I need to be at the moment. It gives me a good perspective on writing about where I came from.

Do you listen to anything while you write?

Just the bugs, birds, and traffic filtering through the open window.

Do you have a philosophy for how and why you write?

Write a thought as fast as you can before you forget it, and then rewrite it 20 to 30 times. 

How has your background as a journalist influenced your writing for this book?

“I had to learn how to stretch stories out, layer them.”

It’s been a benefit and a hindrance. While my skills as a reporter gave me a leg up on tracking down records, researching archives, and asking tough questions, I found that newspaper-style writing hampered me. I had to learn how to stretch stories out, layer them, and show the specific-revealing details of my life. In the newspaper, I string bare facts together, making sure they fit coherently and hum with an urgent tone, leaving most of the minutiae that makes a good memoir on the editing floor.

What do you find most challenging about writing memoir?

Striving for accuracy and honesty, while doing so in an entertaining and colloquial style.

Since you’re writing about your family, how have relatives reacted to your work?

One niece says she stopped reading it because some of the startling revelations overwhelmed her. I understand that. Some things I witnessed growing up were astonishingly disturbing, breaching the borders of sanity. My goal was to describe facts as they unfolded, raw and unvarnished. The majority of my family has welcomed it. My mother, Sumiko, offered the best review: “It’s the truth.” Many of my relatives came to a reading I did of Sushi and Black-Eyed Peas at my hometown library and encouraged me to carry on. My uncle, the Reverend C.L. Hutchinson, pastor of the House of Love Deliverance Church, who I write about, said I got his unique preaching style down pat.

How have your goals as a writer changed over time?

I want to write something that has lasting value, instead of writing something I’ve seen on subway floors a day later.

Is there a quote about writing that motivates or inspires you?

I was watching The Charlie Rose Show one night and heard Gore Vidal say, “Don’t try to be a great writer; just try to be a good writer.”

What advice would you give to aspiring writers?

Be extremely patient; try to be positive about rejection. Know that writing isn’t magic, it is hard work and an on-going battle with self-doubt.

“It is hard work and an on-going battle with self-doubt.”

What’s the best advice you’ve been given as a writer?

“Journalism is not your forté,” from a college professor who strongly suggested I consider another major. His doom and gloom only inspired me.

Is there a question you find surprising that people ask you about your work?

When your ethnicity is as hyphenated as mine, your town is as redneck as mine, and your loved ones speak in tongues and go around casting Satan out of each other, no question is surprising.

When you’re not writing, what do you like to do?

I’m also a self-taught abstract artist constantly painting and drawing, a voracious reader, and an amateur surfer.

About Bill Hutchinson

Bill Hutchinson is a senior writer for the New York Daily News. He has also worked as a reporter for the Boston Herald, the Fresno Bee, the Contra Costa Sun and the Daily Ledger-Post Dispatch in the California Delta. He has reported on the biggest news stories of his generation, from the Columbine High School massacre to the death of Osama Bin Laden. He is a graduate of San Francisco State University, and played a key role in the Daily News’ award-winning coverage of the September 11th attacks. He has appeared on national television and radio networks, including MSNBC, CNN, ABC and FOX News. His memoir Sushi and Black-Eyed Peas is available as an e-leaf from TheWriteDeal.

[Toffoli, Marissa B. "Interview With Writer Bill Hutchinson." Words With Writers (September 14, 2012), http://wordswithwriters.com/2012/09/14/bill-hutchinson/.]

Sushi and Black-Eyed Peas by Bill Hutchinson (TheWriteDeal e-leaf).