First Draft - Margot Livesey (Returns)

02/12/24 • 58 min

Margot Livesey has published ten novels: Homework, Criminals, The Missing World, Eva Moves the Furniture, Banishing Verona, The House on Fortune Street, The Flight of Gemma Hardy, Mercury, and The Boy in the Field, and The Road from Belhaven. The Hidden Machinery, a collection of essays on writing, was published by Tin House Books in 2017. Livesey is currently teaching at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She lives with her husband, a painter, in Cambridge, MA, and goes back to London and Scotland whenever she can.

We talked about growing up in Scotland, quiet novels, traveling in her mind when she couldn't in person during Covid, small town farm life, solace in animals and the natural world, secret sorrows, and the supernatural.

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Previous Episode

First Draft - Kaveh Akbar

Kaveh Akbar's poems appear in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Paris Review, Best American Poetry,and elsewhere. He is the author of two poetry collections: Pilgrim Bell and Calling a Wolf a Wolf, in addition to a chapbook, Portrait of the Alcoholic. He is also the editor of The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse: 100 Poets on the Divine. In His novel is called Martyr! He is also the Poetry Editor of The Nation. Akbar was born in Tehran, Iran, and teaches at the University of Iowa and in the low-residency MFA programs at Randolph College and Warren Wilson.

We talked about the transition to novel writing from poetry, transcendence in poetry, not looking away from the terrors of the world, addiction and rehabilitation, the messiness of life, and questions about goodness.

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First Draft - Leslie Jamison (Returns Again)

Leslie Jamison is the author of two essay collections— The Empathy Exams and Make It Scream, Make It Burn—a critical memoir, The Recovering, and a novel, The Gin Closet. She’s written for The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Harper's, Oxford American, A Public Space, Virginia Quarterly Review, and The Believer. Her new book is called Splinters. Jamison teaches at the Columbia University MFA program, where she directs the nonfiction concentration.

We talked about how structure can be the answer to figuring out how to get a story on the page, the process of writing versus vetting it for the public, how time and perspective can bring spaciousness, the many selves that we exist as, and Google searches as confessions.

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