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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