Writing Guideposts

THE COSMO DAVENPORT-HINES MEMORIAL MEETING

Writing a memoir is something most people leave until they are old and grey, with a life's work behind them; but Tracey Thorn and Damian Barr are just 50 and 36 respectively. Tracey Thorn's beautifully written, faintly wistful Bedsit Disco Queen, published in February, traces her development from shy, self-conscious teenager to internationally acclaimed pop-singer - one half of Everything But The Girl - and offers fascinating insights into the highs and lows of stardom. Damian Barr, prize-winning columnist, writer, playwright and presenter, is the founder of the Shoreditch House Literary Salon, and Maggie & Me, published this month, is his heartbreaking, heartwarming account of what it was like to grow up gay and in deep poverty in Thatcher's Britain.

In a conversation chaired by Susannah Clapp, theatre critic of the Observer, and interspersed with readings from their memoirs, they reflect on what moved them to look back on their lives so soon, explore the relationship between memory and imagination, and exchange views on the Iron Lady and her legacy.

Damian Barr and Tracey Thorn on midlife memoir

Excerpted from the full interview, here: litshow.com/097/leslie-jamison

Leslie Jamison on the ethics of writing about others

Hannah Tinti is a writer, editor, and teacher.  Her short story collection, Animal Crackers, has sold in sixteen countries and was a runner-up for the PEN/Hemingway award. Her best-selling novel, The Good Thief, is a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, recipient of the American Library Association’s Alex Award, winner of the The Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, and winner of the Quality Paperback Book Club’s New Voices Award. She is now finishing a new novel.

Hannah has worked at bookstores, magazines, publishing houses, and literary agencies. In 2002 she co-founded the award-winning magazine One Story and for the past 12 years has been its Editor in Chief. In 2009 she received the PEN/Nora Magid award for excellence in editing and in 2014 One Story won the AWP Prize for Best Small Press. In 2011, she joined the Public Radio program, Selected Shorts, as their Literary Commentator, interviewing authors and actors about the importance of literature and reading.

More at www.hannahtinti.com

More on First Draft on Aspen Public Radio: aspenpublicradio.org/programs/first-draft


First Cuts from First Draft - Hannah Tinti

Mouth

The Lady Will Have the Slug Louie by Amy Hempel

A special presentation of New School Faculty brought to you by The New School Writing Program in conjunction with drDOCTOR, a reading series and podcast based in Brooklyn. Alumni Luke Wiget and Sam Farahmand held a three-day marathon reading with students and faculty. This episode brings you David Lehman, Sara Lippmann, Lori Lynn Turner, Gregory Collins, Dale Peck, Sarah Weeks, and Hettie Jones reading from their own work and speaking to The New School and NYC writing experience and life. 

You can find drDOCTOR on iTunes at drDOCTOR, online at drdoctordrdoctor.com, and on Twitter @drDOCTORdrDR. 

audioDOCTOR, Vol. 2 of 2

Recorded live at BookCulture in Manhattan, Eileen Myles discusses her new volume of collected poems, I Must Be Living Twice, and her re-released novel, Chelsea Girls. 

Eileen Myles, I Must Be Living Twice

January 2016 Podcast with Eileen Myles

Eileen Myles and Maggie Nelson
Reading and Conversation

July 12, 2016 | ALOUD @ Los Angeles Public Library

For twenty years, groundbreaking poets Eileen Myles (Chelsea Girls; I Must be Living Twice) and Maggie Nelson (National Book Critics Circle Award, The Argonauts) have been friends, mutual influences, and interlocutors on the experiences of living in a poetry and gender inflected writing world. Myles’ latest work—a collection of old and new poems—refracts a radical world and a compelling life.  Nelson’s genre-bending memoir, The Argonauts, calls for radical individual freedom and the value of caretaking.   Together on stage to read both poetry and prose, these two ground-breaking writers then will join in conversation to, as Myles says, “let thoughts rip.”

Why We Write

Bestselling author Maggie Nelson's latest book, “The Argonauts,” received the 2016 National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism. In this conversation with poet and critic Wayne Koestenbaum, Nelson talks about justice, empathy, and the nature of grief.

Maggie Nelson & Wayne Koestenbaum on Clarity & Cruelty

Leslie Jamison’s critically acclaimed The Empathy Exams confronts our personal and cultural urgency to feel. In The Unspeakable, Los Angeles Times opinion columnist Meghan Daum defiantly pushes back against the false sentimentality and shrink-wrapped platitudes that surround so much of contemporary American experience. With piercing insight and wit, hear from two of today’s most thought-provoking and intimately honest essayists, grappling with the modern complexities of being human.

Unspeakable Emapthy

Debbie talks to poet Eileen Myles about poetry, fame, and politics.

Design Matters with Debbie Millman: 2009-2016

Design Matters with Debbie Millman: Eileen Myles

Background and poem text: https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/11/30/eileen-myles-reads-for-my-rampant-muse-for-her/

Excerpted from https://soundcloud.com/designmatters/design-matters-with-debbie-millman-eileen-myles

POEM TEXT

Eileen Myles Reads "For My Rampant Muse, For Her"

Michael Silverblatt hosts Joan Didion for an exclusive Bookworm Book Club interview, asking her the questions that have come out of the discussion around her novel, "Play It As It Lays."

Highlights include Joan's revealing response to a question regarding the famed opening lines of her book, "What makes Iago evil? some people ask. I never ask."

To join the KCRW Bookworm Book Club: http://www.facebook.com/groups/KCRWBookwormBookClub/

Joan Didion for Bookworm Book Club: Full "Play It As It Lays" Interview

A conversation between the photographer Catherine Opie and Eileen Myles, author of "Chelsea Girls" and numerous volumes of poetry, in Houston on April  29, 2017.

Off Road: Catherine Opie & Eileen Myles

In this episode, poet and critic Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib debates with editor-at-large Andrew Grace on whether or not song lyrics should be considered literature. Ranging from considerations of Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen to Lil Yachty and 2 Chainz, Abdurraqib explains the importance of taking popular music seriously and notes how poets can enhance their craft by paying close attention to the lyric strategies of songwriters.

Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib, A Conversation

Audiobook Excerpt from ROUGHNECK - By the time Jim Thompson was sixteen years old, he had been a newspaper boy, a burlesque show hawker, a plumber's helper, a comedian in two-reel pictures, a night bellboy in a luxury hotel and over a dozen other occupations. By the time he was eighteen, he was driving across America in a broken-down Ford without a penny to his name and his mother and his kid sister Freddie in tow, looking for just one more paycheck to keep them all alive.

"The most hard-boiled of all the American writers of crime fiction." -Chicago Tribune

"If Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett and Cornell Woolrich would have joined together in some ungodly union and produced a literary offspring, Jim Thompson would be it...His work...casts a dazzling light on the human condition."-Washington Post

"My favorite crime novelist-often imitated but never duplicated." -Stephen King

A bittersweet comedy of a hard-won American life, ROUGHNECK chronicles the many jobs, near-criminal escapades, and downright unlawful grifts of the man who would become one of crime fiction's most enduring writers, in a larger-than-life literary memoir--or wildly entertaining tall tale--as only Thompson could tell it. Hard times have never sounded so good.

ROUGHNECK by Jim Thompson, read by Bob Walter - Audiobook Excerpt

The publication of Edna O'Brien's memoir is one of the major literary events of 2012. Born in Ireland in 1930 and driven into exile after publication of her controversial first novel, The Country Girls, O'Brien has created a body of work which bears comparison with the very best writers of the twentieth century. Here she is reading the first of two extracts. An interview with the author is also available.

Edna O'Brien Reads from Country Girl (Extract 1)

Eileen Myles was born in Boston in 1949, attended catholic schools in Arlington, Mass. and graduated from UMass (Boston) in 1971. She came to New York in 1974 to be a poet. Inferno (a poet's novel) which comes out in fall of 2010 from OR books chronicles the adventures of a female writer in hell very much like Eileen Myles. Inferno is actually a kunstlerroman. Myles first became known to many people for her openly female write-in campaign for President of the United States in 1991-92. She received her poetic education at The Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church in 1975-77 where she participated in workshops lead by Alice Notley, Ted Berrigan and others. In 1977 and 79 she published issues of dodgems, a poetry magazine which presented a collision of New York School, Language Poetry, performance texts and other likely aesthetics of the time. She co-edited the feminist anthology Ladies Museum (w Timmons, Kraut and Notley), worked as assistant to poet James Schuyler in 1979, and was a founding member of the Lost Texans Collective (w Nauen & McKay) which produced Joan of Arc a spiritual entertainment and Patriarchy, a play. Following these were solo performances: Leaving New York (1989), Life (a performance by Eileen Myles) (1991) and Summer in Russia (1996) at PS 122, the Judson Church, Franklin Furnace and the WOW Café and her plays Feeling Blue Parts 1, 2, & 3; Modern Art; and Our Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, which she wrote for Alina Troyano, were all produced at PS122. Her books include The Importance of Being Iceland/travel essays in art (2009) for which she received a Warhol/Creative Capital art writing grant, Sorry, Tree (poetry) 2007, Tow w/ artist Larry C. Collins (2005), Skies (2001), on my way (2001), Cool for You (novel, 2000), School of Fish (1997), Maxfield Parrish (1995), Not Me (1991), and Chelsea Girls  (stories, 1994). In 1995, with Liz Kotz, she edited The New Fuck You/adventures in lesbian reading. From 1984 through 1986 Myles was Artistic Director of St. Mark's Poetry Project. In 2004 she wrote the libretto for the opera, Hell, composed  by Michael Webster and performed on both coasts and in Tijuana in 2004 and in 2006. She is a Professor Emeritus of writing & literature at UC San Diego where she taught from 2002 to 2007.  In Spring, 2010 she was the Hugo Writer at U. of Montana in Missoula. In November of 2010 she will be Fannie Hurst Professor at Washington University in St. Louis. She contributes to a wide number of publications including Art Forum, Parkett, The Believer, Vice, Cabinet, The Nation, TimeOut, Book Forum and AnOther Magazine. She received an Andy Warhol/Creative Capital art writers' grant for “Iceland.” The Poetry Society of American awarded her the Shelley Prize in 2010. She lives in New York. . . .

Eileen Myles Reading

ArchitectureTravelWriter enhances its New Writers column with this podcast featuring Tracy Slater, an American living in Japan who's just has her first book, a memoir, accepted by Penguin Putnam via book proposal  

Writing Guideposts

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