ATELIER TALK, EP. 1: ARE YOU SERIOUS? -- David R. Roth is the author of the novel The Femme Fatale Hypothesis (Regal House Publishing, 2021). His stories are set in or shaped by life in the small Delaware River town in which he has lived for over three decades. M. Allen Cunningham is the author, most recently, of the novel Q&A (Regal House Publishing, 2021) and the producer and host of In the Atelier and Thoreau's Leaves: the Thoreau Podcast. He teaches creative writing at Portland State University and elsewhere. The springboard for this Atelier Talk is the first question in this interview from The New York Review of Books. (https://www.nybooks.com/online/2022/11/05/gods-of-chaos-and-stupidity-joshua-cohen/) Mentioned in this episode: 2022 Pulitzer Prize winner Joshua Cohen • New York Review of Books • The writer’s seriousness & the writer’s subject • The writer’s seriousness & the market • Moby-Dick • Kent Haruf’s Our Souls at Night • Haruf’s Plainsong Trilogy • Subject versus treatment • The need to be read • The “sanctity” of fiction • Communication as consequence • The circuit of creativity, thought, expression • A paltry number of readers • Focusing on one reader at a time • Many angles on seriousness • The reader’s perspective on what makes writing serious • Genre-writing and seriousness • C.S. Lewis’s An Experiment in Criticism • What kind of reading does the writing encourage? • Georges Simenon • Simenon's The Stain on the Snow • Dashiell Hammett • Louise Erdrich’s Justice Trilogy • Literary crime novels • Genre expectations • Form versus formula • “Blood-red lips” • Attention elicits attention • Satisfactions of form • Lasting reading experiences versus beach reads • Elmore Leonard • Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer • The importance of achieving more than one thing • Writing as human expression • 3 questions about the reading experience • James Baldwin’s “The Discovery of What It Means to Be an American” • Baldwin's Nobody Knows My Name • Impatience with interiority • Teju Cole • Trusting in the reader’s seriousness • The writer’s seriousness and the writer’s daily discipline • Toni Morrison • Reading seriously as a writer • Becoming more and more judgmental, unforgiving, and incorrigible • Letting the unconscious continue the work • Showing up and waiting • Writers have to write.

---

Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/in-the-atelier/support