Rion Amilcar Scott reads from The World Doesn’t Require You: Stories (Liveright Publishing Corporation/W.W.Norton & Company 2019).
We talk about narrative forms, beautiful lines and building a world. We also talk about imagination, characters, and Cross River.
Carmen Bugan reads from Lilies from America: New & Selected Poems (Shearsman Books UK 2019).
We talk about narrative poems, memoir, and recording a documentary. We also talk about resistance, reclaiming your story, and planting a garden.
Guest host Amanda Uhle speaks with Adrienne Brodeur, author of Wild Game (HMH, 2019) about keeping our parents’ secrets, the art of memoir writing, and gourmet meals by the sea. Brodeur co-founded the fiction magazine Zoetrope: All-Story with filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola, was an editor at Harcourt, and currently serves as Executive Director of Aspen Words, a literary arts program of the Aspen Institute.
photo credit: Julia Cumes Photography
Freelance journalist/filmmaker and 2019 Wallenberg Medalist Safa Al Ahmad talks about her documentaries, including Saudi’s Secret Uprising (2014) and Targeting Yemen (2019).
We talk about activism, the power of reporting, access, and editing.
We also talk about moral responsibility to the person and the story.
CM Burroughs reads poems from The Vital System (Tupelo Press 2012). We talk about a sister, a red bird, experimental forms, and choosing art. We also get a preview of poems from Master Suffering out in 2020 with Tupelo Press.
Michigan Quarterly Review editor Khaled Mattawa, guest editor Benjamin Paloff and contributor Jeremiah Chamberlin talk about the Fall 2019 issue of Michigan Quarterly Review: What Does Europe Want Now? We talk about MQR’s mission, its history since 1962, and its future. We also talk about the issue’s central question, and the poetry, fiction, non-fiction, interviews and translations within MQR 58:4.
Novelist and journalist Rebecca Clarren (KICKDOWN, Skyhorse Publishing, 2018) reads from her novel, a finalist for the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction.
Summer host Amanda Uhle and Rebecca Clarren talk about writing with a social cause in mind, journalistically reporting a novel, and the American West. We also consider whether KICKDOWN is maybe part of a new genre of subversive westerns in contemporary writing.
Frank Uhle talks with actor, director, and writer Simon Callow, author of the memoir Being an Actor and acclaimed biographies of Charles Dickens, Richard Wagner, and Charles Laughton. Callow is working on the fourth and final volume of his definitive account of the life of Orson Welles for Jonathan Cape/Viking.
They discuss life on the British stage, coming out in the ’80s, how research has changed from the pre-internet era to today, and the cult of Welles.
