Poets & Writers Theater

“Last night the moon lifted itself / on one wing / over the fields.” In this 1992 recording for Howard County Poetry and Literature Society’s The Writing Life, Linda Pastan reads her poem “Elegy,” which appears in her collection Imperfect Paradise (Norton, 1989). Pastan died at the age of ninety on January 30, 2023.

“High school changed my life. Suddenly, there was Latin and German, and Silas Marner and The Odyssey.” Cynthia Ozick talks about her childhood, family influences, and the inspiration behind her book, The Shawl (Knopf, 1989). Ozick’s new nonfiction book, Critics, Monsters, Fanatics, and Other Literary Essays (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016), is featured in Page One in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“Sometimes for a kid the shortest distance between two points is not a straight line. And that’s the way that we think in dreams.” In this Blank on Blank animated video of a 1989 interview, Stephen King talks about the many different connections between childhood and his own writing process.