Good Afternoon everyone and welcome to another edition of The Avid Reader. Today we are happy to have as our guest Colum McCann. Colum has written Letters to a Young Writer: Some Practical and Philosophical Advice, published earlier this month by Random House.

Colum is the award winning internationally bestselling author of Let The Great World Spin, Zoli, Dancer, This Side of Brightness and Songdogs. He teaches at the MFA program at Hunter College.


Letters is just that, a series of missives to an imaginary young writer who may be confused, excited, forlorn, and unsure. But she knows she wants to write and nothing can stop her.

If a dilettante, a scribbler like me picks up this book, one will will gain enormous knowledge and write better but in order to take the fullest and really only advantage of this book, you must be a writer. That is, you wake up in the morning and you have to write.

Letters pushes you, guides and goads you and most oftentimes inspires you and notwithstanding Rilke’s saying that “nobody can advise you and help you, nobody”, there is advice here and there is guidance.

There is a certain Zen like quality to the book. A kind of this isn’t going to make you a better writer but try doing this anyway. Kind of like mediation. Nothing happens.

Without meandering too much, as I am wont to do, let’s just say that this is a good book for a young writer to carry around, to underline, to dog-ear, to Google the epigraphs at the head of each chapter. To read while writing. To write while reading.