#7: Tobias Wolff and George Saunders 2016

Episode 7 of Rewrite Radio features the on-stage conversation between Tobias Wolff and his former student, George Saunders, that took place after Saunders’s keynote at the 2016 Festival of Faith & Writing. As a professor of creative writing, Tobias was a major influence on George when the younger writer did his MFA at Syracuse. George now teaches at Syracuse himself, while Tobias recently retired after finishing his teaching career at Stanford. George has called Tobias an American master, one of our best short-story writers. And Tobias has called George “one of the luminous spots of our literature for the past 20 years.” Needless to say, we were delighted and honored to host their first public dialogue about their work. Moderated by Sarina Gruver Moore, the conversation covers how writers situate themselves within a creative lineage, the danger of abstractions, and the ways Catholicism and Buddhism influence their writing.

To introduce the recording, we caught up with George just as he was getting ready to go out on the road to promote his first novel LINCOLN IN THE BARDO and we talked about Tobias and their time together at the Festival.