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.
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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!
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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 →

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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 →

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The Gao Brothers

Posted on November 7, 2011 by daysofyore

The Gao Brothers are among the best-known artists working in China. Born in a provincial Chinese city during the infamous Cultural Revolution of the ’60s and ’70s, they say Mao Zedong’s government cast a dark shadow over their childhood. But they overcame poverty to develop a whimsical aesthetic that packs a none-too-subtle political punch. Their most famous works are satirical sculptures that ridicule Mao, a national icon whose controversial legacy still informs life and art in contemporary China. The Los Angeles Times has said their “weapons are brushes, their battlefields canvases.”

China’s powerful Communist Party is not exactly a fan. Over the years, police have canceled the Gao Brothers’ exhibitions, raided their Beijing studio and confiscated their art. But the brothers refuse to play nice: They show politically edgy, mixed-media work at underground exhibitions, and they aren’t afraid to speak out against the government even after communist authorities detained dissident artist Ai Weiwei without charges for nearly three months this year – a move Ai’s supporters claim was a punishment for discussing social problems and criticizing the Party.

The Days of Yore caught up with the Gao Brothers this summer through a translated email exchange.

You both grew up in Shandong Province in the 1960s – what was your home city, Jinan, like in those days?

In the 1960s, Jinan was still small: There were no skyscrapers or tall buildings, no elevated highways, no crossover intersections, and the streets weren’t congested with cars as they are today. Most people lived in one-story houses, and they mainly walked, biked, and rode buses.

Mao's Guilt 2009

Mao's Guilt 2009

You were kids, and later teens, during the Cultural Revolution – and your family was deeply affected by Mao Zedong’s policies. Please explain.

During Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution, our father was taken away for interrogation, and he died on October 25, 1968. The Chinese government said he committed suicide, but his body, which showed obvious signs of abuse, was cremated without a coroner’s examination. To this day we are unsure about the cause of his death.

At the time, the six children in our family were still young, and our mother didn’t work, so our family depended on our father’s income. After his death, we had no source of income… We had no choice but to leave school, and we survived thanks to assistance from our aunt and uncle.
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h a l l o w e e n

Posted on October 31, 2011 by daysofyore

Since the project’s inception, DoY has brought you interviews with all kinds of successful artists and writers. Often, the interviews reveal some pretty scary moments— whether tales of poverty or simply terror in the face of a daunting, uncertain, unprofitable artistic future. So, in honor of Halloween, we decided to put together some scary moments of yore for your shuddering amusement. With no further ado…

Boo!

Astri, Evan and Lucas

Nightmare Living Situations!

Paul Elie, writer and editor
I had a very small, very dark one-bedroom on 106th Street near Amsterdam. It was skanky. The guy across the hall would bring in hookers with some regularity. The only window looked out on a junk-filled lot and had one of those trapeze gates over it. I had a futon, a computer, a couple of bookshelves, and one little lamp with a 60 watt bulb. I spent all my time in the back room writing. At the end of the night I would pull the gate closed, locking myself into my cell.

Josh Bell, poet
I lived in a garage that had been converted into an apartment. (…)That garage was basically the last stop on the sewage line, there wasn’t even supposed to be plumbing back there at all. So I’d be in bed sometimes— and this is so disgusting I don’t even want to talk about it— and air would get into the sewage line, and you could hear it; there would be this audible explosion in the bathroom. I don’t even want to tell you what it was like to walk in through that door to see what had happened…the sewage just basically backed up and shot into the bathroom.

(…)

I didn’t realize it until the spring, but my wall, where my bed was, had a beehive in it. A huge beehive. I woke up one morning being stung. There were bees in my bed. Exterminators came out and sprayed it, but the bees just kept coming back in. I had to start sleeping in the other room until it got cold again. It was horrible, really. I would go to class with all these bee stings. I looked like I’d been abused, or had abused myself. It caused really weird bee dreams.

John D’Agata, writer
To begin with, the “salad days,” as you put it, were vegetable-less. I spent the harshest of them in my car, a white Chevrolet Caprice Classic with red velour interior that I inherited from my grandfather—who happened to be Sicilian, if the car didn’t give it away. After I quit my first teaching job, I spent a year hopping from art colony to art colony around the United States. I think I did a total of seven of them in one year. But during those periods when I wasn’t at an art colony I slept in my car. That sounds awful, but I actually enjoyed it. I used to park outside Denny’s restaurants, figuring that they’d be safe because they’re open 24-hours and people were always coming and going. (…) I really only had to interact with the occasional cop who knocked on my car window to tell me to move along in the middle of the night.

David Humphrey, painter, sculptor, and critic
Across the hall was a place called Wally’s Attic, which was a gay S&M club that was the inner sanctum to a place in the neighborhood called the Mineshaft. He [Wally] managed the Mineshaft, and this [the Attic] was for his more exclusive parties, or special events. Pretty much anytime we’d come home late there’d be something interesting going on— meetings of the Golden Shower Association, military night, the Fall Poo Party. It was like some fictional idea of bohemia.

(…)

I ended up giving a deposition describing my experience there… I got a printed out version of it later and was mildly shocked by my own descriptions of daisy-chained men in cages, glory holes, and fist-fucking slings that I would see because they left their door open and were friendly neighbors. You know, on my way home with the groceries and my milk for tomorrow’s coffee!
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Mary Jo Bang

Posted on October 24, 2011 by daysofyore

Mary Jo Bang is a poet whose formal tricks don’t imprison meaning in a cage of structure, but rather act as a funnel through which emotion and prickle-your-skin honesty gush forth with surprising velocity. In Elegy, the collection that won the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award, she responds to the untimely death of her son in a way that is somehow both raw and measured. And that’s the thing about Bang, she manages to continually combine states and forms and attitudes that seem incongruous. Her poems often respond to art, from pop celebrities to classic literature, from Cher to Beckett.

This amalgamation of high and low is reflected in her own biography. Bang has no less than five degrees— a B.A. and M.A. in Sociology from Northwestern University, a B.A. in photography from the Polytechnic of Central London, training as a Physician Assistant at St. Louis University, and an M.F.A. in creative writing from Columbia University— and she has worked in a wide range of fields: commercial photographer, research assistant to a geneticist, welfare caseworker, sweatshop garmet worker, writer, and teacher of poetry, just to name a few.

Bang has published six books of poems to date, including The Eye Like a Strange Balloon, Louise in Love, The Bride of E, and Elegy. Her translation of Dante’s Inferno, with illustrations by Henrik Drescher, is forthcoming from Graywolf Press in 2012. She has been awarded a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University and a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation. She has taught at Yale University, The New School, the University of Montana, Columbia University, and the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop, and now teaches in the English Department at Washington University in St. Louis.

Do you remember the first thing you read that stirred the writer’s desire in you?

I don’t remember how old I was or what I was reading— The Boxcar Children, The Borrowers, Dickinson’s poems, or e.e. Cummings’s— but it was certainly long before college when I read Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 and Nabokov’s Lolita. All of those readerly moments blend together as one long immersion in that state of suspended animation, suspended disbelief, desperate escape from the deadly boredom of one same day after another.

I don’t know when reading slid over into wanting to be a writer. There was the love of the story, the love of the poem, then, rather seamlessly, the wanting to write the story, write the poem. If that desire is strong enough, and persistent enough, you do whatever you have to do to teach yourself how to cross over from being a reader to being a reader who is a writer. For me, the crossing over took a very long time and there were many interruptions but the desire never lessened. But I first had to learn how to learn. Continue reading →

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Timothy Donnelly

Posted on October 17, 2011 by daysofyore

Timothy Donnelly is a wordsmith whom The New Yorker has called “the barreller-in-chief of the younger generation of American poets.” He has published two collections of poetry, Twenty-seven Props for a Production of Eine Lebenszeit (2003) and The Cloud Corporation (2010). His work has also appeared in publications like Harper’s, Iowa Review, The Nation, The New Republic, The Paris Review, and Ploughshares.

He earned a BA from Johns Hopkins University, an MFA in poetry from Columbia University, and a PhD in English from Princeton University. He has been the poetry editor of the Boston Review since 1995 and currently teaches writing at Columbia University.

Donnelly is the kind of writer— and person— who never ceases to keep you on your toes and who, while you are balancing there on a precarious intellectual tightrope, winks conspiratorially as if to say, “We’re in this together, aren’t we?”

I read this thing that you wrote about how you were as a child, which I just loved. Can you tell me a little bit about what you were like as a child?

I’m revisiting what I was like as a kid lately because I have a five and a half year old daughter and both my wife and I recognize certain traits in her as being, so to speak, my fault. [Laughs.] For example, my wife for the longest time thought I was being ridiculous whenever she would try waking me up in the morning—I hate waking up—and I would say “Just give me five more minutes, I just need to finish my dream.” She thought I was feeding her a line! But then, completely independently of my example, my daughter started saying the same thing. My wife would try to wake her up and she would say, “No, just five more minutes, I need to finish my dream.” She never saw or heard me say this, my daughter, I swear. The way her brain works in general—her wild imagination, the way she relentlessly analyzes things, her spazziness—this is all me. We often say what the other is thinking. The first time this happened she ran to her mother saying “Mom, Dad spoke the words right out of my brain.”

We both concentrate very deeply on things—in my case, partly to counter a natural tendency to grow distracted. I often think of my writing as a way for me to bring it all together, to focus myself. It has a semi-meditative quality for me, writing does—weaving everything into a single thread. That’s at least one of the reasons I take pleasure in doing it and why it seems to serve a kind of psychic function quite separate from mere expression.
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David Grossman

Posted on October 10, 2011 by daysofyore

David Grossman is one of Israel’s most prominent writers and a much-loved literary figure in the world— his books have been translated into over thirty languages and have won countless international awards. He has written a number of works of nonfiction, including Sleeping on a Wire: Conversations with Palestinians in Israel, Death as a Way of Life: Israel Ten Years after Oslo, and the hugely influential report The Yellow Wind. His fictional works include The Smile of the Lamb, See Under: Love, The Book of Intimate Grammar, The Zigzag Kid, and To the End of the Land, which was nominated for the 2011 National Book Critics Circle Award and made President Obama’s 2011 summer reading list.

Grossman is also a political activist and an outspoken critic of Israel’s policy toward the Palestinians. His twenty year-old son, Uri, a staff sergeant, was killed in the 2006 Israel-Lebanon conflict, shortly before the ceasefire. A few months later, Grossman addressed a crowd of 100,000 Israelis in Tel Aviv on the anniversary of the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, denouncing Ehud Olmert’s government and reasserting his belief that, despite his personal tragedy, hostility toward the Palestinians was a misguided tactic in the region. In an in-depth profile of Grossman in the September 27, 2010 issue of The New Yorker, George Packer writes, “Grossman is no longer allowed to be simply a novelist. The left-wing writer whose son fell in combat has become a secular prophet.”

Grossman is warm and thoughtful; a man who remembers the importance of listening even though he has been blessed with the gift of words. This conversation took place during a phone call between Stockholm and Jerusalem on an afternoon in September.

Your father was a librarian. Did you spend a lot of time in libraries as a child?

Well, my father was a bus driver in the local transportation company in Jerusalem. Then, after a certain age and a couple of health problems, he was transferred to be the librarian of this transportation company, which gave me free access to many books and I loved it. It was really like the dream of a book-loving child because I could have asked my father to order any book that I was interested in.

But, before I got this privatized fortune, I used to go get books in the public library by my home. In the 60s, the libraries in Israel were quite gloomy places. There was one room that was usually in the cellar of a public building. There stood a librarian who was quite a frightening figure in my life. She was tall, her hair was gathered together, she had a very stiff look, and she was regarding us— the readers— as potential enemies who just wanted to destroy her private treasure. You were not allowed to go into the library itself and to look or choose for yourself among the shelves. She used to look at you, scrutinize you with her eyes, and then the verdict came: “You should read this and that.” You know, even if it was absolutely not useful for the child at that age, or even if he didn’t like that writer, or whatever. He was doomed to have this book for the next week.

You were not allowed to get more than one book a week. Now, for me, this was a torment. Because I used to finish the book by the time I got home. I read very fast and I walked while reading— you know, bumping into all kinds of things. And then once, when she was ordering me to take a book— I don’t remember what book it was— I started to tell her frankly how I desperately needed more than one book a week. And something happened. You know, I think I cracked her icy heart, and she allowed me to have three books every week, which was very exciting for me.

She must have realized that you were actually a lover of books, the way she was probably a lover of books, protecting her stash from greasy-fingered kids who didn’t appreciate them enough.

I am really curious— if she is still with us— to look at things from her point of view. [Laughs.]

So, when your father became a librarian, it must have been a major liberation!

Yes. I had my own gold mine.

When you were reading as a child, did you have a sense that there was someone who had written the stories you were reading? Was the idea of a writer alive to you in your mind?

No, I don’t think so. I knew that there was someone who had written the book, but he or she did not interest me at all. I was totally interested in the story. You know, sometimes I think that in a series of books, when I found a little contradiction or something like that, then it roused my attention immediately to the notion that there is a human being behind all this creation. But usually the characters are so much more important than the writer.

Do you remember a point where you shifted and thought: “I don’t want to just be reading, I want to be one someone who creates characters.”

Yes, but I have to distinguish. I do not think that I thought, “I want to be a writer,” I thought, “I want to tell a story.” That was the thing. Telling a story became such an urge, a passion. My mother was a housewife when I was ten or so, and in order to make some money on the side and sustain the family, she would type all kinds of university work for students. So she had a little typing machine, it is just now behind me on a chair here…

Oh yeah?

Yes. All dusty… Did you ever hear those strange machines? You know they sound…I’ll just make the sound…

[Grossman types on the typewriter and I can hear the smatter of the keys through the phone.]

Do you hear it?
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Tom Purcell

Posted on October 3, 2011 by daysofyore

Tom Purcell is currently the executive producer for The Colbert Report. He’s been with the show since 2005, first as a writer, then head-writer, then producer. During his time with the program, he has received a Writer’s Guild Award, and the show’s first Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing For A Variety, Music Or Comedy Program. The series has a combined total of 15 Emmy nominations, and also received the Peabody Award for Excellence in Broadcasting.

Before Colbert came along, Purcell wrote for Cosby and Grounded For Life. He is a veteran of the legendary comedy collective, The Second City, where he has also taught or directed countless shows and classes.

Where did you grow up?

In St Joseph, Michigan, just north of South Bend, Indiana, which you might remember from the race riots. It’s an all white city next to an all black city, so there was a lot of racial tension there. I moved there from Oak Park, Illinois. I remember the first day of sixth grade, a kid stopped me on the playground and said, “Don’t worry, if they try to come over the bridge, me and my dad will be there with shotguns.” And I was terrified, I was like, “Who’s coming over the bridge?” And the kid looks at me like I’m a moron and goes, “You know: the n***ers.” Horrible, you know. So that was my introduction to the town. If you weren’t born there, you were never really part of it. I felt like a new kid for nine years.

What was your saving grace?

In St Joe’s, the high school newspaper was basically this comedy newspaper called The Wind Up. This teacher Mr. Holt had made it completely independent. It was all ad revenue and donations, so no high school money went into it. This guy bought it for the independence. I remember as a freshman, there was this kid Will Peyovich. When people say, who is your comedy hero, I say Will Peyovich. His stuff was brilliant, I wanted to be just like him.

So you followed in his footsteps?

Yeah, by senior year I had the main comedy column, I was the features editor. So I basically started writing comedy when I was 15 years old.

Did you know immediately you wanted to do that forever?

Pretty much, I think, looking back. I just gravitated towards the people at that paper. But after high school I went to Loyola for college because my father was a professor there. So I went there for free. And then I spent so much time broke. I don’t understand how people with student loans do comedy, because I was broke for ten years. I couldn’t have imagined throwing an extra five hundred bucks for a loan into that. It would have killed me.
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