The Spine

As a graduate student at Duke University English Department, Ken Ilgunas lived out of a van so that he could (and did!) graduate without incurring debt. You can read about it in "Walden on Wheels," his first book, which just celebrated its fifth anniversary. His third book, "This Land is Our Land," was released this spring. On The Spine, he talks about how his love of video games as a child prepared him for a love of books in college.

KEY QUOTES:

"Being exposed to stories in [video games] prepared me for a love of reading later on."

"I have this rule where if a book doesn’t grab me in the first 15 to 20 pages, I’m just done with it. And it’s probably not a great policy."

"I could point to a constellation of influences. There was 'A Walk Across America' by Peter Jenkins, 'Into the Wild' by Jon Krakauer, and 'Walden' by Henry Thoreau, and just a number of books that kept telling me, You don’t have to live this ordinary life. You can just get this crazy idea and make it real."

See a list of all the books and writers Ken mentions in the Show Notes section of The Spine's website: https://thespineshow.com/show-notes

Megan Cummins is the managing editor at A Public Space, a tri-quarterly magazine. I reached out to Megan because I wanted to speak with someone who was working at a magazine that publishes disparate and untraditional pieces. I wondered how she got there, as a reader. It’s a great story, full of medieval heroines, Holocaust survivors, and 20-somethings in Manhattan.

A Public Space is a nonprofit magazine that publishes everything from fiction and art to nonfiction and poetry. Founded in 2006 by Brigid Hughes, who was previously the editor of The Paris Review, A Public Space focuses on challenging work that might be overlooked elsewhere, work that’s very true to its own vision. They also just launched a book division, with the first title coming out in December.

To see the Show Notes, visit thespineshow.com.

To subscribe to A Public Space, visit apublicspace.org.

It was recently announced that Janice Y.K. Lee's latest book, "The Expatriates," is going to be made into an Amazon Prime TV series by Nicole Kidman. That sounded like a great reason to replay her 2016 interview on The Spine.

Reading, for Janice, was "like ice cream" in that she couldn't get enough. But reading was always her private pleasure: Because her parents read books in Korean, she still doesn't know what kinds of readers they are.

The award-winning writer Allan Gurganus discovered the library later in life than most writers. “All of the imagination that a lot of people use in reading I used to read the woods." But he made up for lost time quickly, finishing 1,200 books (and writing book reports on each one) in under four years. He says it saved his life, and after listening to his story, you'll understand why.

Allan Gurganus is best known for his first book, "Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All,” which was on the New York Times Best Seller list for eight months, won the Sue Kaufman Prize from The American Academy of Arts and Letters, was a main selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club, and sold over 4 million copies. He was interviewed at his home in Hillsborough, North Carolina.

KEY QUOTES:

About reading as a child: “All of the imagination that a lot of people use in reading I used to read the woods."

“I discovered something called a library. It had about 2,000 books, and I started reading them fairly systematically. And I discovered literature with a capital L.”

"Literature really saved my life. Without that, I think I think I might have gone crazy.”

“I’ll give every book 30 pages."

“Writing is exhaling and reading is inhaling."

“Reading is everything to me."

“My goal as a writer is to create something that will be read forever, and I see that as a reparation for all the joy and pleasure I’ve gotten from reading. It’s a payment on a great, inexhaustible debt."

“That’s what separates the people who are out to write pot-boiling best-sellers from people who are genuinely interested in humanity. And genuinely interested, like [James] Agee, in leaving a testament to how complicated, how completely charged and difficult it is to live in the world. And try, however imperfectly, to identify with those around you, and to be patient with those around you."

Elizabeth Cox is an award-winning author of several collections of poetry, short stories, and four novels. Her most recent is called "A Question of Mercy." Long before she won the Robert Penn Warren Award for fiction for her entire body of work, she grew up 100 yards from a library with two older brothers who became poets — Herb Barks and Coleman Barks. You can only imagine the kind of reading life she’s had! Or you can listen to her story right now.

Krista Bremer is the author of "My Accidental Jihad: A Memoir" and editor at The Sun. She shares with listeners of The Spine how she became a reader (including "the thrill of browsing" she still experiences at the library), how her reading informs and affects her writing, and her all-time favorite book (by Virginia Woolf).

KEY QUOTES:

About the difference between fiction and nonfiction: "Fiction can be truer than nonfiction. There are the facts of what happened, and then there are the hard truths of the human condition."

About today's readers: "Our most endangered resource is our undivided attention."

About Toni Morrison's: "It broke open language in order to recover its power."

Her greatest reading achievement? Being the first first-grader to read 100 books and sitting in the birthday chair even though it was not her birthday. But it was the $75 gift certificate to a West LA feminist bookstore that changed poet Lynn Melnick the most as a reader. In its stacks, she met Alice Walker, Gloria Anzaldua, Audre Lorde, Adrianne Rich, Rita Dove, and other women writers. She never looked back.

QUOTES

About reading Diane Wakoski: “The rhythms of her words have always been somewhat similar to the way my brain thinks. There are very few authors who I feel are speaking my language, so to speak, and she was always one of those.”

After winning second place and a $75 gift certificate to The Sisterhood Bookstore (a feminist bookstore in LA) in a poetry contest as a community college student: “It had everything I’d never heard of. I discovered everybody. That was a very memorable day in my reading life because…I didn’t know who to look for before.”

“[Alice Walker’s] activism was something that inspired me. Poet as activist…in the literary world and beyond. I always suspected that poetry could do stuff in the world, but she’s always been proof of that.”

“It’s so sad to think there are so few feminist bookstores left in this country. …It’s huge, going to a bookstore where it’s all women! It was great.”

On reading feminist writers: “They let me know that…the things that were happening or had happened to me as a girl and as a young woman were not, that I wasn’t imagining them, and I wasn’t overreacting to them. And that I wasn’t alone. And that one could use one’s voice to change the world.”

“You can’t go wrong with Wuthering Heights, I mean, they’re just so messed up.”

“[Emily Bronte’s poems] exhilarate you even as they destroy you at the same time.”

“I always felt like [Edward Albee] was writing from inside my brain."

Writer and reader Michele Filgate credits her grandmother for generating her love for books; for Michele's 10th birthday, she even paid Michele's $100 library fee. Who does she consider "the patron saint of book worms"? What kind of fan fiction did she write as a kid? And what was her role in Paul Harding's "Tinkers" winning the Pulitzer Prize for literature? You'll have to listen to find out.

You may recognize the name David Ulin — passages from his book “The Lost Art of Reading” have been read on The Spine multiple times. David was the L.A. Times book critic for 10 years, and his latest book. "Sidewalking: Coming to Terms with Los Angeles,” was published in October 2015. We talk about how he became a reader and the books and genres that have affected him most strongly. Also, two new volunteers are now behind The Spine each week! Listen to learn more.