By Patricia Connelly The Whole is Greater Than the Sum of its Parts–A Two-Part Blog At one of our group advising meetings during the June residency in Vermont, Deborah Brevoort suggested we all read one or two of the same works during the semester and annotate them at the same time. The idea was that […]
1) What was the impetus for writing this book? The first inspiration for this novel was my own family. I lived in India as a child for two years, during which my father worked for the UN and my mother for the Indian Government. My father flew all over Asia for work, including Afghanistan. I […]
So, how does it feel to know that your 1999 memoir, Apples and Oranges: My Journey Through Sexual Identity, originally published by Houghton Mifflin, will be reissued by Seven Stories Press? Do you think this is a good moment for that to happen? It definitely feels good, but a little weird. Apples and Oranges is […]
Have you ever wondered who began the low-residency MFAW Program at Goddard College, the first of its kind anywhere? Who spearheaded our progressive and oft-imitated curriculum? It was Ellen Bryant Voigt, who just last week won a MacArthur Fellowship Grant. Ellen grew up on her family’s farm in rural Virginia. She earned her BA from […]
When The Writer was a student in the RUP Program at Goddard College, she got a part in Paul Zindel’s play, The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds. It was her favorite play: she’d seen Eve Arden in it in Chicago at the old Ivanho Theatre, on a day when her mother “forgot” to […]
On Elena Georgiou’s rapturous rhapsody… Q: What was the impetus for this book? The impetus of the book was to try to document working-class immigrant voices. I am the daughter of immigrants who then also immigrated. In my experience, working-class immigrants, on the whole, don’t have much time for putting their lives on paper, and […]
Three Apples Fell From Heaven was Micheline Aharonian Marcom’s first novel. Here she tells us a little about its inception: I began it when I was in my late twenties and enrolled in the MFA Program at Mills College, where I also currently am on faculty. The main drive to write the book was to […]
In simple, rhythmic, nail-sharp prose, the cast of unnamed characters in The State of Kansas survive a flood, brush their teeth, drink, attend a sinister dinner party, try to love others, think a lot about death (animal and human), and weigh the confusion of trying to and a place—decent or otherwise—in a big, beautiful, and often […]
Slab is Goddard alumna Selah Saterstrom’s new book out from Coffeehouse Press, a place you can rely on for fascinating, timely and inventive work. “On a slab that’s all Katrina left of her Mississippi home, Tiger tells a story full of wickedness and incantation…” Excerpt from the book: “SCENE IN A HOUSE: The filthy kitchenette, […]
Goddard College alum Walter Mosley has written more than 4 dozen books in his incredible career. In particular, he invented the character of Easy Rawlins, an African-American detective living in Watts, solving crimes, and reflecting on life in an America few get to know. The Writer has cobbled together excerpts from interviews Walter has given […]