Writers

Scott Westerfeld

Scott Westerfeld is a bestselling author of books for both children and adults best known for his young adult series Uglies and Leviathan. While on tour with his new graphic novel Spill Zone, Westerfeld spoke with The Write Up host Owen Egerton about monsters, collaboration, teenagers and storytelling.

Westerfeld’s recent projects have embraced visual storytelling. From the stunning illustrations in the Leviathan series to the Uglies graphic novel adaptations to Spill Zone, Westerfeld says he’s learned lessons not only about writing for comics and other visual media, but about writing prose as well.

“I’ve learned that books breathe better when you vary scale or light between scenes,” he says. “And while, in a prose novel, your audience might not see the crowd or the space you’ve written around your characters, if you do it right they will feel it anyway.”

Spill Zone, is the first installment in a new series with artist Alex Puvilland. The graphic novel is set three years after a mysterious event destroys the town of Poughkeepsie and follows Addison and her little sister, Lexa. The narrative revolves around Addison’s secret: that she sneaks into the otherworldly Spill Zone to take photos to support herself and her sister. Westerfeld says he’s always been drawn to writing characters shrouded in secrecy.

“I love characters with secrets because there’s always something that can go wrong for them,” he says. “[There’s] always something churning in their head, and it allies the reader with the person with the secret because we’re in there with them. We’re keeping the secret with them.”

The Write Up: George Saunders

In this episode of The Write Up, Owen talks to George Saunders about craft, ecstatic empathy, and the afterlife in his new novel Lincoln in the Bardo.

George Saunders is an award winning and New York Times bestselling author of essays, short stories, novellas, and children’s books. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Guardian, GQ, Harper’s, and McSweeny’s. His vast literary achievements include multiple National Magazine Awards, A McArthur and a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Bram Stoker Award, and a National Book Award.

In this interview during the Texas leg of his book tour, Saunders talks about his ever-present mental editor that drives him to refine his work. When referring to his recent essay on process, he talks about the connection he has to his readers.

In his constant drive to sound “less lame” he builds a faith-based relationship with his imagined readers. He promises them his best work and trusts that they will unfold themselves, tap into their empathy, and join him in his story.

The idea for this novel came some twenty years ago when he heard a story about Lincoln’s grief over losing his son. During his presidency, it was said that Lincoln would frequently venture into the graveyard and into the crypt where his son’s body was to hold him. From this anecdote he could see the outline of a story that would, eventually, become Lincoln in The Bardo.

Saunders was well known as a short story writer for some time before this new novel. When speaking about writing a longer work, he says he was at first unsure. But his skills in crafting short fiction translated into novel writing more easily than he originally imagined. Saunders described it as if he had spent years building small tents and then a large tent arrived. The material was greater and more complex but it was all based on the same principles.

In writing a larger story he found that not only that not only that he could combine several small structures to make a large one, but that there was room for new beauty and complexity in the places where the smaller pieces came together.

Saunders is well known for his essays, often going out of his way to put himself into situations with people he might not run across otherwise. He’s covered Trump rallies and once lived in a homeless encampment, which might have directly affected his most recent novel.

Saunders noticed that all the people living there had a very specific story. Always some variation on the theme of ‘I’m not supposed to be here’. Seeing how circumstance and tragedy could reduce personal narratives to a narrow monologue directly influenced the characters in his novel. The residents of the graveyard are ghosts stuck in an in-between place who tell their stories. Their voices illuminate pockets of experience and lives lived that weave around the main story.

Saunders speaks simply and elegantly, both in this interview, and in his work. It’s impossible to not be inspired as he talks about topics ranging from ethics and spirituality to one of his characters’ supernaturally persistent erection.

Lincoln in The Bardo is Saunders’ first novel and, according to Owen, is “the best text about ethics and empathy, ever, including all religious texts and all the classics.”

-Felix Morgan

Amelia Gray

I’ve long been a fan of the beautifully dark and bitingly funny fiction of Amelia Gray. Her short story collections AM/PM, Museum of the Weird, and most recently Gutshot rank among my favorite books to pick up for a quick, smiling nightmare.

Her novel Threats digs deeply into grief and melancholy, so deeply that the pages seem soaked in an unstable sadness, a madness that runs through the characters, the setting, and the prose itself. As NPR described it, “Amelia Gray’s psychological thriller takes us to the brink between reality and delusion.”

The dream logic and expansive bizarreness of Amelia Gray’s fiction can have a reader gasp and laugh in the same shudder. Compassion and outlandish cruelty hold hands, and it’s the combination of these opposing elements that make Gray’s work such a delight to read. We squirm, we laugh, we turn the page.

Like Kelly Link and Manuel Gonzales, Gray is part of a modern tradition that seeks to re-mystify the world. The inexplicable becomes the norm. But her writing is in no way escapism. Magic and monsters can appear, but more frightening still are the grounded-in-reality lovers and mothers.

Gray has also been compared to David Lynch and even body-horror filmmaker David Cronenberg. She dips into horror, but it’s a stranger, more nerve-tickling horror than you’d expect from the establishment of the genre.

To read Gray is to risk. She takes readers to dark, honest places. And like a nightmare, we may dispute the logic, but the emotion and terror are inescapable. Her stories and essays has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, VICE, and The Wall Street Journal.

Gray came to the KUT studios while visiting Austin from her home in Los Angeles. We chatted craft, risk, and the joys of writing. We talk about her writing routine and how she mines her own fears and desire to inspire her fiction. We also trace her career and how she sees herself in the current literary scene.

It’s always a treat to talk with Amelia Gray. Her imagination, wit, and insight ensure any conversation will shine. And, like her stories, humor and darkness weave through all her words.

-Owen Egerton

C. Robert Cargill Live at SXSW 2016

Novelist, screenwriter, critic and slam poet C. Robert Cargill sits down with host Owen Egerton at SXSW 2016 to talk about coming up in Austin, the history of scary movies, and advising on the set of Dr. Strange.

Ada Calhoun

Writer Ada Calhoun discusses her new book, “St. Marks Is Dead: The Many Lives of America’s Hippest Street,” with host Owen Egerton.

Debra Monroe

Debra Monroe

Debra Monroe is an award winning author of six books and acclaimed university professor. But she was, in her own words, “ raised to be a farmer’s wife, a shopkeeper’s wife, a telephone man’s wife.”

In her most recent memoir, My Unsentimental Education, Monroe chronicles her journey from the backstreet bars and the presumed limited opportunities of her small Wisconsin hometown to a seat in the ivory tower. Along the way she battles the discouraging voices of her parents, her professors, and a series of poorly chosen lovers. With her passion for literature and her undefeatable spirit, Monroe not only reaches her goals as a writer and an academic, but also achieves a hard won confidence. The book is a beautiful and often hilarious chronicle of one woman’s battle to be exactly who she wants to be.

Whether trying LSD for the first time, unintentionally accepting a job at a pornographic movie theater, or discussing her love life with religiously conservative neighbors, Monroe manages to move her life and career forward. With a wit that helps ease the hurt, we travel with Monroe through heartbreaking relationships with every sort of wrong man. She makes her way through marriages and romances that quickly announce themselves as mistakes.

Men fear her ambitions, are intimidated by her intellect, or simply have no desire to move as she rockets forward. As Monroe finds her way, she also finds herself. Her story charts the difficult task of leaving behind one’s socially assigned identities to find the authentic self. My Unsentimental Education is a celebration of misadventures, surprises, and powering forward against all odds.

This Monroe’s second memoir. Her first, On the Outskirts of Normal, came out in 2010 and traced her experiences adopting a black child while living in a small Texas town. Monroe is also the author of two novels and two collections of short stories. Her first collection, The Source of Trouble, won the Flannery O’Conner Award for Fiction in 1990 and launched her into the national literary scene. From there she wrote a second collection of stories, A Wild, Cold State, in 1995 and the novels Newfangled in 1998 and Shambles in 2004.

Monroe has often been praised for her honest portrayal of the darker corners of American life. She doesn’t back away from images of poverty, crime, and abuse. Her writing is, as the Boston Globe describes it, “fine and funky, marbled with warmth and romantic confusion, but not a hint of sentimentality.” She’s known for using humor to highlight the humanity of her characters.

A conversation with Monroe is a true delight rich with humor and insight. On this episode of the Write Up, we talk about the different challenges of writing memoirs and novels, the rewards of teaching students in the Texas State University MFA program, and the importance of discovering who one really is.

Doug Dorst

Doug Dorst is a wonder at words and worlds. He’s a master of bringing the known and unknown, the mundane and the strange, into immediate proximity to one another is such a way that the line begins to fade. Whether it’s insecure police officers encountering restless ghosts romping through northern California in his debut novel Alive in Necropolis, or the dark inner lives of surf gurus and cake sculptors in his short story collection The Surf Guru, or the wild labyrinth voices, artifacts, and nightmarish locales of S., Dorst mingles nightmares and fantastical visions with earthy, recognizable emotions.

It’s an absolute pleasure to chat books and writing with Doug Dorst on this edition of The Write Up.

In 2009, Alive in Necropolis was awarded the Emperor Norton Award, and was a runner up for the Shirley Jackson Award, the IAFA/Crawford Award, and the PEN/Hemingway Award. It made the Editor’s Choice list in The New York Times Book Review and was named one of the year’s best books by Amazon. The book was also chosen as San Francisco’s 2009 One City One Book selection.

He followed up his success with the beautiful and haunting story collection The Surf Guru, which also landed on the Editor’s Choice list in The New York Times Book Review and was a Rumpus Book Club pick.

Not long after, director and producer J.J. Abrams picked him out to pen a novel in which the story would be found in the margins. Dorst crafted S., a complex but highly accessible book filled with handwritten notes in the text, loose napkins and postcards between the pages, and mysteries that stretch beyond the final chapter. The book is a marvel – a thrill for any lover of the printed word and fan of puzzles.

Dorst is an accomplished playwright, essayist, and, believe it or not, a three-time Jeopardy champion.

In our conversation we talk through his approach to writing, including writing habits, struggles, and how he finds his way into a story. We talk about the pressure of deadlines and joy of the blank page.

Doug Dorst is a celebrated teacher of creative writing who helps run the Texas State MFA program in San Marcos. He talks enthusiastically about his students and the feel of the workshop.

It is a thrill to have Doug Dorst on The Write Up. He is a pleasure to talk with – or just to listen to. The depth of his voice is matched only by the depth of his soul. So please join us as Doug Dorst, with charming humility, shares his passion for craft, teaching, and above all, storytelling

Carrie Fountain

Always Remain a Beginner

Interviews on the Write Up come out more as conversations than a scripted line of questioning. The authors who are featured bring their own spirit and personality into the discussion and the conversation spins to wonderfully surprising places. Our episode with award-winning poet Carrie Fountain is a perfect example. Talking with Fountain is like grabbing a coffee with a dear friend you who leaves you feeling thrilled and more awake to the world about you.

During our talk, Fountain and I explore parenting, mysticism, craft, and her extraordinary new poetry collection Instant Winner. Whether it’s writing her next poem or facing a new parenting challenge, Fountain strives to “always remain a beginner.”

Carrie Fountain’s poems are prayers. Like prayers they carry the earthbound to heaven. Her poems are born from daily life — experiences of motherhood, marriage, traffic and trash trucks – but quickly rise up to questions of spirit and desires for divine connection.

Fountain earned her MFA at the James A. Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin where she began work on what would become her debut collection Burn Lake. That book received the 2009 National Poetry Series winner and was published in 2010 by Penguin.

Her latest collection, Instant Winner, is a sly prayer book of winking meditations and wry observations. Fountain has a gift for finding the miraculous in the mundane, the tremendous in the ordinary. Capturing a fragment of life, a passing moment, Fountain highlights the endless magic moments that fill an average day. Like the best of poetry, her pieces inspire new views on a world we believe we know.

Balancing a family and a writing career can be an incredible trial. Fountain and I chat about becoming a mother and how that has impacted her life and poetry. Fountain is married to acclaimed playwright Kirk Lynn. We chat about how a household of two creatives works and how the two have inspired, supported, and challenged each other.

Fountain has taught at the university level for several years and is now the writer-in-residence at St. Edward’s University. We chat about mentoring younger poets and her love for poets who have inspired her.

Much of poetry in Instant Winner describes encounters with the spiritual. Fountain shares some her own experiences with organized religion and where she stands now on questions of faith, God, and religion. She also discusses the role writing poetry plays in her spiritual life.

We touch upon Fountain’s own process in approaching writing: When she writes, how she seeks inspiration, and the discipline needed to sculpt a career in the arts. She also gives us a peek at how she approaches a blank page. Fountain hopes her style never outshines her poem, instead she aims for what she calls an “invisible craft.”

So brew a cup of coffee, pull up a chair, and join us for a conversation on this edition of The Write Up.

Louisa Hall

On this edition of The Write Up, host Owen Egerton sits down with novelist Louisa Hall, author of The Carriage House. Plus we’ll hear book reviews of Cats Cradle and Stiff!

Jason Neulander

On this installment of The Write Up host Owen Egerton interviews and the co-creator, writer and director of the Intergalactic Nemesis, Jason Neulander. Neulander’s story is one to inspire adventurers everywhere to take just one more climb up the mountain or trip out to sea. He bravely fought the forces of rationality to go on to produce one of the most successful radio plays of our time.

Manuel Gonzales

Manuel Gonzales, author of “The Miniature Wife: and Other Stories,” is interviewed by Owen Egerton in the inaugural episode of “The Write Up.” Plus we’ll hear book reviews with Owen’s lovely parents!