This Writing Life

A small taster for part three of my chat with Tom Drury. 

We talk MP3s, social networking, email, and The New Luddites from the third Grouse County novel, Pacific.

In the second part of my interview with Tom Drury, one of America's finest living novelists, we begin by discussing the railroad and its part in linking places like Grouse County to the outside world. 

----more----We then moved on to: 

• his parents

In this stopgap between podcasts, Tom Drury discusses the use of light in his debut novel, The End of Vandalism. 

'I love that there would be some incidental lighting in the dark, like the dryer, you know?' 

Hear Antonya Nelson read Tom Drury's 'Accident at the Sugar Beet', which became an episode in The End of Vandalism, for the New Yorker here.

Tom Drury is the author of six astounding novels. Three - his masterpiece The End of Vandalism, Hunts in Dreams and Pacific - are set in the same fictional Grouse County area of Iowa - Drury's home-state. 

----more----We met the day after The End of Vandalism was relaunched in the UK, in an Earls Court flat next door to Hattie Jacques' former residence. We began by discussing the forthcoming film of his 2006 book The Driftless Area, which Drury adapted himself. Having talked about the ways writing for the screen differed from writing for the page, we moved onto: 

• ideas of what is essential and inessential in Drury's stories

In the next episode of This Writing Life, James Kidd talks to the extraordinary American novelist Tom Drury, author of The End of Vandalism, Hunts in Dreams, Pacific and The Driftless Area, among others. 

----more----In this trailer for our two-part conversation, mainly about the British re-release of The End of Vandalism Drury discusses his love of music. Having stumbled over Druryish, Druryean - Druryesque, we move from Led Zeppelin to Roxy Music. Brian Eno's hair makes a feeling appearance (what else is new) as Drury considers how music transports the imagination. 

To read my own review of The End of Vandalism in The Independent, click this.

The second part of my chat with Amit Chaudhuri began with a discussion of his literary inheritance - that combined Philip Larkin with Tagore. 

----more----From there we headed towards Bengali culture and onwards to: 

• Ideas of 'ownership' of culture - Bengali and English

And with that, pretty much, Chaudhuri's taxi arrived. For James Wood's review in The New Yorker, click here.

Amit Chaudhuri is a novelist, academic and musician whose books include A New World, The Immortals and most recently Odysseus Abroad. 

----more----His talent for close observation of everyday details, events and characters have earned him comparison to Proust, though Chaudhuri tends to work on rather smaller canvasses. 

We met in an extremely noisy cafe in Oxford, and began by discussing Chaudhuri's own time as a postgraduate student in the city over two decades earlier. In the same way that this period inspired his second novel, Afternoon Raag, Chaudhuri's arrival in London and undergraduate degree in English at University College is the basis for Odysseus Abroad. As well as describing an early love of poetry, the novel traces through its allusive form a love of Homer and James Joyce. In the first part of our conversation, we also talked about: 

• his ambition to be a poet

Amit Chaudhuri's website can be found here.

In the final part of my epic conversation with the American soldier-poet Brian Turner, our attention turned to the question: does writing help confront trauma and the violence he has witnessed and indeed participated in. 

----more----Other subjects include: 

• 'Sergeant Turner' vs Brian Turner: Poet

And then, finally, we headed to lunch. 

Brian Turner reads his poem Ferris Wheel, from the collection Here, Bullet.

In part three of my epic conversation with Brian Turner, we begin by discussing how the Soldier Poet bears witness, 

----more----and how ideas of complicity distinguish this from other kinds of war writing. 

We then moved on to:

• what inspired Turner to write about war