More than a few people have assumed that Howard Norman is a Canadian writer. It’s no wonder, considering that most of his work — including his first two novels, The Northern Lights and The Bird Artist, both of which were nominated for the National Book Award — is set in Canada. In fact, Norman was…
It was a scraggy landscape, a Vermont mentally and physically full of uneven footholds, dirt paths, and dark trees — but green with possibility. In 1965, Jane Shore and a few other classmates came to the door of Cate Farm, the place we rented from Goddard College, where my husband taught, and they all stepped…
Earlier in her literary career, Mary Gordon was fond of quoting Flannery O’Connor, who’d once said that writers learned everything they needed to know before the age of eight. What does Gordon — the celebrated, bestselling author of four novels, three collections, and a memoir — believe she had learned? “I think I learned the…
Yusef Komunyakaa speaks in a gravelly Southern baritone, tinged with a Cajun flavor that reflects his childhood years in Louisiana. He is a man who chooses his words carefully, splicing his speech with long silences, until his conversation resembles something close to a jazz riff — very fitting for this acclaimed poet who says “oral…
In many ways, Robert Boswell fits the mythology of the contemporary man in the American West. Known as Boz, he’s a lanky, laconic six-footer with a closely cropped beard. Typically garbed in jeans and rumpled shirts with rolled-up sleeves, he drives a pickup truck and listens to Bruce Springsteen. He lives in an adobe house…
When asked about her poetic influences, Ellen Bryant Voigt’s answer is somewhat surprising, but delivered with typical certitude. “Bach and, later, Brahms.” It was the pure forms of music from which she started; poetry was, as she tells it, a sort of accident, something she happened on to late in her undergraduate career at Converse…
Richard Ford was in France this past spring when he got the call. He had rented an apartment in Paris for a few months to escape distractions and do some writing. He had wanted to be difficult to reach. In April, he was eating dinner with a friend at a remote little restaurant, deep in…
Award-winning poet and renowned editor, lesbian activist and literary formalist, native New Yorker and expatriate American in Paris — Marilyn Hacker, who is all these identities and more, gloriously defies all attempts at easy categorization. “It’s not a question of an issue,” she says in describing the relationship between her art and her convictions, “but…
The good news is that Tim O’Brien is writing fiction again. In 1994, after his sixth book, In the Lake of the Woods, was released, he distressed his many fans by vowing to stop writing fiction “for the foreseeable future.” Then, a few months later, he published a now famous essay in The New York…
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