First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing Mitzi Rapkin

Stacey D’Erasmo is the author of the novels Tea, A Seahorse Year, The Sky Below, Wonderland, and The Complicities and the nonfiction books The Art of Intimacy and The Long Run.  She is a professor of writing and publishing practices at Fordham University.
We talked about inspiration and creativity as lightning bolts and melting, abstract art, aging as an artist, breakthroughs, and longevity in art.
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Carvell Wallace is a New York Times Bestselling author, memoirist, and award-winning podcaster who covers race, arts, culture, film and music for a wide variety of news outlets.  His work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Esquire, the New Yorker and other publications.  He co-wrote the nonfiction book The Sixth Man.  His podcast Closer Than They Appear explored race and identity in America and his podcast Finding Fred was nominated for a Peabody Award.  His new memoir is called Another Word for Love.
We talked about growing up with unstable housing, how writing helped him look at himself and his life differently, acting and becoming a creative, self-forgiveness, depression and holding trauma in the body, sobriety, the vast topic of love, Star Wars, and being a sensitive human.
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Claire Messud is the author of six works of fiction. She is a recipient of a Guggenheim and Radcliffe Fellowships and the Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.  Her essay collection is called Kant's Little Prussian Head and Other Reasons Why I Write. Her recent novel is called This Strange Eventful History.  She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her family.

We talked about her family history, Algerian independence, the wisdom of age, emphasizing character, distance from true subjects, colonialism, and her novel’s structure.
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Edward Hamlin is the author of the short story collection Night in Erg Chebbi: Stories and the novel Sonata in Wax.  His writing has been published widely and recognized with a number of awards, including the Nelson Algren Award and the Iowa Short Fiction Award.  He lives in Colorado.

We talked about writing family history, research for the historical novel, classical music, the power of creation and redemption, music recording, the possibility of a lost masterpiece, and serendipity.
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Adelle Waldman is the author of the novels, Help Wanted and The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P., which was published in 2013 and was named one of that year’s best books by The New Yorker, The Economist, The New Republic, NPR, Slate, Bookforum, The Guardian and others. She lives in the Hudson Valley with her husband and daughter.
We talked about Adelle’s job working at a big box store, the societal problems of low wage jobs, creating omniscient point of view, Jane Austin, George Eliot, Middlemarch, creating a common enemy in a story, and showing her novel to her former co-workers.
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Sunjeev Sahota is the author of the novels: China Room, which was longlisted for the Booker Prize and a finalist for the American Library Association’s Carnegie Medal; The Year of the Runaways, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Dylan Thomas Prize and was awarded a European Union Prize for Literature; and Ours are the Streets. In 2013, he was named one of Granta’s twenty Best of Young British Novelists of the decade. He lives in Sheffield, England, with his family.  His new novel is The Spoiled Heart.
We talked about writing socially and politically motivated themes but still making them stories worth reading, unions, the impact of the news and our culture on writing, the strategic reveal of information, creative writing and algebra, and more.
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