This Writing Life

A short trailer for part 4 of This Writing Life's conversation with Rick Bass. In which Rick answers the question: are you optimisitic about human nature?

Part three of This Writing Life's transatlantic chat with a Montana-bound Rick Bass takes in the material in Episode 119: in which Rick reviews his short story career in For a Little While (Pushkin), and attempting to describe what it feels like to be lost in a story.

In between he discusses the connections between writing and geology, about following his imaginative nose through a story. To finish, we talk about his story 'Elk', which first appeared in the New Yorker, images of substrata and blue in his work, and the mysteriousness of his own characters.

Part 4 to follow.

'You are a stranger inhabiting this blazing dream and you barely get out with your life...yeah, and then you go to the bar for a drink.'

A Writing Life podlet, in which Rick Bass recalls what's like to review your career (to date) in his superb collection of stories, For a Little While (Pushkin Press), which won 2017's Story Prize. From here Bass tries to explain what it feels like when inspiration strikes and fades.

Part two of This Writing Life's transatlantic conversation with Rick Bass, novelist, activist, award-winning short story writer, begins with a question referencing Philip Larkin, Romanticism and Transcendentalism and continues with an answer discussing fiction, geology, humans and time: 'We are new to this world. We don't know how to be in this old world.' ----more----From here we moved towards some if not all the following:

• Bass, religion and nature

Part 3 to follow.

'I am working on a new novel...and an op-ed for the Los Angeles paper about Trump and his reign of terror.' Here in one line is This Writing Life's lengthy podcast conversation with Rick Bass - novelist, award-winning short story writer, and environmental activist. In future episodes we discuss For a Little While, a collection of his best short fiction, which a week after we spoke won the prestigious Story Prize.

We began however with Rick Bass the Environmental Activist - in his home state of Montana and elsewhere across the United States and disunited world. You can read more about his work to save the natural world and fight the powers that seek to denude it at his excellent website: rickbass.net/projects. 

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We spoke over the magic of Skype. This not only allowed us to talk from different locations (TWL at home in Oxford; Bass from his writing office near Montana State University), it inspired new, if temporary theme music. Other sounds are provided by the TWL daughter: 'It's good music,' Bass said kindly as she chatters in the background. In this opening instalment, our focus was on the election of Donald Trump and what it might mean for the environment and environmental politics in the United States.

Bass is unequivocal: 'In the worst nightmare horror movie you would not have such goings on'. From this low point we skate upwards to:

• Bass on the 2016 Presidential race

Part two to follow.

'I quite liked it.' So says Gary Younge about America in the final part of This Writing Life podcast's conversation about his  wonderful new book, Another Day in the Death of America. We began by asking asking Younge about his decision to leave the country and return to his home in Hackney, east London. A description of his feelings on departing the United States leads into a meditation on his Barbadian family background, and what it means to grow up black in Britain. 'There is an element of outsiderness here that I carry with me.'

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From here, he talked about

• what politicians in America (this was pre-Trump, mind you) are doing to confront the problems Younge's book raises: gun control, racism, the gap between rich and poor, healthcare

Our next guest on This Writing Life is the American novelist, short story writer and activist, Rick Bass.

In part three of Gary Younge's conversation with This Writing Life podcast, we continue our discussion of his extraordinary book A Day in the Death of America. We begin by discussing the idea of choice in the lives of the teenagers Younge writes about - all of whom are either the victims of gun violence, or the perpetrator. Younge weighs up role of personal responsibility against a culture and society in which gun violence is simply more likely. He recalls the tragic example of Justin, who was shot in a case of mistaken identity whilst driving on the streets of Goldsboro, North Carolina. ----more----Younge then considers:

• the challenge of writing Justin's story

Part 4 of 4 to follow.

In part two of This Writing Life's conversation with Gary Younge about his powerful book Another Day in the Death of America, we begin by discussing the place of guns in the stories he tells: the deaths by gun-shots on one random day of teenagers across the United States. What makes America different with regards gun-crime? Do guns kill people, or is it the people themselves? ----more----Having addressed this, we moved onto:

• Younge's own encounters with guns living in Chicago

Part 3 of 4 to follow.

Gary Younge is an acclaimed writer and journalist, best known for his reporting on the United States for the Guardian in the United Kingdom. The author of several books, he spoke to This Writing Life podcast about his most recent: Another Day in the Death in America (Faber & Faber). As he explains in the introduction, its premise is tragically simple: every day on average seven children and teens are shot dead by guns in America. Younge decided to tell the story of one day, 23rd November 2013, selected at random, on which 10 young people were killed.

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We spoke at the offices of Faber & Faber in the autumn of 2016: hence the red hot topical reference to the imminent debate between Donald Trump and Hilary Clinton (them were the days).

Younge begins by describing the background and thesis of the book, how the stories themselves suggested themes, rather than the other way around, how the demographics of the day differed from the average. From there we moved through:

• the role of mental health in one of the shootings

Part 2 to follow.

Read Gillian Slovo's review of Another Day in the Death of America: here.

The final part of Kevin Sullivan's conversation with This Writing Life podcast arrives after a slight delay for a summer holiday. We begin by asking whether Kevin has a typical writing day - a pressing matter given his long career as a foreign correspondent. From here we move through his creative process as a novelist (editing and re-writing) to the challenges of writing from the middle of a war zone. We also discuss his human rights work with the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP), above all in identifying those murdered at Srebrenica.

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The remainder of our chat includes:

• did Kevin hesitate to return to Sarajevo after being blown-up by a landmine?

Visit the ICMP here.

Read more about Kevin's novel, The Longest Winter here.