This Week on The Writers Institute Podcast, From the Archives of the New York State Writers Institute
Welcome to the new season of The Writers Institute, the podcast from the New York State Writers Institute and Lit Hub. This is the first episode of five, and new episodes will come out on Wednesdays. In this season’s conversations with writers—who all listen to the institute’s archival sound of writers across decades—a new theme emerges. We’re going to hear, often, about how literary exploration leads us beyond a usual sense of who we are.
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Some writers take their exploration through history. In this episode, you’ll hear archival sound of Toni Morrison, Nobel-winning author of Beloved and Song of Solomon, who says in an interview from the 1980s: “It seems to me that uncharted terrain, unfathomed depths, are yet to be plumbed in the material that’s yet to be written about.”
Another Nobel laureate, the poet Seamus Heaney, describes here (in Writers Institute sound that’s also from the 1980s) how engaging the world through literature can take us into a kind of mind-place while using material from history. “When we open a book,” he says, “be it about Billy Budd or Billy the Kid, we are reading language into ourselves.”
And in this episode’s interview, the novelist Ingrid Rojas Contreras, author of Fruit of the Drunken Tree, talks about her fiction that deals with Colombian history, and she considers her own investigation of something beyond familiar selfhood. “Sometimes,” she says, “I think when I’m entering the best writing moments, I’m almost completely not present. I’m gone from myself, and I’m somewhere else, and in a sort of fugue state. For me, when I’m writing, I’m trying to collaborate with an intelligence in myself that isn’t present all the time.”
Rojas Contreras reflects on her experience of memory loss, too: “In the time when I didn’t have memory,” she says, “one of my favorite things was to just stare at my brain.” There, she found intimations of something else. She says, “It’s sort of like when you’re looking at yourself in the mirror, and sometimes you’re conscious that you’re looking at yourself, and sometimes it almost feels like there’s something staring back at you as you’re staring at yourself.”
The Writers Institute
Books are written in solitude, but writers do some of their finest work with crowds—in public talks, interviews, and events. The best moments from those strange, dramatic interactions often go missing, however: either they’re never recorded, or nobody will ever find the recordings. Fortunately, the New York State Writers Institute at the University at Albany has been methodically recording thousands of writers’ events since 1983, when it was founded by the novelist William Kennedy. Now, the writer and radio producer Adam Colman is digging into those audio archives, listening to recordings from the likes of Raymond Carver, Grace Paley, Jamaica Kincaid, Margaret Atwood, and Samuel Delany. On The Writers Institute, you’ll hear them, too, along with writers who joined Adam in listening to the archival recordings. They include Jonathan Franzen, Susan Choi, Jonathan Lethem, Saeed Jones, and Amelia Gray.
