At the Creative Independent, poet Ross Gay examines the ways playfulness and imagination steer his work and remind him of the joy in writing. “Playing, exploring, attempting, and wondering is so important. It’s so important and it feels like a practice a sort of vocation—in all kinds of things, it just feels important not to necessarily make it beautiful or not to necessarily make it the best or not to have aspirations to be the best. But to have it be like what you said, a sort of play.”
Ross Gay on the Importance of Wonder
The Colonized Space of Language
Recommended Reading: Iona Sharma writes about language as a colonized space, with its own history, politics, and tradition.
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Behind the National Book Awards
Our own Edan Lepucki interviewed National Book Award finalists George Saunders and Rachel Kushner for the National Book Foundation. Saunders discussed money issues in his writing. “Now I feel like paucity vs. grace is one of the great American issues—we all live with it every day.” Kushner explained her writing process. “The sentences are beads on a string; I see each one as essential.”
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Discussing Knausgaard
“Knausgaard‘s work is literary because of what it does, but not because of how it’s written. He gets us all asking…where does my truth really lie?” Recommended listening: James Wood, Meghan O’Rourke and Bill Pierce discuss Knausgaard in a podcast for Open Source.
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An Old Story
“We aim to foster a review culture where all genders can write about all topics and be met with equitable coverage.” Launched last year by a group of McGill University students, Just Review is an advocacy project that aims to help publications combat gender bias in the literary and publishing worlds. Would that this weren’t such an evergreen subject.
Discussing ‘A Wrinkle in Time’
Recommended reading: a piece for The Toast “In Which Three Adults Discuss A Wrinkle in Time Seriously and At Length.” Related: A Wrinkle in Time may finally become a (good) movie.
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Make the Canadians Face Off Against Everybody Else, Too
“Nurturing eventually becomes coddling, and now it’s time to encourage that work to take a bigger stage,” writes Jared Bland in his plea for the Griffin Poetry Prize to combine its two categories – Canadian and English-language – into one, global whole.
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