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

4.22.07: Jeffrey McDaniel

"Reading the poem out loud is part of the revision process. Not in terms of performing it, but standing in my house, walking around reading the poem, seeing how it sounds in my throat. I think that's a very good tool for revision, you can feel... the way you walk across a wooden floor, you can look to see if there are weak spots or dead spots, and I think that happens when you can read a poem; you can feel if there is something a little wrong with it." >>>more

4.08.07: Ander Monson

"The term 'Creative Nonfiction' is kind of the de-facto term we use now for this kind of stuff, which is, I guess, non-fiction that is in some way trying to be playful or in some way trying to approach art. It really is a strange thing to be writing non-fiction at all. My interests are in the world, and are in some of the methods we have of organizing information such as the Dewey Decimal system and the Library Cataloging system and then the Internet with all these weirdo links everywhere. Some of forms I use in the book are kind of to interrogate the world and interrogate the form." >>>more

4.01.07: Jonathan Lethem

"Any time I dabble in a genre, or used recognizable materials form elsewhere, or recombine different literary forms, it's first and foremost something that I did out of a kind of passion for those materials. Things that I read, a movie that I saw, books that I love, different styles of writing that I felt drawn to and I wanted to imitate, it all comes out of a fascination and an affection. I'm never trying in any important way to analyze or expose or tear down the genres that I'm fooling around with. I'm almost always writing out of a real aspiration to participate in the language that has turned me on. " >>>more

3.11.07: Daniel Pinkwater

"When I got [my] stuff in the museum, I would go and haunt the museum to hear and eavesdrop about what people were saying about my work. And it was disgusting! They were on a date, you know, a little culture-outing. First they'd look at the name, before they'd look at the picture, to see if it was by somebody important, then they'd sort of rock back on one heel and stroke their chin and say 'Ah, interesting, mystical, inspired...' It just seemed so uninteresting to me, the people, they seemed so hard to reach and so distracted and not worth my time. And the kids I was dealing with at the same time were practically eating the paint, or they were eating the paint. They were into it, it was important." >>>more

1.28.07: Colson Whitehead

"We are sort of saturated with marketing. We hear these slogans all the time. I found it not so hard to tap into that. It's sort of suffused our brains. I think we also lapse into marketing speak sometimes when we don't know it. . . . I can't escape it. . . . I am putting forth a critique of advertising, but I'm not above it. I'm sort of enthralled with these brands as anybody else." >>>more

1.21.07: Roger Bonair-Agard

"Moving to another country to pursue a life there is a choice on one level . . . on another there is no choice. You go where the resources are. You go where the resources are taken to. At the same time, I live by the grace of this country, this society, I probably couldn't pursue as a living, what I'm doing here, at home. But I still belong, I belong to the world and I belong to this other place. There is this pull and tug back and forth between who I am and what it means contextually to have moved to that place to this place. Who is that new person, what does that new person mean." >>>more

1.14.07: Rachel Webster & Richard Fammeree

"Universe of Poetry, a United Nations of Poetry, is an interactive forum and celebration of international poetry encouraging universal dialogue, compassion and peace. Each nation, with or without territory, will be represented by at least one poet." >>>more

11.19.06: Chicago Humanities Retrospective

featuring Gary Snyder, Philip Gourevitch, Laura Kipnis, Art Spiegelman, and Joyce Carol Oates "I think peace and war go together. I don't separate them. War meaning, a broad distribution of trouble, a conflict. That is inevitably part of our social human being whether you like it or not. I don't think we need to have the kinds of wars that organized governments launch against each other ... but I'm also avoiding trying to polarize a pure idea of peace as against a pure idea of war. To live with peace we have to live with disruptions ... It's like getting married, to run risks but stay safe." >>>more

11.12.06: Philip Gourevitch

"I'll talk to the [Paris Review] interviewer and offer any kind of guidance or help that they might request, but for the most part they are on their own - like any reporter would be - to go out and talk to a writer. The assumption is that they are going to seek to be pretty exhaustive and really cover the territory of that person's craft, of their preoccupations, their interests as a writer, their life as a writer - the writing life, I suppose one could say." >>>more

11.05.06: Laura Kipnis

"It does seem to me that there is a kind of incoherence to womens' position at the moment...I think where I started was thinking about how much actual female self-loathing still persists despite all of the progress...It struck me that all women, from the most diehard feminist to the most, you know, 'I-like-being-a-woman' type, are stuck between these two poles: on the one hand we've had gender progress and independence and financial independence, but most women are also steeped in traditional femininity to different degrees that encourage an endless amount of dissatisfaction and in the end self-loathing." >>>more

10.22.06: Chuck Palahniuk

"On tour this spring in Great Britain I read (the story Guts) twice, and at the second event in Brighton thirteen people fainted. I worked with a performance artist and while I read Guts he had sixteen screens projected with sigmoidoscopy footage, so while people were drinking beer in the darkness listening to the story they were looking at, you know, sixteen or seventeen different sigmoidoscopies taking place simultaneously. Thirteen people hit the dirt and the St. John's ambulance company had to take them all out." >>>more

10.15.06: Jonathan Lethem

"I do, in general, like to strive for a diversity of approaches and I've sort of promised myself not to write the same book twice. Each of the novels does have an overt stylistic entry point, or stance - some idea about the language of the book that I want to make come true when I write it, and hold to. Of course, that's easy to set out as a goal and yet you know that there are things about your language and your style that are going to occur, things that are innate to your approach to language. There's an inescapable stylistic self, I guess...as though there's some point I can't ever finish making." >>>more

10.08.06: David Rakoff

"It has been my great good fortune to be listened to, even when I was a child. When I was little, I think it was a combination of the fact that I had a certain kind of verbal acuity, and that I was a very tiny person - I didn't grow until sophomore year of college, etc. So it was this strange contrast, and I think that it threw people off, you know, this probably age-appropriate verbal acuity coming out of a body that looked like it was six years old. So I was always listened to in that way, and if you're listened to in that way you become a bit of a bully. Joan Didion was the one who said that writers are secret bullies, essentially trying to force our version on people. Writing is quite wonderful if you feel like a secret bully." >>>more

10.01.06: Jonathan Safran Foer

"I really desperately envy artists working in other mediums because I see all the things they can do that I can't do. A musician or a (visual) artist doesn't always have to make sense in the way that a writer does. As a writer, you're always working in sentences and you're always working in language that communicates some meaning, and even if the meaning can be interpreted in different ways, it's always meaning something. When you hear a note coming out of a guitar or when you see a field of color in a painting it doesn't mean anything in that way - it's experiential, it has a certain kind of effect. I really very, very often envy other artists for that reason." >>>more

09.24.06: Patrick Somerville

"A lot of the stories [in Trouble] are about building ways of dealing with the world that aren't what you had when you were a tiny little kid - stuff that's going to work for you and help you make sense of the entire world. If you grow up in the middle class, it's sort of frightening to be exposed to other classes and how other lives are lived without as much comfort as yours is lived. I think the characters [by the end of certain stories] are just beginning to figure out how to deal with being alive and maybe even the guilt that comes along with being a little bit privileged compared to other people." >>>more

05.28.06: Mykel Board

"When I write I see myself as a character. In (Even A Daugher Is Better Than Nothing), the idea is that I'm kind of the bad guy, or at least the naive bumbling oaf, and the hero is the country of Mongolia. One of the criticisms I hear is, "You don't come off very well - you seem like this sleazy, oafish character." I say, "Ok! That's the goal! That's not a criticism, that's the idea - Mongolia is the hero of the book, not me!" >>>more

05.21.06: Chris Sorrentino & Chris Hager

"One reason why I find (writing) so incredibly satisfying is because it does obviate the need to think - there's really just the creation of things. Other authors say this - my father has said this, I think Don DeLillo has said this somewhere: 'When you write you discover things that you didn't really realize that you knew.' I'm not sure exactly where they're coming from, these things, but they are very assertive opinions that come out through you and through your narrative voice." >>>more

05.14.06: David Remnick

"Writing is really hard. It's performing intellectually and emotionally in public in language, and that's a hard thing to do at any level. To do it at I hope the top of your game, you need support, you need encouragement, you need somebody watching over you. You need, as a writer, to know that you have a kind of ideal reader out there - that's what an editor should be: somebody who is sympathetic yet critical and who's there for writers." >>>more

05.07.06: Kevin May

"I know a lot of the songs that I write are love songs, and for a long while I beat myself up about it because I just thought I was being very unoriginal. Eventually I came to the conclusion that the reason love is the greatest theme is that when you're in a relationship, your senses are so heightened, you're lifted out of the banal, you notice more and you see more details. I think that it's within that idea of a relationship that you learn a lot more about yourself because it's far more dramatic (than normal life) - that's why I write love songs." >>>more

04.23.06: Robyn Schiff & Maggie Mascal

"Werewolves and vampires are great muses for poetry: things that seem to be one thing change form and they are actually something else - that's exactly what a poem is to me. The idea of the undead - Emily Dickenson's quote, 'a word is dead when it is said some say, but I say it just begins to live that day' - she could be writing about vampires, really. And the idea of text and line break and the sort of box that a poem makes on the page - there is something coffin-life about that. The way that a poem resonates through our culture long after it is written, long after it is published, long after the writer is gone - there is something vampiric about that in a great way." >>>more

04.16.06: Arthur Golden

"I wanted very much to tell the story of a woman's life, but it was to be informed by my own experience. My father died when I was 13, my parents divorced when I was 7 or 8...so I feel like I know a little something about irrevocable loss. That was the novel I wanted to write - this girl who's torn away from her home, who loses something very, very important to her at an early age when she has no resources for dealing with it, and yet somehow or another cobbles together a sort of life for herself under these circumstances." >>>more

04.09.06: Tony Fitzpatrick & Bill Savage

"In the late nineties I wanted to shake my work up and I wanted my poems and my drawings and my collector-type habit of ephemera junk and matchbooks and things like that - I wanted them all to be the same thing, so I started combining drawing and collage and bits of my poems and then whole poems themselves in these pieces. When somebody says to me, 'welll what are they? Are they drawings or collages or poems?' and I say, 'well, they're kind of all of that.' When I'm finished with them they kind of actually become memory objects." >>>more

03.26.06: Lisa Buscani

"Visual artists understand the importance of negative space - white space and blank space - as opposed to taking up space with an image. Musicians understand the importance of the space between notes as well as the notes, and so do (slam poetry) performers - or at least the really good ones. There has to be equal weight on what is not happening as well as what is happening. However, if you're not (performing) well enough, a sassier audience will use the space to heckle and insert their negative input.">>>more

03.12.06: Tim Miller

"Queer visibility is crucial - straight folks need to get used to the idea (of homosexuality). It's scary though - I've been in three major relationships in my life and two of the men have been almost murdered on the streets of this country, completely without any provocation, just stabbed or beaten with a two by four. America is incredibly dangerous to gay people." >>>more

03.05.06: Thomas Glave

"Some of the most incredible literature throughout history - in the west and everywhere - has been politically-charged literature. When you think about Russian writers, African writers, Latin American writers, etc - people in this country who dare to take on really charged issues - those books stay with us today. I think that what is most interesting in a lot of that work is the fact that it documents particular times but it also documents human complexity....Nothing is as simple as black or white, or grey, or gay, or lesbian - it's much more complicated than that on the human level." >>>more

02.26.06: Jonathan Messinger

"She wrote this monologue about this terrible bar of soap (from the Dollar Store) - it was called "Bush Babies." It had like a baby koala bear trapped in the bar of soap and so she wrote about that and she was sort of making fun of it, and then over the course of the monologue she started talking about her breast cancer and it was this incredibly personal piece about her breast cancer and really one of the most moving things I've heard in a long time. It's strange that the mundane things in the dollar store bring out these really personal, sort of deep things." >>>more

02.19.06: Samantha Hunt

"The Disney version of The Little Mermaid made mermaids seem so vanilla or so safe and nice when it's really a horrible myth. It's the scariest and most frightening thing - these women come up from the water and they're not really women and they kill people - it's a terrifying idea. I wanted to somehow reclaim the horror of that myth and I thought, "well alright, the horror of that myth can easily be married to the horror of a 19 year old girl trying to find out who she is in a small town that's alcoholic and claustrophobic." >>>more

02.12.06: Hilary Hamann

"There are places we go in the mind - we daydream. This book gives voice to those daydreams around the rigid space of the science. So if you're reading the science and your mind begins to wander, it actually gives you places for your mind to wander: literature, art, and questions of values." >>>more

02.05.06: Andrew Winston

"(New forms of literature) will continue to emerge because of technology, ...but there is still a human respect and need for the book as an object, and I don't think it will go away. There are different kinds of books you want to own - you might be happy to have something as an e-book, but you might want to put your War and Peace on the shelf because you read it and it sort of resonates with you and if it's not there as a physical thing it's just not quite the same." >>>more

01.29.06: Zach Dodson & Brian Costello

"There are a lot of writers and a lot of different (literary) groups in Chicago and they're not always aware of each other. The same goes for the music scene - I think there is a lot of potential for cross-pollinization. I think a lot of people who enjoy Brian (Costello's) band would also like to read Brian's novel. There just doesn't exist a support network for young writers who are doing the same thing that musicians are - making art. They're overlooked and underappreciated, and we're trying to change that." >>>more

01.22.06: Brian Bouldrey

"We are forced, at a certain point on Corsica, to hitchhike. I am terrified and I won't do it, and of course (hitchhiking) is something you can do in Europe at any time, and in fact its expected of certain people. We ended up getting picked up by an old, old couple who made honey from the bees in their hives, and we were sitting (in the car) with these big buckets and I was sure there were bodies in them. This little couple who were only there to do us a kind favor were going to hack us up and feed us to their bees, I was sure of it." >>>more

01.15.06: Make Magazine

featuring Sarah Dodson, Mike Zapata, Ramsin Canon, and Marvin Tate.

"Because we're trying to connect a lot of these different communities, we don't want to fall into one style of writing or one group of writers. I think that's kind of our underlying goal, to have a broad spectrum - everything from very much experimentation to sort of traditional Steinbeck-like stories or something like that. We definitely want to cover what we see as going on in Chicago right now, and of course outside of Chicago as well." >>>more

01.08.06: Pireeni Sundaralingam

"In a political situation such as the war in Sri Lanka, for example, you have elements of censorship going on and so you can't write freely. Some of the first people who were taken in and disappeared by the government were poets and journalists. There was always the sense, even back home when speaking my own language, that you had to be so careful of what you said, who you spoke to, what names you used, and unfortunately that carries on to some extent even when we're in relative freedom in the west because you don't want to jeopardize people's lives back home." >>>more

12.04.05: Guy Deutscher

"Of all mankind's manifold creations, language must take pride of place. Other inventions - the wheel, agriculture, sliced bread - may have transformed our material existence, but the advent of language is what made us human. Compared to language, all other inventions pale in significance, since everything we have ever achieved depends on language and originates from it. Without language, we could never have embarked on our ascent to unparalleled power over all other animals, and even over nature itself." >>>more

11.27.05: Chicago Humanities Festival Retrospective

featuring Margaret Atwood, Charles Baxter, Barbara Burkhardt, Edward Hirsch, and Annie Proulx

"Somebody from the Caribbean once said to me, 'Why is there so much weather in your books?' Where they live, the days are all the same length and they all proceed in much the same way - it's sunny in the morning, you have an afternoon shower, and the sun sets around six o'clock. So I said, 'there's so much weather in my books because there's a lot of weather where I live, and it is important weather. It determines things - if you have a blizzard you can't go out, etc...' All of these different kinds of weather that we have get into books because they are in life." >>>more

11.20.05: Susan Orlean

"The idea of home and the quest and yearning for home is an abiding theme in everything I've ever written. The Orchid Thief is almost entirely about that notion and the book ends really with me going home - not me finding a ghost orchid, not me doing anything else, but rather me just thinking 'I want to go home.' That is the primal human condition - the desire for a sense of where we fit in the world." >>>more

11.13.05: Billy Lombardo

"I felt like a poet as a boy. I never wrote when I was a kid but I felt like I was paying attention differently. I wasn't paying attention to the things that I should have been probably - like academic things - that sort of attention I didn't pay to the world. But I was paying attention to other stuff that is largely responsible for whatever is in my book and whatever is in my poetry." >>>more

11.06.05: Peter Kuntz/Philippe Treuille

"We chose the Home and Away theme about two years ago. (It) was originally meant to sort of evoke the idea of travel, journeys, and exploration, and also just notions of a sense of identity and belonging. After last years tsunami and then recent events in the southeast, in Gaza Strip and Darfur, where people are literally being yanked from their homes or cruelly ejected from their homelands, we realized that we weren't doing the subject justice unless we plumbed some of this darker side of the Home and Away theme, and so there is quite a bit of that as well." >>>more

10.30.05: Larry Sawyer & Lina Ramona

"We really nurture each other as writers. We're both in love with the dictionary and the thesaurus and we just love words and love to play with words. When we met, I felt that my writing was constrained in some ways because there was only a certain type of writing I'd been exposed to. Then we just started playing with words back and forth and then that kind of opened up a whole new kind of poetry, which really runs amok within itself - sometimes it doesn't have the point, sometimes you don't start writing with a topic in mind and the language flows off of itself." >>>more

10.16.05: Billy Collins

"I want readers to have access to the poems, I want them to get inside the poems. Because I think poetry, like any writing, is an act of seduction. Fiction seduces you by narrative, and poetry seduces you by image. What happens inside the poem, I hope, is a movement toward not easily-accessible areas. So that the poem begins in a rather invitational spirit, but becomes a bit complicated and serious later on..." >>>more

10.09.05: Stephen Murray

"In Ireland, we're Catholics but we're a bold race as well. Bold is what we used to say for naughty. We've all had such strict up-bringings. The Catholic Church is the richest institution in Ireland. We were a third world country, so what you find in the new generation is anything that kind of flies in the face of it or takes the mickey out of a bit...everyone loves that." >>>more

10.02.05: Marc Kelly Smith

"A lot of people have accused (slam poetry) of being cheap entertainment. Well, it's entertaining. It has to be entertaining to keep people's attention. You've got to take them on a journey and hold them on that journey. But what makes it worthwhile is what you were talking about - you have got to move them. You've got to move them to a new perspective and a new place. If you don't, you're not doing your job. … But if you've moved someone emotionally, intellectually, and changed their perspective, then you're doing what great literature and great art is supposed to do." >>>more

09.25.05: Jim Moore

"When I'm reading poetry, I trust voices that are personal and direct, and I don't feel excluded when somebody speaks very personally in that way - I feel included. So even though I'm writing about my mother and my situation, my hope is that, you know, everybody has a mother and everybody will certainly go through the death of somebody who is close to them and hopefully the people in the public who read the poems will be able to relate their own experience to this experience." >>>more

05.22.05: Peter Ho Davies

Born in Britain to Welsh and Chinese parents, Peter Ho Davies is the author of the story collections The Ugliest House in the World (1997) and Equal Love (2000). His work has appeared in Harpers, The Atlantic Monthly, The Paris Review, The Washington Post, and Chicago Tribune, among others, and his short fiction has been widely anthologized, including selections for Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards 1998 and Best American Short Stories 1995, 1996, and 2001. Granta magazine recently named him among its twenty Best Young British Novelists. >>>more