The Millions
Claire Vaye Watkins on Bearing Witness to Loss
Watkins talks about loss without trying to tidy it up, and the interview keeps circling the harder question underneath: what does it mean to witness damage honestly on the page?
The Creative Independent
Christopher Bollen on What It Takes to Write Novels
Bollen's version of the job is brutal and useful: every novel makes you feel like a beginner again, so you stop waiting to feel ready and write anyway.
Electric Literature
Clare Sestanovich on the Power of the Unanswered
Sestanovich is interested in what people leave unsaid, and in how a novel can let uncertainty sit there without rushing in to explain it away.
BookPage
Elaine Castillo on Reading as Investigation
Castillo treats reading less like taste and more like investigation, pushing on who gets treated as universal and who gets asked to explain themselves.
The Millions
Hanya Yanagihara on Privacy and Authorial Distance
Yanagihara keeps biography at arm's length, and that distance becomes the subject: how much of a writer does a reader really need in order to meet the work?
Electric Literature
Jessica Zhan Mei Yu on Tokenism and Literary Inheritance
Yu talks about loving literature that does not always know what to do with you, and about the limits of forcing every coming-of-age story through a Western frame.
BOMB Magazine
Jonathan Franzen on Conflict, Art, and the Novel
Franzen pushes back on the neat idea that suffering automatically turns into art. He wants conflict on the page without romanticizing damage off it.
BOMB Magazine
Kate Milliken on Work, Obligation, and Finishing the Book
Milliken talks about writing a novel around jobs, children, and the rest of life, which makes the book feel built out of pressure and persistence instead of myth.
BookPage
Louise Erdrich on Building a Novel Over Time
Erdrich does not sit down to start a novel. She lets notes and half-scenes pile up for years until the pile turns out to be a book.
BookPage
Nnedi Okorafor on Writing the Book That Scares You
Okorafor's rule is blunt: if an idea scares you, that is probably the one to write. She is also done arguing about where literary ends and genre begins.