First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing

Ethan Rutherford’s new novel is The North Sun or the Voyage of the Whaleship Esther. He is the author of two story collections—Farthest South and The Peripatetic Coffin and Other Stories—and for these works has been named a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, a finalist for the John Leonard Prize and CLMP’s Firecracker Award, received honorable mention for the PEN/Hemingway Award, was a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, and was the winner of a Minnesota Book Award. He received his MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Minnesota and now teaches Creative Writing at Trinity College.

We talked about his novel North Sun, whaling, mythology, Peter and the Wolf, musicality in writing, Alaska, and going back to ideas he thought he was finished with.

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Shelley Read’s debut novel, Go as a River, is an international bestseller that has been translated into thirty-four languages and is in development for film with the Mazur Kaplan Company. Winner of the High Plains Book Award for Fiction, the Reading the West Book Award for Debut Fiction, and le Prix de l’Union Interalliée, Go as a River is also a Sunday Times bestseller, Goodreads Choice Award finalist, Amazon Editors’ Pick for Best Debut Fiction, Indie Next Pick, and a Colorado Public Radio Books We Love selection, among other national and international accolades. Go As A River has been highlighted in the New York Times Book Review, Sunday Times, Scientific American, Real Simple, Kirkus Reviews (starred review), Denver Post, London Independent, Alta Magazine, 5280, Zibby Mag, and many more publications around the world.

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Madeleine Thien is the author of four books, including Do Not Say We Have Nothing, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, The New York Review of Books, and elsewhere. She lives in Montreal.  Her new novel is The Book of Records.

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Lauren Groff is a three-time National Book Award finalist and The New York
Times–bestselling author of the novels The Monsters of Templeton, Arcadia, Fates and Furies, Matrix, and The Vaster Wilds, and the celebrated short story collections Delicate Edible Birds and Florida. She has won The Story Prize, the ABA Indies’ Choice Award, France’s Grand Prix de l’Héroïne, and the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, and has been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her work regularly appears in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and elsewhere. Her work has been translated into thirty-six languages. She lives in Gainesville, Florida.

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Kate Folk is the author of the novel Sky Daddy and the short story collection Out There. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in the New Yorker, n+1, the New York Times, Granta, and The Baffler, among other venues. A former Stegner Fellow, she’s also received fellowships and residencies from MacDowell, the Headlands Center for the Arts, and Willapa Bay AiR. She lives in San Francisco.

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Bob Johnson is an award-winning short story writer and graduate of the lowa Writers’ Workshop. His work has been published by The Common, Philadelphia Stories, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, The Barcelona Review, and elsewhere. His story "The Continental Divide" was named Short Story of the Year in The Hudson Review. He lives in South Bend, Indiana. His collection is called The Continental Divide.

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Lynn Steger Strong is the author of the novels Hold Still, Want, Flight and The Float Test. Her non-fiction has appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, New York, The Paris Review, Time, and elsewhere. She has taught writing at The Pratt Institute, Fairfield University, Catapult, and Columbia University. She was born and raised in South Florida.

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Vauhini Vara has been a reporter and editor for The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and the New York Times Magazine, and is the prize-winning author of The Immortal King Rao and This is Salvaged. She lives in Fort Collins, Colorado. Her new nonfiction book is called Searches.

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Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda is a literary translator.  Born in Tokyo, and raised in Texas, she is the co-translator of Ryke Akutagawa’s Kappa and the translator for Yuko Tsushima’s Wildcat Dome.  She lives in New York City.

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Lynne Tillman is a novelist, short story writer, and cultural critic. Her novels are Haunted Houses; Motion Sickness; Cast in Doubt; No Lease on Life, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; American Genius, A Comedy, and Men and Apparitions. Her nonfiction books include The Velvet Years: Warhol’s Factory 1965–1967, with photographs by Stephen Shore; Bookstore: The Life and Times of Jeannette Watson and Books & Co.; and What Would Lynne Tillman Do?, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism. Her new collection is Thrilled to Death. 

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