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Three characters in this story, the narrator, Liam, and Henry, work in academia. Others, Bobby Cooper, Ruthie, and the narrator work in publishing. How has your experience teaching at the University of Texas, Austin and editing the O. Henry Prize Stories influenced your own fiction?
Continue readingHow did you begin Committed? What inspired this work?
I began with the poplar seeds. In June, the fluff is everywhere. Always in the air and underfoot. Russian pop songs are written about it. I remember a picnic on the riverbank with my wife that was lousy with it. We were in Samara. In the streets, small children gather the fluff into balls and light them on fire. And on the sidewalks older kids write chalk love letters to girls in balconies overhead. I combined these images for Sofia’s young suitors and wrote that scene several years ago hoping to eventually use it as part of something larger.
Continue readingIn your poem When did we first, the speaker seems to question our need to philosophize over simply experiencing the world. Do you view this impulse as negative? Do you think poetry is an extension of this need to intellectualize the world around us?
The speaker is not questioning our need “to philosophize.” She is questioning the validity of our egocentrism: our need to see ourselves as the center of the universe, a desire which has caused irreparable harm not only to our understanding of other peoples and to the creatures that share this little blue marble we all live on, but to the planet itself. The poem begins simply enough: “When did we first/ entertain the notion/all this was made for us?” And then the poem traces that notion through history and finds that even now, millions of years later, we with all our “smart” devices are no better than that poor, shivering, inconsolable soul who first came up with that egocentric idea of human centrality, and thus human dominance. It seems to have been built into us, this me, me, me. And it is destroying us.
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