
436 episodes

First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing Mitzi Rapkin
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- Arts
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4.7 • 151 Ratings
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First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing is a weekly show featuring in-depth interviews with fiction, non-fiction, essay, and poetry writers. First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing highlights the voices of writers as they discuss their work, their craft, and the literary arts. This weekly show hosted by Mitzi Rapkin is a celebration of creative writing and the individuals who are dedicated to bringing their carefully chosen words to print as well as the impact writers have on the world we live in.
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Alice McDermott
Alice McDermott is the author of nine novels, including Charming Billy, winner of the National Book Award, and That Night, At Weddings and Wakes, and After This, which were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. She is also the author of the essay collection What About the Baby?: Some Thoughts on the Art of Fiction. Her stories and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, and other publications. She lives outside Washington, DC. Her new novel is called Absolution.
We talked about voice, epistolary influence, focusing on women's stories, retrospective narrators, the idea of absolution, and Vietnam.
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Ayana Mathis
Ayana Mathis’s first novel, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, was a New York Times Bestseller, second selection for Oprah’s Book Club 2.0, a 2013 New York Times Notable Book, NPR Best Book of 2013, and was long listed for the Dublin Literary Award and nominated for Hurston/Wright Foundation's Legacy Award. Mathis’s nonfiction has been published in the The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Financial Times, Rolling Stone, Guernica and Glamour. She currently teaches at Hunter College’s MFA Program. Her new novel is The Unsettled.
We talked about the title, her main character's agency, her focus on character and story, and myth among other topics.
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Edgar Kunz
Edgar Kunz is the author of two poetry collections: Fixer, named a New York Times Editors’ Choice book, and Tap Out. He has been a National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, a MacDowell Fellow, and a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. Recent poems appear in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Poetry, APR, and Oxford American. He lives in Baltimore and teaches at Goucher College.
We talked about vulnerability, how Edgar knows when a poem is finished, the influence of Luise Glück, death, divorce, agency, and Ellen Bryant Voigt's poem about smoking.
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Tan Twan Eng
Tan Twan Eng’s debut novel The Gift of Rain was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2007 and has been widely translated. His second novel The Garden of Evening Mists won the Man Asian Literary Prize in 2012 and the 2013 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Tan divides his time between Kuala Lumpur and Cape Town. His new novel is called The House of Doors and was long listed for the Booker Prize.
We talked about W. Somerset Maugham, descriptive writing, historical research, having fun while writing, and the act of creation.
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Richard Deming
Richard Deming is a poet, art critic, and theorist whose work explores the intersections of poetry, philosophy, and visual culture. His collection of poems, Let’s Not Call It Consequence, received the 2009 Norma Farber Award from the Poetry Society of America. His most recent book of poems is Day for Night. He is also the author of Listening on All Sides: Toward an Emersonian Ethics of Reading, Art of the Ordinary: the Everyday Domain of Art, Film, Literature, and Philosophy, and This Exquisite Loneliness: What Loners, Outcasts, and the Misunderstood Can Teach Us About Creativity. He teaches at Yale University where he is the Director of Creative Writing.
We talked about the meaning of exquisite loneliness, what the opposite of loneliness is, flow state, connection with other people, creativity, finding your life's purpose, and crafting beautiful sentences in Sonny's Blues by James Baldwin.
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Jenn Shapland
Jenn Shapland is a writer living in New Mexico. Her first book, My Autobiography of Carson McCullers, was a finalist for the 2020 National Book Award and the Southern Book Prize, and won the 2021 Lambda Literary Award, the Judy Grahn Award, and the Christian Gauss Award. Her second book is called Thin Skin.
We talked about Oppenheimer, environmental justice, motherhood, living the queer creative life, structuring essays, and crafting personal narratives with historical research.
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Customer Reviews
A treat
This podcast is such a treat. The dialogue between Mitzi and the authors is so thoughtful and insightful. The process of writing has become so fascinating to me (a reader), and this podcast is a beautiful window into the craft of writing.
Great guests, great questions
Mitzi has a pitch perfect interview presence and she asks the questions I wish I could ask in addition to clearly putting a lot of thought and effort into the interviews and honoring the authors’ work. I just became a supporter!
Inspired every time
I’m a writer. When I get stuck, I fire up this podcast and go on a walk. It’s so helpful to hear how successful writers tackle their craft. I always end up with new ideas and energy.