11.11.07: Chicago Humanities Festival Retrospective

Featuring Terry Tempest Williams and E.L. Doctorow
"[On the Climate of Concern:] If The March is about war, well it turns out we happen to be in a war. In fact, I often wonder why this was the only book I could write in 2003, because I'd thought about writing [it] for 20 years. I'd been reading Sherman's memoirs and Grants memoirs, but why did I start this book now, when we're in this disastrous war in Iraq? I don't know. Presumably when you're writing about the past, you're also thinking and talking about the present. All novels really take place in the past, even if they're in the preset tense. They're always about the writer's own time." >>>more

10.07.07: Porochista Khakpour

"Lately, I feel like in the last decade or so immigrant or ethnic writers are put under pressure to just present beautiful, moving stories. Just tell the story, forget toying with language, forget your craft, forget the construction, the actual architecture of the book; just tell the story. It'll be commercial, people will cry, you know, we're all happy. But I'm not a fan of those books. They never felt very moving to me. I saw a false emotion in those books, just like any movie that wants to be a tear-jerker. You feel a bit manipulated." >>>more

9.30.07: Miranda Mellis

"What is character? Can a person ever be a character? Aesthetically, I was interested in just situations, circumstances, episodes. Conventionally what drives a story is the thwarted desire of a character, the agency or lack thereof. And here character is submerged by the circumstances. The circumstances are actually so much bigger than any individual hero or figure who could have impact. And I don't mean that in a kind of nihilistic way, I just mean it as a kind of emotional sensation." >>>more