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Today, I have the pleasure of interviewing Philip Lopate. Phillip is the author of over a dozen books: 4 personal essay collections (Bachelorhood, Against Joie de Vivre, Portrait of My Body, and Portrait Inside my Head), as well as Being with Children, Waterfront, and Notes on Sontag 3 works of fiction (Confessions of Summer, The Rug Merchant, and Two Marriages) 3 poetry collections (The Eyes Don't Always Want to Stay Open, The Daily Round, and At the End of the Day). He has also edited several anthologies, including one of my personal favorites—Art of the Personal Essay—and he's the author of To Show and To Tell: The Craft of Literary Nonfiction. He is a professor in Columbia University's MFA Writing Program, and lives in Brooklyn, New York. In this episode Phillip and I discuss: Why you need to have some things you haven't worked out when you begin to write an essay. The ground rules, selection process, and organizational structure for his three volume anthology. What qualities make for a great essay, what can kill a piece, and the role the past plays. Plus, his #1 tip for writers. For more info and show notes: diymfa.com/377
We have an amazing conversation with Meghan Daum about life as a writer, the new culture wars, and the importance of being alone. It's a great one - enjoy! Meghan is the author of five books, including her latest work that Patrick highly recommends - The Problem With Everything: My Journey Through The New Culture Wars. In 2019 Meghan became a biweekly columnist for Medium. From 2005 to 2016 she was an oped columnist for The Los Angeles Times. Her work has been included in The Best American Essays and she has written for numerous magazines, including The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, The Atlantic, and Vogue. She is the recipient of a 2015 Guggenheim Fellowship and a 2016 National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. She is on the adjunct faculty in the MFA Writing Program at Columbia University's School of the Arts. Find Meghan on Twitter: @meghan_daumVisit Meghan's website: https://www.meghandaum.com/Look out for Meghan's new podcast launching late July 2020! Full details (will be) available at: http://theunspeakablepodcast.com Deyus Life is a show about interesting people and interesting conversations. Have a question or want to be featured on the show? Email deyuspod@gmail.com or visit deyuslifepod.com. We read and respond to EVERY email - including yours.
Ellen Bass is a poet, non-fiction author, and teacher. She is the author of many collections and books including Like a Beggar, The Human Line, and Mules of Love. Ellen’s poems also appear frequently in The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, and many other journals. She’s been awarded three Pushcart Prizes, The Lambda Literary Award, The Pablo Neruda Prize, and The New Letters Prize. Ellen also teaches in the MFA Writing Program at Pacific University. Her newest collection of poetry is entitled Indigo. This is Ellen’s second time as a guest on the show.In this episode, Ellen and Eric discuss the power of poetry – how it can change us and deepen our experience of and attention to the world around us. Ellen reads some of her incredibly beautiful poetry and as a result, we are indeed changed.Spiritual Habits Group Program – Find Solid Ground In Shaky Times: Join Eric in this virtual, live group program to learn powerful Spiritual Habits to help you access your own deep wisdom and calm steadiness – even when the world feels upside down. Click here to learn more and sign up. Enrollment is open now through Sunday, July 19th, 2020Need help with completing your goals in 2020? The One You Feed Transformation Program can help you accomplish your goals this year.But wait – there’s more! The episode is not quite over!! We continue the conversation and you can access this exclusive content right in your podcast player feed. Head over to our Patreon page and pledge to donate just $10 a month. It’s that simple and we’ll give you good stuff as a thank you!In This Interview, Ellen Bass and I Discuss the Power of Poetry and…Her new book of poetry, IndigoHow gratitude and love help her combat fearHer practice as a poet is to take suffering and make artThe poem that took her 12 years to writeThat worthwhile things are hard to do – even for expertsWanting to be changed after writing or reading a poemHer poem, Taking My Old Dog Out To Pee Before BedHer poem, EnoughWhat she thinks about when she hears someone else read her poetry as well as how poetry is to be read and heard “out loud”Her poem, The Long RecoveryTrying not to resist the life we have and instead, hurl ourself more deeply into itGreat poets and their poetry teach us to observe the world more closely and see it as sacred and beautifulHer poem, Any Common DesolationEllen Bass Links:ellenbass.comTwitterInstagramFacebookAshford University: Their online bachelor’s and master’s degrees allow you to learn on a convenient and flexible schedule. There’s no fee to apply and no standardized testing to enroll. Go to ashford.edu/wolf Athletic Greens: The all in one daily drink to get daily nutritional needs, support better health and peak performance. Visit www.athleticgreens.com/feed to get 20 free daily travel packs with your first purchase. Daily Harvest: Delivers absolutely delicious organic, carefully sourced, chef-created fruit and veggie smoothies, soups, overnight oats, bowls, and more. To get $25 off your first box go to www.dailyharvest.com and enter promo code FEEDIf you enjoyed this conversation with Ellen Bass on the power of poetry, you might also enjoy these other episodes:Ellen Bass (2018 Interview)Marilyn Nelson
Meghan Daum is a columnist for Medium, an adjunct faculty in the MFA Writing Program at Columbia University's School of the Arts, and author of five books, one of which we will be discussing today, The Problem With Everything: A Journey Through the New Culture Wars. It was named one of the 100 notable books of 2019 by the New York Times. In a recent book club meeting, HxA read The Problem with Everything, a critique of contemporary feminism. On this episode, Cory Clark talks to Meghan about the book, and includes some questions from our book club participants.. You can follow Meghan on twitter @meghan_daum. If you have any comments you can contact Cory Clark at clark@heterodoxacaemy.org or on twitter @ImHardcory. Related Links The Problem With Everything: A Journey Through the New Culture Wars by Meghan Daum: https://www.meghandaum.com/the-problem-with-everything Rating the Show If you enjoyed this show, please rate it on iTunes: Go to the show's iTunes page and click “View in iTunes” Click “Ratings and Reviews” which is to the right of "Details" Next to "Click to Rate" select the stars. Listen to other episodes of Half Hour of Heterodoxy >
-Paul sits down with Anthony D'Aries to talk the MFA Writing Program -Provost MIssy Alexander reflects and evaluates reflection and evaluation -Veronica proves again why libraries are not the boring places you think they are -Chantel lays out all the events and plugs the new WOW
Writer Marisa Matarazzo shares “Ions” from her short story collection “Drenched: Stories of Love and Other Deliriums”. Marisa’s stories show how boundless love is by fusing magical realism and fantasy with heart. “Ions” is a wild adventure about a woman on the rebound having an unexpected encounter with an otherworldly water engineer. Marisa Matarazzo’s works have been published in Faultline, Hobart, Fivechapters, Unstuck and more. She has taught at UCLA Extension Writers’ Program and is currently an Assistant Professor in the MFA Writing Program at Otis College of Art and Design. Links to Share http://www.marisamatarazzo.com Follow “Stories, But Shorter” on Twitter & Instagram - @storiesbutshorter
Join us for a special evening as students from Otis College or Art and Design's MFA Writing Program share their poetry and prose.
Brief Encounters (W.W. Norton)What anthology could unite the work of such distinct writers as Paul Auster, Julian Barnes, Marvin Bell, Sven Birkerts, Meghan Daum, Stuart Dybek, Patricia Hampl, Pico Iyer, Leslie Jamison, Phillip Lopate, Naomi Shihab Nye, and Lawrence Weschler? What anthology could successfully blend literary forms as varied as memoir, aesthetic critique, political and social commentary, slice-of-life observation, conjecture, fragment, and contemplation? What anthology could so deeply and steadily plumb the mysteries of human experience in two or three or five page bursts? For the late Judith Kitchen, editor of such seminal anthologies as Short Takes, In Short, and In Brief, "flash" nonfiction—the "short"—was an ideal tool with which to describe and interrogate our fragmented world. Sharpened to a point, these essays sounded a resonance that owed as much to poetry as to the familiar pleasures of large-scale creative nonfiction. Now, in Brief Encounters: A Collection of Contemporary Nonfiction, Kitchen and her co-editor, Dinah Lenney, present nearly eighty new selections, many of which have never been published before, having been written expressly for this anthology. Taken together, as a curated gallery of impressions and experiences, the essays in Brief Encounters exist in dialogue with each other: arguing, agreeing, contradicting, commiserating, reflecting. Like Walt Whitman, the anthology is large and contains multitudes. Certain themes, however, weave their way throughout the whole: the nature of family, the influence of childhood, the centrality of place, and the role of memory. In Lynne Sharon Schwartz's "The Renaissance," for example, the author remembers her relationship with her mother, tracing her own adolescent route from intimacy to contempt. In "The Fan," Eduardo Galeano dramatizes the communal devotions of the soccer fan. And in "There Are Distances Between Us," Roxanne Gay considers the seemingly impossible and illogical demands of love. What binds these and many other disparate essays together is the ways in which they enrich, color, and shade each other, the manner in which they take on new properties and dimensions when read in conjunction. Dinah Lenney is the author of The Object Parade and Bigger than Life, and, with Judith Kitchen, edited, Brief Encounters: A Collection of Contemporary Nonfiction. She serves as core faculty in the Bennington Writing Seminars and the Rainier Writing Workshop, and as the nonfiction editor at Los Angeles Review of Books.Emily Rapp Black is the author of Poster Child: A Memoir, and The Still Point of the Turning World, which was a New York Times bestseller. Her work has appeared in Salon, Slate, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, Redbook, O the Oprah Magazine, and other publications. She lives in Palm Springs and teaches in the UCR Palm Desert MFA Program in Writing and the Performing Arts.Chris Daley’s work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Los Angeles Review of Books, DUM DUM ZINE, and The Collagist, where “Thoughts on Time After Viewing Christian Marclay's ‘The Clock’” first appeared. She teaches academic writing at the California Institute of Technology and, as Co-Director of Writing Workshops Los Angeles, offers creative nonfiction workshops for students at all levels. Chris has a Ph.D. in English from the City University of New York Graduate Center. Amy Gerstler is a writer of poetry, nonfiction and journalism. Her book of poems include Scattered at Sea (Penguin, 2015), and Dearest Creature (Penguin, 2009) which was named a New York Times Notable Book, and was short listed for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry. Her previous twelve books include Ghost Girl, Medicine, Crown of Weeds, Nerve Storm, and Bitter Angel, which won a National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry. She was the 2010 guest editor of the yearly anthology Best American Poetry. Her work has appeared in a variety of magazines and anthologies, including The New Yorker, Paris Review, American Poetry Review, Poetry several volumes of Best American Poetry and The Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Poetry. She currently teaches in the MFA Writing Program at the University of California at Irvine.Tod Goldberg is the author of a dozen books, including, most recently, Gangsterland. His nonfiction, criticism, and essays have appeared widely, including in the Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal, and Best American Essays. He lives in Indio, CA where he directs the Low Residency MFA in Creative Writing & Writing for the Performing Arts at the University of California, Riverside. Jim Krusoe has published five novels and two books of stories, Blood Lake and Abductions. His first novel, Iceland, was published by Dalkey Archive Press in 2002. Since then, Tin House Books has published Girl Factory, Erased, Toward You,and Parsifal. Jim teaches writing at Santa Monica College as well as in Antioch's MFA Creative Writing Program. He has also published five books of poems. His latest novel, The Sleep Garden, is due out this winter from Tin House.
These Dreams of You (Europa Editions) We're thrilled to present Steve Erickson, author of Zeroville and editor of the literary journal Black Clock, who will read and sign his new novel These Dreams of You. "In its gorgeous, vivid prose and its acutely sensitive soul, These Dreams of You shows us just what a novel can still do in our own crazy times." --Boston Globe "Erickson's seemingly fractured novel turns out to be something else -- the novel as fractal, a series of endless, astounding tessellations." --The New York Times Book Review "Over his entire career Erickson has challenged readers with a fiercely intelligent and surprisingly sensual brand of American surrealism." --The Washington Post Steve Erickson is the author of eight previous novels, including Zeroville, which was named one of the best novels of the year by Newsweek, the Washington Post Book World, and the Los Angeles Times Book Review, and noted as one of five favorite novels in a winter 2008 National Book Critics Circle poll. He also has written two books about American politics and popular culture, Leap Year and American Nomad. Erickson has written for Esquire, Rolling Stone, Bookforum, Frieze, Conjunctions, Salon, the L.A. Weekly, the New York Times Magazine and other publications and journals, and his work has been widely anthologized. Currently he is the film critic for the Los Angeles Magazine and the editor of the literary journal Black Clock, which is published by the California Institute of the Arts where he teaches in the MFA Writing Program. Erickson has received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts grant and a fellowship from John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. In 2010 he was been nominated for a National Magazine Award for criticism and received one of seven awards in literature given by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. THIS EVENT WAS RECORDED LIVE AT SKYLIGHT BOOKS February 22, 2012.
Bernard Cooper writes eloquently about the difficult landscape of memory as it pertains to sexuality, loss, AIDS, and family. He is the author of the collection of memoirs Maps to Anywhere, the novel A Year of Rhymes, and a recent collection of memoirs, Truth Serum. He received the 1991 PEN/Ernest Hemingway Award and a 1995 O. Henry Prize. He has taught at Antioch/Los Angeles, for the Masters of Professional Writing program at USC, at the UCLA Writer’s Program, and he has been a core faculty member in the MFA Writing Program at Bennington College. Of Truth Serum, playwright Tony Kushner has written, "One of the most beautiful and moving memoirs I've ever read... Reading Bernard Cooper is like reading Chechov, he's really that good." This program was originally produced as part of the 1997 season of Racing Toward the Millennium: Voices from the American West, in partnership with the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.