Poets & Writers Theater

“Stories should not protect us, stories should expose us...” Israeli author David Grossman, who received the 2017 Man Booker International Prize for his novel A Horse Walks Into a Bar (Jonathan Cape, 2017) with his translator Jessica Cohen, talks about how all stories are multilayered and some can even trap us in this 92Y video.

“Don’t worry about whether you’re writing anything, worry about if you’re sitting there attempting to write something or not.” In this video, Mohsin Hamid speaks to Granta about his award-winning fourth novel, Exit West (Riverhead Books, 2017), the job of being a writer, and what he has learned from Douglas Adams.

In this 2014 interview, Celeste Ng talks with Amazon senior editor Chris Schluep about becoming a mother while writing her debut novel, Everything I Never Told You (Penguin Press, 2014), elements of story inspiration, and the setting of her second novel, Little Fires Everywhere (Penguin Press, 2017). Ng is one of the honorees for the 2023 Poets & Writers Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award.

“You don’t have to have an MFA to be a writer, you’re a writer by writing.” In this 2017 Talks at Google event, Grant Faulkner, author of Pep Talks for Writers: 52 Insights and Actions to Boost Your Creative Mojo (Chronicle Books, 2017) and The Art of Brevity: Crafting the Very Short Story (University of New Mexico Press, 2023), discusses tips to boost creativity and endurance when writing fiction with author Anthony Francis. For more from Faulkner, read his essays on writing from our Craft Capsule series.

“I never felt that I wrote [my poems] anyway. I would feel them coming from way off, and then they would come toward me and if I didn’t catch them, they went through me and went on. So I just figured they were part of the universe and not me.” In this excerpt from the 2017 film In Person: World Poets, a collaboration between Bloodaxe Books and filmmaker Pamela Robertson-Pearce, the late poet Ruth Stone reads her poems from her home in Vermont.

In this 2017 interview, Rabih Alameddine discusses the themes and motifs present in his novel The Angel of History (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2016), which won the 2017 Arab American Book Award in fiction and the 2017 Lambda Award for Gay Fiction, with poet Kamelya Omayma Youssef for the Arab American National Museum.

“The best writing advice I ever got was, don’t give up and you can be a writer, if you work really hard and don’t stop writing.” In this Audible interview, New Yorker staff writer and author Ariel Levy speaks about finding her voice, writing about women’s lives, her experience with maternal grief, and her memoir, The Rules Do Not Apply (Random House, 2017).

“Scientists say the average human/ life gets three months longer every year. / By this math, death will be optional,” reads Nicole Sealey from her poem “The First Person Who Will Live to Be One Hundred and Fifty Years Old Has Already Been Born,” which appears in her collection Ordinary Beast (Ecco, 2017), in this reading with Morgan Parker, author of Magical Negro (Tin House, 2019), at Scripps College.

“What persuades in poetry, what moves, what transforms—and what is memorable—starts with music.” Jorie Graham talks about the importance of musicality and the influences of American modernist and English romantic poetry on her writing in this Big Think video. Graham’s collection Fast (Ecco, 2017) is featured in Page One in the May/June 2017 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

In this Knopf video, Kazuo Ishiguro, who was awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize in Literature, speaks about what he calls “double-cross metaphors” and how “tilting the reality of the world just a little bit” in his stories provides inspiration. For more Ishiguro, read “Never Let Me Go: A Profile of Kazuo Ishiguro” by John Freeman from the May/June 2005 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“I should share with you that I did not intend to be a fiction writer, I did not intend to write a historical novel…I did intend to always, however, tell the truth,” says Min Jin Lee about writing her novel Pachinko (Grand Central Publishing, 2017), which has been adapted into a television series, in this 2018 reading and conversation with Claire Messud at Harvard University.

“If you don’t know where to start, remember that every single thing that happened to you is yours and you get to tell it.” In this TED Talk, Anne Lamott, author of Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (Anchor Books, 1995), shares twelve truths she’s learned from life and her writing.

“What you can do is tell your best story, at that moment.” Camille T. Dungy, whose first essay collection, Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys Into Race, Motherhood, and History (Norton, 2017), was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, offers writers advice on how to overcome roadblocks in this Austin Community College video.

Based on the best-selling historical novel by Min Jin Lee, Pachinko is an eight-episode series that follows a Korean immigrant family across four generations. The highly anticipated Apple TV+ series stars Yuh-Jung Youn, Lee Minho, Jin Ha, and Minha Kim and will be told in three languages—Korean, Japanese, and English.

In this 2017 event, poet and novelist Fanny Howe reads from her rewritten novel, The Wages (Pressed Wafer Press, 2018), and poet and fiction writer John Keene reads from his story collection, Counternarratives (New Directions, 2015), for the Woodberry Poetry Room’s Vocarium reading series at Harvard University.

“The first was that I was very busy. // The second—I was different from you: whatever happened to you could not happen to me, not like that.” In this 2018 video for Bloodaxe Books, Marie Howe reads “Magdalene—The Seven Devils” and other poems from her fourth poetry collection, Magdalene (Norton, 2017).

“Here is another reason to write a memoir: to utter what must not be erased.” In this 2017 PBS NewsHour video, Richard Ford speaks about his reasons for writing, Between Them: Remembering My Parents (Ecco, 2017), a memoir about his parents. “I wrote about my parents because, decades after their deaths and when I was no longer young, I realized that I plainly missed them.”

“‘Sometimes it’s a relief,’ he said lugubriously, ‘to see a face you recognize in an unfamiliar place. Other times you think, oh no, not him again,’” reads Rachel Cusk from her novel Transit (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017), the second volume in her Outline trilogy, in this 2017 reading at Politics and Prose Bookstore in Washington, D.C.

In this 2017 craft talk for Hugo House, Terrance Hayes reads from his book American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin (Penguin Books, 2018) and discusses the work and writing strategies of the late poet Lynda Hull.

“A poem is an utterly free space for language,” says Kathleen Ossip in this 2017 lecture at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. “That is what makes it indispensable to me, and also what makes it political.” Ossip’s fourth poetry collection, July (Sarabande Books, 2021), is featured in Page One in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.