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Writers

Promiscuity Is a Virtue: An Interview with Garth Greenwell

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Garth-GreenwellGarth Greenwell interviewed by Ilya Kaminsky in The Paris Review.

I don’t know how much these distinctions exist for me. Certainly I think the conversation of art doesn’t care about them very much. I’ve always been turned off by a kind of assertive Americanism, and the American writers I love best, from Hawthorne and James and Baldwin to Alexander Chee and Yiyun Li, have all been cosmopolitan in their tastes and views. Of course, America is important to my writing—the landscape of the American South, the rhythms of American speech, the expansive, sometimes-redemptive, sometimes-toxic sense of American selfhood.

What it means to be American is one of the subjects of my books, as it is of any book about Americans abroad. Bulgaria is important to the books, too. I was speaking Bulgarian every day as I wrote What Belongs to You. Often enough, I spoke only Bulgarian. The rhythms of Bulgarian—the most beautiful, the most musical language in the world, so far as I’m concerned—are part of those sentences, as is the cityscape of Mladost, the quarter of Sofia where I lived, which I also think is very beautiful, though maybe with a difficult kind of beauty.

Does Reading Really Improve Your Writing?

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reading-and-writing.jpgDoes Reading Really Improve Your Writing?

While our literature professors may have embedded this idea in our heads since middle school, the relationship between reading and writing is not as straightforward as it may seem. Yes, they are obviously closely related. But, it does not mean your interaction with one will affect your skill in the other.

As someone who has written for several organizations, newspapers and magazines for a fair amount of time and can barely get through half a book, I never understood the basis of this concept. And so, trying to decipher it was like a roller coaster ride.

Brevity blog: Seven Stages of Submittable

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Alison-Lowenstien-at-Brevity-Blog.jpeg“Seven Stages of Submittable” by Alison Lowenstein, Brevity Blog.

Submitting:

After meticulously crafting a brief cover letter and biographical statement, you upload your work of creative genius, along with a twelve-dollar submission fee. You press submit and enter a period of limbo when you see the essay, along with your many other submissions–ranging from haikus to flash fiction, logged as Received.

Dreaming:

Every evening you visit the web page for the literary journal you submitted to and imagine yourself on their homepage. Fantasizing that within minutes of the essay being on the journal’s website you get a book deal or at least an inquiry from a literary agent… [Read full blog post]

Larry Kramer Wishes More People Wrote About Gay History

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The American People by Larry Kramer“Larry Kramer Wishes More People Wrote About Gay History” – his new book is “The American People: Volume 2.”

Which subjects do you wish more authors would write about?

Gay history. Most historians taken seriously are always straight. They wouldn’t know a gay person if they took him to lunch. A good example is Ron Chernow’s biography of Hamilton, which doesn’t include the fact that he was both gay and in love with George Washington. Gore Vidal pointed this out to me.

Have you ever gotten in trouble for reading a book?

Not for reading one but plenty of times for writing one. Gay writers writing about other gays is not exactly a winning audience. And gays are not the best buyers or readers of their own. In “Faggots,” I used my best friend for one of the leading characters because he told such good jokes that I used. He never spoke to me again after the book came out.