Quarantine Island Discs Laurence Peters

In this episode Stella talks about her tastes in TV, Cinema, Arts, Podcasts ans Music

TV: Hill Street Blues: One of the first ensemble productions. Innovative and highly diverse cast.  Came out in 1981. Great scripts. Runner Up: West Wing.

Movies: Moana, Reminds her of growing up in New Zealand,  Runner Up All about Eve–some of the best lines in cinema.

Novels:

Russell Hoban, Ridley Walker

Pedra Chodron, When Things Fall Apart

Poems: Emily Dickinson, Because I Could not Stop for Death,

Album:

David Bowie, Honky Dory, particularly Is there Life on Mars?

Comforting tunes, Fleetwood Mac, Rumors, particularly Don’t Stop Thinking about Tomorrow, Regina Spektor, Eva Cassidy.

Performances:

All female production of A Merchant of Venice

Mathew Bourne, New Adventures, production of Red Shoes.

Podcasts:

The Jungian Life, Podcast

On Being, Krista Tippett

Classic Myth

Orpheus

Welcome back to the first part of a two part conversation with Novelist, Short story writer, Director,  Actor, all round creative Stella Duffy.  In the first part we talk generally about  her experiences of lock down and her speculations  about the future of the arts.  We also discuss her Fun Palaces project.  In the second part we explore her tastes in media at this current time. 
I look forward to you all enjoying this marvelous conversation with a fully engaged artist. 



Stella Duffy is a writer and  performer born in London who spent her childhood in New Zealand before  returning to the UK. She has written plays, and novels and directs.

Stella Duffy has written fourteen novels including her latest, London Lies Beneath which Virago will publish in November 2015. The Room of Lost Things and State of Happinesswere  both long-listed for the Orange Prize. She has written ten plays and  over fifty short stories, including several for BBC Radio 4. Her  collected stories are published by Salt inEverything is Moving, Everything is Joined. She won the CWA Short Story Dagger in 2002 (Martha Grace) and 2013 (Come Away With Me), and Stonewall Writer of the Year in 2008 (The Room of Lost Things) and 2010 (Theodora). HBO have optioned her two Theodora novels for a TV series. She wrote and presented the BBC4 documentary How to Write a Mills and Boon and has reviewed for The Review Show (BBC2), Front Row(BBCRadio4)  and written articles for most major newspapers in the UK. In addition  to her writing work she is a theatre director and performer.

Stella is also the co-founder of Fun Palaces -- an annual, free, nationwide celebration of  culture at the heart of community, using arts, science, craft, tech,  digital, heritage and sports activities as a catalyst for community  engagement.  This takes place over the first weekend in October every  year.  Fun Palaces are community events, created by and for local  people.  They are held in a variety of locations, ranging from  libraries, shopping centres, schools, parks, village squares, community  halls, swimming pools, etc.  The original (never built) Fun Palace was  the brainchild of celebrated theatre director Joan Littlewood and architect Cedric Price.  Their never-realized vision was re-interpreted for the 21st century  with the Fun Palaces campaign for cultural democracy, with community-led  events in many locations. The first weekend of action took place in  2014, with 138 Fun Palaces taking place across the UK and  internationally and in 2015 the number rose to 142, 292 Fun Palaces in  2016, and 362 in 2017.

Joan Wickersham's most recent book of fiction is The News from Spain (Knopf). Her memoir The Suicide Index (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) was a National Book Award Finalist. She is also the author of a novel, The Paper Anniversary (Viking).

Her fiction has appeared in magazines including Agni, One Story, Glimmer Train, The Hudson Review, New England Review, Ploughshares, and Story, and has been published in The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Nonrequired Reading. Her op-ed column runs regularly in The Boston Globe. She has published essays and reviews in The Los Angeles Times and The International Herald Tribune; and has read her work on National Public Radio’s “On Point” and “Morning Edition.” She also writes frequently about architecture, including “The Lurker,” a column she created for Architecture Boston magazine.

She has received the Ploughshares Cohen Award for Best Short Story and has been awarded grants by the National Endowment for the Arts, The American-Scandinavian Foundation, The Massachusetts Cultural Council, the MacDowell Colony, and Yaddo. She has taught at Harvard, Emerson, the University of Massachusetts (Boston), and the Bennington Writing Seminars. Joan graduated from Yale with a degree in art history. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Boris Fish­man was born in Min­sk, Belarus. He is the author of the nov­els A Replace­ment Life (win­ner of the VCU Cabell First Nov­el­ist Award and the Amer­i­can Library Asso­ci­a­tion’s Sophie Brody Medal) and Don’t Let My Baby Do Rodeo. Both were New York Times Notable Books of the Year. Sav­age Feast, a fam­i­ly mem­oir told through recipes, will be out in paper­back in ear­ly 2020. His jour­nal­ism has appeared in The New York­er, The New York Times Mag­a­zine, and many oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. He lives in New York and teach­es cre­ative writ­ing at Prince­ton University.

Boris's choices include:

Books

Sophie's Choice, William Styron

King of the Jews, Leslie Epstein

Netflix etc

Give Me Liberty

Two Lovers, James Gray

Better Call Saul

Music

Def Leppard, Stand up, Kick Life into Motion

Podcast

I'll Drink to That

Poetry

Lucky, Tony Hoagland

Michael's Choices:

Streaming

Better Call Saul

Babylon Berlin

Ozark

Novel

Joseph Karon: The Defectors

Michael's Podcast--First Rough Draft of History (FRDH)

___________

Remember to Listen to Four Dead in Ohio

Archive on 4

May 4th 2020 marks the 50th anniversary  of the Kent State massacre.  Through archive and personal memory, Michael  Goldfarb explores what  America was like on that terrible weekend.

In November 1985, Goldfarb moved to London to pursue a career in  journalism. He has reported from 25 countries on five continents.

He reported on the arts for British and American newspapers, particularly The Guardian and Newsday. He became a critic for BBC Radio 4 and this work led him into broadcast journalism with National Public Radio (NPR).

From 1990 to 1998, Goldfarb worked for NPR, from 1996 to 1998 as its London Bureau Chief. He covered British politics, the Royal Family and the five-year-long peace process in Northern Ireland for, but also reported from Bosnia and Iraq. Throughout this period he also worked with the BBC and in 1994 won British radio's highest honor, the Sony Award, for his essays on the American Midwest, titled Homeward Bound.

In 1999 he was a fellow at the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government.

In 2016, he launched the FRDH podcast. He frames his storytelling  through the idea that journalism is the First Rough Draft of History  and draws on the history he has reported and lived and written about.

He continues to make documentaries for BBC Radio 3, Radio 4, the World Service and Radio 5 and is a regular panelist on the BBC News program Dateline London.  He writes op-eds for The New York Times and contributes occasionally to The Guardian.[3Michael's choices include Hillary Mantel, The Mirror and the Lamp

Four Dead in Ohio, covered by  Isely Brothers, Ben Harper, Hannah Wicklund --more choices in Part 2 of the Interview