Bookslut

An Interview with Hannah Tinti

"The term led me to the story. A friend had given me Jeffrey Kacirk’s Forgotten English, a book of words that have fallen out of use in the English language, and 'Resurrection Men' was one of them. After coming across it I immediately formed a scene in my mind, of a graveyard, and the robbers, and a young boy keeping watch for them. I zeroed in on the boy, and as soon as I discovered he was missing his hand, I knew I had a novel to write." by Teresa Burns Gunther

An Interview with Leanne Shapton

"I had heard of a Truman Capote auction that was happening in 2006, the day after the launch of Was She Pretty?. I didn’t go to the auction, but I read the catalog like a book and I realized that it told the story of his last eight years in Hollywood. He was holing up in Joanne Carson’s place in LA, rejected by New York society -- the catalog showed what he was wearing, what he kept from his childhood; it showed that he was really into his pets... [E]ven the dry catalog descriptions were telling, explaining that the lots from his wardrobe were in “various states of condition, many pieces having stains, rips, tears and other issues…” Everything was so rich with this living he had done." by Jessica Ferri

On "Creative Writing"

It’s not particularly new or shocking to suggest that there’s something sensual in the relationship between reader and writer, but we’ve largely forgotten that the idea goes all the way back to Emerson’s Promethean sentence, which suggests not only that the reader and writer are promiscuous and messing around, but that there’s issue that results from the frolic. The reader and writer make something, create. But that’s not really the way “creative writing” gets used today. For the most part, it simply means fiction and poetry. Made up stuff. Created events. As a dead metaphor, “creative writing” is a desiccated zombie stumbling about, trying to keep up with a changing world and infect as many hapless souls as it can get its teeth into. by JC Hallman

Second Book Slump: On Reader’s Block

I have acquaintances who are successful readers. They buy a new hardback book once a month, sometimes at the kind of chain bookstore I boycott, and they read it and like it. Or, they read it and think it’s “okay, although I haven’t gotten to the end,” and they recommend it anyway, and they don’t feel the urge to die of boredom. It is usually a New York Times Notable Book. This little system of production and consumption also brings us room fresheners that are not safe for homes with pet birds, happy pills that cause liver failure, processed ham from tortured pigs, and movies like You’ve Got Mail. by Elizabeth Bachner

An Interview with Jules Feiffer

"I knew I was entering foolishly in terms of making a living, or in terms of a potential career, this field with no outlets at all. There was no books publisher, there were no comics publishers. There were no newspapers. And I tried all over. By the time I was trying this I had tried the more conventional routes. I had tried very hard to be a hack. I had tried very hard to have a traditional career. No one was interested in me doing that. When I went for broke I wasn’t risking anything. Nobody wanted me. Nobody wanted me respectable." by Paul Morton

An Interview with Jedediah Berry

"More and more I don’t think of there being as much of a distinction between the genre and literary so much. There’s certainly form and shapes to things and there’s certainly story traditions that pop up and again, but in the end I think of genre as providing one of many possible structures for telling a story. What you can do within those guidelines is so expansive and so broad that it starts to become almost pointless to think of them as separate anymore." by Michele Filgate

An Interview with Susie Orbach

"I wouldn’t have thought of myself as a writer when I did [Fat is a Feminist Issue]. It was more of an urgency to share what I had come to know and think. The consideration at the level of writing was entirely pragmatic: How do I tell people these ideas that they probably won’t be that receptive to? Because of FiFI’s success, I have had many opportunities to write, and by the time I wrote Hunger Strike I remember working at the words for effect. Now I think I work for authenticity: Does this really express what I mean? Has it caught the subtlety of the idea? I am particularly alert when it comes to technical language because then I fear it is easy to hide what one hasn’t quite understood. by Catherine Lacey

Gorillas at Risk, Animals at Play, and a Writer’s Place in the World

In such a [post-apocalyptic] world, what good would I be? What could I contribute? Would there arise among my neighbors a clamor to be taught about the development of cognition, consciousness, and communication in primates? Could my research on ape gesture become a bartered skill as I publicly interpreted the nonverbal nuances of people running for local political office? Could I organize Fahrenheit-451-style oral recitations to promote the literary arts? by Barbara J. King

An Interview with Samantha Hunt

I didn't want to make anything up about Tesla. I thought he had already been very badly maligned and forgotten. There have been awful, fantastic lies told about Tesla. One biography I purchased, claimed, in kelly green ink, that "Tesla was born onboard a spaceship traveling from Venus to Earth." The challenge for me was how to take his life and weave it into a work of fiction so that while a reader is wrapped up in story he/she would also be learning the real facts of this astonishing man's life.by Michele Filgate

An Interview with Paul Tremblay

"The idea of writing a PI novel -- a genre that celebrates order and the lucid piecing together of clues to ultimately reveal truths and black-and-white conclusions -- that blurs the lines of reality and embraces ambiguity appealed to me. I started with Mark Genevich being the anti-private dick: not calm-cool-collected, not handsome, and not at all well-suited for his choice of career (and does he really even have a career?). As the novel progressed, I think Mark and his narcolepsy became much more complex, and hopefully, more compelling." by Geoffrey H. Goodwin

An Interview with Wells Tower

"I really don’t feel as though I’m writing for my generation, or that I’m deliberately not writing for my generation. I guess the only audience I really write for are the people upon whom I inflict early drafts -- my editors and patient friends. The person I try hardest to please is the cranky, spiteful critic in my head who keeps up an incessant caterwauling of invective and unhelpful fault finding. If I write something that quiets that guy down, I can usually feel confident that it’s not completely awful." by David Varno

An Interview with Ruta Skujins of True Colors Bookstore

"The challenges are those that face any new business, but are perhaps more pressing because of the fact that Amazon has been an icon known around the world for almost 40 years. There was huge publicity around the fact that the store was closing, but not so much about us staying open. Getting the word out that we’re still here is our biggest challenge, that and trying to figure out how to get customers in the store in these difficult economic times. Personally, being the bookkeeper, event planner, community contact, PR person without any help is overwhelming. I have just one employee because I can’t afford to hire more, and I’m not even paying myself yet." by Gili Warsett