First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing Mitzi Rapkin

Marie Mutsuki Mockett is the author of the novels Picking Bones from the Ash and The Tree Doctor.  Her nonfiction books include American Harvest, which won the Nebraska Book Award, and Where the Dead Pause, and the Japanese Say Goodbye, which was a finalist for the PEN Open Book Award.  
We talked about writing about nature, sex, loss, cross-cultural influences, Japan, and binaries. 
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Julia Alvarez has written novels including How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, In the Time of the Butterflies, ¡Yo!, In the Name of Salomé, Saving the World, Afterlife, collections of poems including Homecoming, The Other Side/ El Otro Lado, The Woman I Kept to Myself, nonfiction works including Something to Declare, Once Upon A Quinceañera, and A Wedding in Haiti, and numerous books for young readers including the Tía Lola Stories series, Before We Were Free, finding miracles, Return to Sender and Where Do They Go? Her new novel is The Cemetery of Untold Stories.  In 2013, she received the National Medal of Arts from President Obama.

We talked about Julia's childhood, her parents reaction to her fiction, telling stories, aging, creativity, the stories we can pass on, and writing craft.
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Lily Brooks-Dalton is the bestselling author of The Light Pirate, which was the runner-up for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, a #1 Indie Next pick, a Good Morning America Book Club selection, one of NPR's "Books We Love," and a New York Times Editors' Pick. Her previous novel, Good Morning, Midnight, which was the inspiration for the film adaptation The Midnight Sky and her memoir, Motorcycles I’ve Loved, was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award. Her work has been translated into 18 languages. A former writer-in-residence at The Kerouac House and The Studios of Key West, she currently lives in Los Angeles.
We talked about writing climate fiction, making time to feel grief, pacing the story so that hope only comes after a proper time to mourn, listening to intuition, remaking the world after catastrophe, magic, and literary structure.  
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Kiley Reid is the author of Come and Get It and Such A Fun Age, which was a New York Times Best Seller and longlisted for the 2020 Booker Price. Her writing has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Playboy, The Guardian, and others. Reid is currently an assistant professor at the University of Michigan.
We talked about religion and fiction, philosophy, acting, Buddhism, materialism, college age women, grace in fiction, what creative writing can and can’t do, not judging your fictional characters, and the background work she does that doesn’t make it into a novel.
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Debra Spark is the award-winning author of five novels, including Unknown Caller, which was picked for Maine’s statewide summer READ ME program.  She has also published two collections of short stories; and two books of essays on fiction writing called And Then Something Happened and Curious Attractions.   Her book reviews, short fiction, articles, op-eds, and essays have appeared in Agni, American Scholar, AWP Writers’ Chronicle, and the Boston Globe among others.  Her new novel is Discipline.  She is the Zacamy Professor of English at Colby College and teaches in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.

We talked about the value of art, if beauty can save people, the real and fictional boarding school in Maine that used abusive techniques on teenagers, the role of women in the art world usually being in service to men, parenting, and creating parallel lines in a narrative piece of creative writing.
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Téa Obreht is the author of the novel The Tiger’s Wife, which won the 2011 Orange Prize for Fiction, and was a 2011 National Book Award finalist and an international bestseller.  Her novel Inland won the BRLA Southwest Book Award and the Ballard Prize.  Her work has been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Non-Required Reading, and has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, The Atlantic, Vogue, Esquire and Zoetrope: All-Story, among many others. She currently lives in Wyoming.  Her new novel is called The Morningside.

We talked about writing during the pandemic in a fever dream, confronting trauma in writing, besting your therapist, folktales, the world our children will inherit, and crafting a novel from feverish draft to structured finished product.
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