Mary Karr

Posted on January 23, 2012 by daysofyore

Mary Karr is a seventh-generation Texan and a New York Times bestselling author of three memoirs and four books of poetry. In 1995, she sparked the memoir revolution with The Liars’ Club, winner of the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction. Five years later came Cherry, a coming-of-age memoir that Times critic Michiko Kakutani praised for blending “a poet’s lyricism and a Texan’s down-home vernacular.” Lit, the third book in Karr’s dynamic trilogy, portrays her descent into the baffling morass of alcoholism and her unlikely turn toward the Catholic faith.

Karr’s critically acclaimed poetry collections include Abacus (1987), The Devil’s Tour (1993), Viper Rum (1995), and Sinner’s Welcome (2006). She has won The Whiting Award, a Radcliffe-Bunting Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. The recipient of Pushcart Prizes for both poetry and essays, Karr’s work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, and Poetry, among others. She is the Peck Professor of English Literature at Syracuse University.

The Days of Yore visited Karr in her Manhattan apartment, a multiple-story unit tucked so tightly into the Garment District that you might pass her door three times before you spot the buzzer. A recent vegan convert, she served tea laced with soymilk, but confessed that the vegetables she ate for dinner might have been buttered.

I often read your work before I write.

That’s so nice. I used to have so many people like that.

Who?

Frank Conroy, who wrote Stop-Time, Maxine Hong Kingston, who wrote The Woman Warrior. Nabokov’s Speak Memory is probably my favorite memoir of all time.

But that’s so great. When I was posing in the mirror with my beret on my head for my author jacket, at ten years old, that’s what I imagined would happen.

You imagined that people would read your work before they wrote.

Yeah, but I was deranged.

You were a prophet.

I was ten years old.
Continue reading →

Posted in Writers | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Steve Almond

Posted on January 16, 2012 by daysofyore

Steve Almond is the author of ten books of fiction and nonfiction whose titles read like the subject headers of emails from the best friend you’ve always wished you had: My Life in Heavy Metal, The Evil B.B. Chow, Candyfreak, Bad Poetry, (Not That You Asked), Letters From People Who Hate Me, Which Brings Me to You (co-authored with Julianna Baggot), This Won’t Take But a Minute, Honey, and Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life.

His essays and stories have been published in the Los Angeles Times, The Rumpus, Slate, Salon, The Believer, Utne Reader, Bitch, Huffington Post, GQ, Spin, Best American Short Stories, and more, as well as in numerous anthologies. In October 2011, he appeared on the podcast WTF with Marc Maron. His work has been described as irreverent and hilarious, as urgent and moving, or as both at once.

The Days of Yore met up with Steve on a rainy afternoon at McNally Jackson Books in Soho. He was slated to read there later from his newest book, God Bless America, and to talk about his work with fellow writers Darin Strauss and Nick Flynn. It was late November, and Occupy Wall Street protesters had been cleared out of Zuccotti Park a few days prior. We found a quiet spot to talk in a basement section of the store marked “Ideas,” sandwiched between “Memoir” and “Religion.”

When did you first become interested in writing?

When I was a kid, I didn’t think, “I want to write!” I thought, “How do I get attention in this family?” and the way I had was being mouthy. I was a TV kid, but also really into reading. I remember reading Where the Red Fern Grows and A Cricket in Times Square and Encyclopedia Brown over and over, and thinking about particular books on my shelf as sacred objects: a dinosaur book, a book about famous sports people. But I don’t think I ever had a moment where I thought “That’s what I’ll do.”

I was more of a failed jock. I didn’t take creative writing classes. But I did work for the newspaper. I was a columnist in high school, a columnist in college—terrible columns. It was in my early to mid-twenties that I started reading short stories in Harper’s and other places, and I remember thinking that those writers were badasses. Those were the ones doing interesting work.
Continue reading →

Posted in Writers | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Brian Kulick

Posted on January 9, 2012 by daysofyore

Brian Kulick is an acclaimed American theater director who currently heads the Classic Stage Company as its Artistic Director. He has directed a number of plays at the Delacourt in Central Park for The Public Theater, including Twelfth Night, The Winter’s Tale, Timon of Athens, Pericles, A Dybbuk, and Kit Marlowe, and he has been the Creative Director of the Shakespeare Society of New York. His work has also graced the stages at Playwrights Horizons, NYTW, the Mark Taper Forum, Berkeley Repertory Theatre, ACT, The McCarter Theatre, Trinity Repertory Company, and the Magic Theatre, among others. He has directed the world premiers of plays by Tony Kushner, Charles L. Mee Jr., Nilo Cruz, Han Ong, Kathleen Toland, David Grimand, and Anne Carson.

He has a B.A. from UCLA and a M.F.A. from Carnegie Mellon and was as an artist-in-residence at the Mark Taper Forum. He currently teaches in the theater program at Columbia University.

Kulick is so laid-back, friendly, and quick to laugh that it’s easy to forget that you’re sitting across from a true theater power player.

I tend to wonder where the ideas come from to begin with. Do you recall the earliest memories of theatrical experience that meant something to you?

You know, I get asked this sometimes and, in thinking about it, I realized that my first theatrical experiences were more family related. My grandfather was a jewelry salesman. We lived in Los Angeles and he would do business in New York and he would come back and have seen all these things called plays on this thing called Broadway. And he would be at the dinner table with us and he would reenact the entire play. His greatest performance was A Raisin in the Sun where he did everybody— the entire thing and all of the dialects and everything. And this is a guy who was a first generation immigrant from Odessa, Russia.

My other grandfather was a completely different individual. He was supposed to be a rabbi but it just didn’t work out. He became the manager of dime stores, Woolworths, all over the country, but he finally landed in Long Beach California. And even though he wasn’t a rabbi, we were visited all the time by cousins, relatives, friends and they would just come to his living room and it was a form of performance art/confession. He was a very interesting fellow and I realized what he taught me was how to be an audience, how to be a listener, how to be somebody that could hear someone else, and be with someone else and help someone else.

I think those were my first experiences. Of my one grandfather performing and my other grandfather being an audience member. I learned the sort of dialectic of theater through them.
Continue reading →

Posted in Directors | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Marina Abramović

Posted on December 19, 2011 by daysofyore

Photography: Reto Guntli Courtesy: Sean Kelly Gallery, New York

Marina Abramović, the self-described “grandmother of performance art,” is perhaps one of the most publicly recognizable artists working today. Born and raised in Belgrade, in former Yugoslavia, she began her performance career in the 1970’s, exploring the relationship between artist and audience and testing the limits of her own body and mind in the process. Over the past three decades, she has cut herself with knives, drugged herself with heavy sedatives, opened her naked body to the abuse of a provoked and vicious crowd (at one point, an audience member held a loaded gun to her head), and nearly died of suffocation while lying inside a burning star.

In 1997, she was awarded the Golden Lion for Best Artist at the Venice Biennale for her harrowing piece Balkan Baroque, in which she sat on a pile of 1,500 bloody cow bones, washing them for four days, six hours a day, in a hot and fetid-smelling basement. In 2002, Abramović presented The House with the Ocean View, where she lived on only water for twelve days in three open platform rooms in the Sean Kelly Gallery in New York (recreated in the sixth season of Sex and the City— when Carrie and Aleksandr Petrovsky visit the gallery, remember?). In 2005, Abramović performed Seven Easy Pieces at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, and in 2010, the Museum of Modern Art in New York presented The Artist is Present, the biggest performance retrospective in the museum’s history, which included a new piece where Abramović sat immobile for over 700 hours facing a chair in which audience members were invited to sit. The Artist is Present became an immediate sensation with over half a million people visiting the exhibition and 800,000 checking in on the museum’s live-feed of the performance. A crop of blogs and articles related to the audience experience of the work appeared and made Abramović’s face – and intent, piercing gaze – instantly famous.

In 2004, she was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from the Art Institute in Chicago, The University of Plymouth, UK, and Willams College, USA, and she is currently creating the Marina Abramović Institute for Preservation of Performance Art in Hudson, New York, which is set to open in 2012.

Abramović is surprisingly warm and convivial, reserving that famously fierce focus for her performances. This conversation took place in her home in downtown New York, a few days after her controversial art direction of the Museum of Contemporary Art’s Gala in Los Angeles.

Your parents were partisans in World War Two and you grew up in a rather special situation. Can you tell me about your childhood?

My theory is that the more miserable childhood you get, the better artist you become. I don’t think anybody does much good work from happiness, because happiness is a state that doesn’t really push you into making work. But difficult childhood problems, families, all those things, somehow become a treasure, become some kind of source of inspiration for later on.
Continue reading →

Posted in Visual Artists | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Deborah Eisenberg

Posted on December 12, 2011 by daysofyore

Deborah Eisenberg is the author of four collections of stories, Transactions in a Foreign Currency, Under the 82nd Airborne, All Around Atlantis, and Twilight of the Superheroes, brought together in 2010 in The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg, which won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. Her short stories have also appeared in the New Yorker, the Yale Review, the Virginia Quarterly Review, and Tin House, among other publications.

She is the recipient of a MacArthur “Genius” Grant, a Whiting Writers’ Award, a Rea Award, a Lannan Foundation Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She received a BA from the New School College and has taught at the University of Virginia since 1994. She currently also teaches writing at Columbia University.

Writing of Eisenberg in the New York Times Book Review, Ben Marcus notes that, “there aren’t many contemporary novels as shudderingly intimate and mordantly funny as Eisenberg’s best stories.” Indeed, her stories are like individually wrapped chocolates full of hidden surprises that you can’t stop squirreling away into your pocket, and then your mouth, from the silver dish at an elderly relative’s house, feeling as you do that you alone have discovered and understood the enigmatic characters fumbling—strangely, elegantly, articulately— on the page.

Eisenberg speaks with disarming bemusement and has the thrilling ability to make you feel like she is about to really level with you.

You had an unusual path to becoming a writer because you didn’t begin writing seriously until a little bit later, when you were thirty. Why did you begin writing when you did?

You’ve done some homework.

A little bit.

But yes, when you say I first started writing seriously…I hadn’t started before at all.

Well, did you have any writerly inclinations before, had you even thought about it?

No. I mean, my big experiences when I was a child were reading experiences. I loved reading. I thought writing was magic, and I thought writers were magical beings anointed by God— I still think so. Although I don’t know how I snuck in there, then. It never occurred to me that I could write, so I never did it. I thought either you were born a writer or you weren’t.
Continue reading →

Posted in Writers | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Jaimy Gordon

Posted on December 5, 2011 by daysofyore

Jaimy Gordon took the reading world by surprise when she won the 2010 National Book Award for Lord of Misrule. The novel, which chronicles the colorful life at a bottom-level horse racetrack, was published by a tiny press after being rejected by the big publishing houses. Gordon’s work had always been critically respected but was never widely read. In her sixties, she feared that the breakthrough she had imagined would never come after all. And then, as she says in this interview, “the gods of mischief decided to turn everything upside down for me with the National Book Award.” Her previous works include She Drove Without Stopping; The Bend, The Lip, The Kid; Bogeywoman; and the underground fantasy classic Shamp of the City-Solo.

Gordon earned her BA from Antioch College and her MA in English and Doctor of Arts in Creative Writing, both from Brown University. She currently teaches in the MFA program at Western Michigan University. She has been awarded three National Endowment for the Arts grants and a grant from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, among other awards.

Writing of Gordon in the LA Times, Susan Salter Reynolds noted that, “In her novels, stories and poetry, Gordon has pushed the limits of style — explored the empty places in her articulate characters and works — so that language drags meaning behind it like a fur coat trailing blood. Her language is so textured that her pages seem three-dimensional.”

Are you ready to answer some questions about your yore?

Yes, I remember how awful it was to be twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-four and feeling like a committed artist but needing to take regular jobs because I really didn’t have any money, and wondering if I would ever have a publication, wondering if anything would ever become of me.

I read in an interview that you felt that already at nineteen you were starting to write with what you considered your mature voice, which is very early indeed and seems to suggest quite a bit of confidence. I am wondering: At nineteen, how were you thinking about your writing?

I was writing a story that was later published, although saying it was like my adult oeuvre is going a little far. But I think what I had from the start was confidence that I could write an interesting sentence. And that was the first time I was working on a story where the basic project was one that I still think about. I was just in Philadelphia reading with Karen Russell and Jennifer Egan—

I love both of them, I just have to say.

Right now, to be reading with those two— that’s feeling like an arrived writer.

Yes. For sure.

But I was remembering that I had set my very first story in Camden, which is really greater Philadelphia. Why did I do that? It looks like Baltimore, it was always Philadelphia’s run-down outlying section, and it had these tall, skinny row houses like Baltimore. The melancholy of those buildings, the urge to describe them was one of the main incentives for writing that story.
Continue reading →

Posted in Writers | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Reed Birney

Posted on November 28, 2011 by daysofyore

Reed Birney has become a ubiquitous presence on New York stages, appearing in some of the most celebrated new plays of the past few years. He received a Drama Desk Award last May for his work in three critically acclaimed dramas: A Small Fire at Playwrights Horizons, and Tigers Be Still and Dream of the Burning Boy at the Roundabout Underground. He also starred in the controversial, wildly popular 2009 production of Sarah Kane’s Blasted at Soho Rep, and was a member of the Obie and Drama Desk award-winning ensemble of Annie Baker’s Circle Mirror Transformation. In addition to a host of other Broadway, Off-Broadway, TV, and film credits, he is the recipient of an Obie Award for Sustained Excellence in Performance.

Birney is a richly versatile actor that younger, aspiring performers in New York look up to, and one young playwrights consistently gravitate toward — an actor, director, and playwright’s actor, if there ever was one.

He spoke to the Days of Yore over popovers on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

You were born in Delaware, but raised in Western New York?

Right. In ninth grade we moved to Buffalo, which even now I can’t really believe. My dad was an Episcopal Minister, but he had done mostly administrative work. He would assist bishops. So we went from Delaware where he had a parish over to the diocese in Western New York. And it’s a nice place, I guess, but I just never saw myself as anybody who spent any time in Buffalo. But then… I did. I went to high school there.

Did you always know you wanted to act?

I’m one of those little freaky kids who knew really young. I remember saying to a group of grown-ups at 5, I’m going to be an actor, and they all laughed. “He’s adorable and weird!”

So you were one of those kids putting on puppet show performances and things like that.

Yeah, the puppet show guy. But I feel like I had this epiphany. I went to see The Wonders of Aladdin, I believe, with Donald O’Connor. And I seem to remember thinking: That’s for me. I want to do that. Why? Who knows.
Continue reading →

Posted in Actors | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

t h a n k s g i v i n g

Posted on November 24, 2011 by daysofyore

Happy Thanksgiving!

Since The Days of Yore began in May 2010, we have published seventy-five interviews with writers, artists, directors, performers…you name it. Seventy-five. That is something to be darn thankful for. And we certainly are. We are so thankful for every single person we have interviewed and so thankful for every single interviewee that has agreed to participate in the future.

Know what else we are thankful for? All the incredible advice we’ve been given over the course of these seventy-five interviews. As a Thanksgiving gift, we hereby give you a compilation of some of the very best of that advice. Makes for a good read when you’re in that late-afternoon food-coma. Maybe you’ll even find something that you’ll want to share around the table.

Cheers!

Astri

Editor
The Days of Yore

Jennifer Egan
My advice is so basic. Number one: Read. I feel like it’s amazing how many people I know who want to be writers who don’t really read. I’m not convinced someone wants to be a writer if they don’t read. I don’t think the problem is that they need to read more; I think they might need to readjust their life goals. Reading is the nourishment that lets you do interesting work. To be reading good things. I feel that you should be reading what you want to write. Nothing less.

The second thing is, I feel like getting in the habit of it is huge. I guess that was my one accomplishment of those two years [with the first failed novel]— making it a routine is a gigantic part of it.

One corollary of that— and this is probably the most important thing for me— is being willing to write really badly. It won’t hurt you to do that. I think there is this fear of writing badly, something primal about it, like: “This bad stuff is coming out of me…” Forget it! Let it float away and the good stuff follows. For me, the bad beginning is just something to build on. It’s no big deal. You have to give yourself permission to do that because you can’t expect to write regularly and always write well. That’s when people get into the habit of waiting for the good moments, and that is where I think writer’s block comes from. Like: It’s not happening. Well, maybe good writing isn’t happening, but let some bad writing happen. Let it happen!
Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Binnie Kirshenbaum

Posted on November 21, 2011 by daysofyore

Binnie Kirshenbaum is a writer whose work vibrates with a strong voice and strong characters. She has written two short story collections and six novels, including On Mermaid Avenue, Pure Poetry, Hester Among the Ruins and, most recently, The Scenic Route. She has won two Critics Choice Awards and her novels have been named Notable Books of the Year by The Chicago Tribune, NPR, The San Francisco Chronicle, and The Washington Post. Granta has named her one of the Best Young American novelists.

Kirshenbaum earned her BA from Columbia and her MFA from Brooklyn College. She is the Chair of the Writing Program at Columbia University where she also teaches fiction. With her biting wit and keen eye for observing the peculiar workings of the world, she has been called “the younger sister of Philip Roth.”

Where did you grow up?

The suburbs of New York, where I grew up, seemed to be a place that was neither here nor there. It had been denuded of the natural beauty of rural landscape and although NYC was but a 20 minute train ride away but it might as well have been 20 hours. I was a product of my environment: neither a happy nor an unhappy child. However, I did blossom into a spectacularly miserable teenager.

Tell me about Binnie the spectacularly miserable teenager.

I cried a lot. I ate a lot. (I was decidedly plump.) I didn’t have a boyfriend. I failed gym.

What did you want to be when you grew up? Did you think writer was something one could “be” already then?

I did know that books got written by people. (Treacly cute confession: I asked if Dr. Seuss could be our family physician.) I have considered other professions: naturalist; cat-rescue lady; something in advertising— but the fantasies are fleeting.

You went to college at Columbia University. What was it like to be in New York then, did you start to sniff around the literary scene already as an undergrad?

I was far too naive and timid to sniff around the literary scene. I’m not sure I even knew that there was such a thing or where to find it. In that respect, not much has changed for me. I had a few friends who wanted to be writers. We read each others’ work with absolute subjectivity. I didn’t “belong.” New York was/is a heady place to be a student. There was always a sense of possibility; anything could happen here. Continue reading →

Posted in Writers | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Daniel Chun

Posted on November 14, 2011 by daysofyore

Daniel Chun is the Head Writer and Co-Executive Producer of The Office. Before writing for what is rapidly becoming a twenty-first century television classic, he wrote for The Simpsons, undoubtedly one of the most iconic shows in modern television history— not a bad track record for a still-young television writer. He won a Writers Guild Award and an Annie Award for his work on The Simpsons, and was nominated for two Writers Guild Awards and two Emmy Awards for The Office.

Chun has a BA from Harvard University and began his comedy writing career at the Harvard Lampoon. His work has also appeared in publications like New York Magazine, The Huffington Post, and Vitals Magazine.

Chun, who is generous, approachable, and completely no-frills, is as un-Hollywood as they come. He is also an avid twitterer (@dannychun).

What came first, books or TV? In other words, as a kid, were you a big reader, a big TV watcher, or both?

Both. My parents didn’t limit my consumption of media (as long as I did well in school). So from the time I got home from school to the time I went to bed, I was pretty much either reading or watching TV.

A lot of being a comedy writer is having an encyclopedic knowledge of cliché, and I acquired mine through gorging myself on media during my formative years. Of course, what you’ll also find about comedy writers is they tend to have great love for those same clichés they’re avoiding/lampooning. They’re comforting in a nostalgic way.

The poet Josh Bell told me that he remembers that there was a distinct moment when he realized, as a kid, that someone had written the shows he was watching on TV and the stories he was reading in books, and that this moment of understanding marked a major shift in his way of thinking about storyteller and his place in the world— it was then that he thought he could perhaps be a storyteller, too. Did you have a similarly important realization when you were younger? Was there a moment when you thought: I want to be the person who writes the story?

In 7th grade, my English class did a lot of creative writing, and I loved making people laugh with my stories. And then in high school my friends and I, inspired by SNL and Kids in the Hall, wrote and filmed comedy sketches late at night during sleepovers. But it was always just for fun.

Actually, the first time I made the realization that Josh Bell made was when I read an interview with Conan O’Brien in which he related having that same realization. So I had to be spoon-fed that epiphany. Even after that, I didn’t admit to myself that I wanted to be a professional writer – I felt like I’d jinx it. I kept saying I wanted to be a teacher or a primatologist. Continue reading →

Posted in Screenwriters | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment