Ben Purkert is the author of the poetry collection, For the Love of Endings. His work appears in The New Yorker, The Nation, and The Kenyon Review, among others. He is the founder of Back Draft, a Guernica interview series focused on revision and the creative process. He holds degrees from Harvard and New York University, and he currently teaches at Rutgers. The Men Can’t be Saved is his first novel.

Ben joins Barbara DeMarco-Barrett to talk about making unlikeable characters redeemable, how Judaism plays a role in Ben’s life and his fiction, the crossover from poetry to fiction, choosing POV, and more.

For more information on Writers on Writing and additional writing tips, visit our Patreon page. We’re excited to announce the opening of our new bookstore on bookshop.org. We’ve stocked it with titles from our guests, as well as some of our own personal favorites. By purchasing through the store, you’ll support both independent bookstores and our show. New titles will be added all the time (it’s a work in progress). To listen to past interviews, visit our website. Finally, on Spotify you can listen to an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. Look for the artist, Just My Type.

(Recorded on August 17, 2023) 

Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Co-Host: Marrie Stone
Music and sound editing: Travis Barrett