First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing

David James Duncan is the author of the novels The River Why, The Brothers K, and Sun House, the story collection River Teeth, and the nonfiction collection and National Book Award finalist, My Story as Told by Water, and the best-selling collection of “churchless sermons," God Laughs & Plays.  He lives on a trout stream in Missoula, Montana.

We talked about his writing process, how writing a novel over 16 changed him, activism, solitude and creativity.

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Paul Harding is the author of the Pulitzer Prize winning novel Tinkers.  His other novels include Enon and This Other Eden, which was short listed for the Booker Prize and a finalist for the National Book Award. He is director of the MFA in Creative Writing & Literature at Stony Brook University, and lives on Long Island, New York.

We talked about mystery in the writing process and the content of the creative writing project, the world offering itself to you and through you via your art, writing about Maine and history, teaching writing, the Old Testament, and the title This Other Eden.

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Michael Cunningham is a novelist, screenwriter, and educator. His novel The Hours received the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1999. He has taught at Columbia University and Brooklyn College. He is currently a professor in the practice at Yale University. His new novel is called Day.

We talked about writing during the pandemic, throwing away a novel he wasn't happy with, the challenge of writing the middle of a novel, and getting the voice of children right.

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Salar Abdoh is the author of Out of Mesopotamia, Tehran at Twilight, Opium, and The Poet Game, and editor and translator of the celebrated crime collection, Tehran Noir.  He divides his time between New York City and Tehran, Iran. He is a professor at the City University of New York’s City College campus in Harlem, where he teaches in the English Department’s MFA program and also directs undergraduate creative writing. His new novel is called A Nearby Country Called Love.

We talked about the influences on his creativity, masculinity, life in Iran, gender and gayness, writing stories close to home, and finding love and belonging.

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Alice McDermott is the author of nine novels, including Charming Billy, winner of the National Book Award, and That Night, At Weddings and Wakes, and After This, which were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. She is also the author of the essay collection What About the Baby?: Some Thoughts on the Art of Fiction. Her stories and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, and other publications. She lives outside Washington, DC. Her new novel is called Absolution.

We talked about voice, epistolary influence, focusing on women's stories, retrospective narrators, the idea of absolution, and Vietnam.

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Ayana Mathis’s first novel, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, was a New York Times Bestseller, second selection for Oprah’s Book Club 2.0, a 2013 New York Times Notable Book, NPR Best Book of 2013, and was long listed for the Dublin Literary Award and nominated for Hurston/Wright Foundation's Legacy Award. Mathis’s nonfiction has been published in the The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Financial Times, Rolling Stone, Guernica and Glamour. She currently teaches at Hunter College’s MFA Program.  Her new novel is The Unsettled.

We talked about the title, her main character's agency, her focus on character and story, and myth among other topics.

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Edgar Kunz is the author of two poetry collections: Fixer, named a New York Times Editors’ Choice book, and Tap Out. He has been a National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, a MacDowell Fellow, and a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. Recent poems appear in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Poetry, APR, and Oxford American. He lives in Baltimore and teaches at Goucher College.

We talked about vulnerability, how Edgar knows when a poem is finished, the influence of Luise Glück, death, divorce, agency, and Ellen Bryant Voigt's poem about smoking.

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Tan Twan Eng’s debut novel The Gift of Rain was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2007 and has been widely translated. His second novel The Garden of Evening Mists won the Man Asian Literary Prize in 2012 and the 2013 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Tan divides his time between Kuala Lumpur and Cape Town. His new novel is called The House of Doors and was long listed for the Booker Prize.

We talked about W. Somerset Maugham, descriptive writing, historical research, having fun while writing, and the act of creation.

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Richard Deming is a poet, art critic, and theorist whose work explores the intersections of poetry, philosophy, and visual culture. His collection of poems, Let’s Not Call It Consequence, received the 2009 Norma Farber Award from the Poetry Society of America. His most recent book of poems is Day for Night. He is also the author of Listening on All Sides: Toward an Emersonian Ethics of Reading, Art of the Ordinary: the Everyday Domain of Art, Film, Literature, and Philosophy, and This Exquisite Loneliness: What Loners, Outcasts, and the Misunderstood Can Teach Us About Creativity. He teaches at Yale University where he is the Director of Creative Writing.

We talked about the meaning of exquisite loneliness, what the opposite of loneliness is, flow state, connection with other people, creativity, finding your life's purpose, and crafting beautiful sentences in Sonny's Blues by James Baldwin.

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Jenn Shapland is a writer living in New Mexico. Her first book, My Autobiography of Carson McCullers, was a finalist for the 2020 National Book Award and the Southern Book Prize, and won the 2021 Lambda Literary Award, the Judy Grahn Award, and the Christian Gauss Award. Her second book is called Thin Skin.

We talked about Oppenheimer, environmental justice, motherhood, living the queer creative life, structuring essays, and crafting personal narratives with historical research.

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