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For the third year in a row, Sam Anderson and I hung out on Instagram to celebrate Michel de Montaigne’s birthday.
I was talking too much and didn’t draw, but Sam drew this page that I love:
And this morning before we talked, I made a map of the things we talked about in our previous conversations:
The folks at City Lights recorded my recent interview with Peter Turchi and posted it to YouTube. I enjoyed it very much. (The last time we spoke was 2015!)
A last-minute souvenir: On her way out of town, my mom sent me this photo of my interview in Austin Monthly from the Bookpeople newsstand at the Austin Airport.
Brad Listi had me back on his Otherppl podcast, and one thing we talked about was the gift of obscurity:
People worry so much about people being angry at them or doing the wrong thing, but obscurity can be this great gift. You can experiment. It’s a kind of freedom. Now, unlimited freedom can be very paralyzing, too. Freedom is not necessarily the best thing ever for art; there’s a tension between freedom and constraint out of which great art arises. Obscurity can be a real gift if you use it correctly.
You can listen to the whole thing here:
Related reading: a message to graduates
Next Monday, March 28th at 2PM central, I’ll be interviewing Oliver Burkeman about his work and his book, Four Thousand Weeks. You can set a reminder to tune in via YouTube:
This was really fun. Watch my chat with Oliver on Youtube:
For the second year in a row, Sam Anderson and I celebrated Montaigne’s birthday (Feb. 28) by jumping on Instagram Live and chatting about writing and drawing. Tune in to see Sam’s therapy drawings and learn his interviewing tricks and tips. Watch below or on Instagram.
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In this week’s newsletter, I shared these notes for my chat with Sarah Ruhl and how I prepare for an interview.
I am was delighted to be interviewing writer Sarah Ruhl about her work and her memoir Smile: The Story of a Face this on Wednesday. You can set a reminder to watch on YouTube:
Cartoonist Lucy Bellwood drew and wrote about talk here.
This afternoon I had the pleasure of interviewing Tim Kreider, author of We Learn Nothing, about his life and work. You can watch our conversation on on YouTube.
We talked about so many things, but I loved what Tim said about Kim Stanley Robinson and Rebecca Solnit being the angels on his shoulder when he’s writing and starts feeling too cynical or grim:
Are you really helping here? That’s what you ought to be doing if you’re a writer. Or any kind of artist. Helping. Some. And it doesn’t mean cheerful or Pollyanna-ish. Francis Bacon, the painter, was helping. William S. Burroughs helps. We all help in different ways.
Here are my prep notes:
Big thanks to Tim for being game and thanks to the folks at Literati for setting it up.
Stay tuned: Next month I get to interview Sarah Ruhl about her book Smile.
Here’s video of my chat with David Epstein, author of Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World. Our conversation, as we had hoped, ranged all over the place. Of particular interest to me:
1. He told me he reads a lot of fiction to try to pick up interesting approaches to structure. He credited his experience helping a film editor friend who had a hand injury — literally sitting there all day and clicking the mouse for him — as hugely instructive. (This didn’t surprise me, as I learned a ton about writing from film editor Walter Murch’s book, In the Blink of an Eye.) He also said that he’s taken fiction classes.
2. As for his reading diet, he said he reads The London Review of Books, The New York Review of Books, and New Scientist to sort of get leads on what to read next.
3. He keeps “a book of small experiments,” where he forces himself, if he gets in “a rut of competence,” to try out and learn new things.
Here are my prep notes:
Thanks, David! Check out his newsletter, Range Widely.
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