An Interview with Carmen Giménez Smith

Barrie Jean Borich recently interviewed Carmen Giménez Smith about Bring Down the Little Birds: On Mothering, Art, Work, and Everything Else, her lyric memoir which received a 2011 American Book Award.

Borich

Do you consider this book a lyric essay? Why or why not, and if yes, what do you mean by the term “lyric” in relation to prose?

Giménez Smith

I do consider it a lyric essay, and as I write more and more nonfiction, I realize that this form is the one I'm best suited for. I like the associative jumps and the compression this form requires. It's a more peripatetic form too, and these are the ways the form is lyric, although I also think it's interesting to consider the terms of subjectivity after Montaigne, which is the way I most like to frame the notion of lyric: how does this form privilege the speaker's subjectivity as opposed to more conventional nonfiction?

An Interview with Ryan Van Meter

Ryan Van Meter’s collection of linked essays, If You Knew Then What I Know Now, was published by Sarabande Books in April. His essays have been anthologized in The Best American Essays 2009 and the Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction.

In If You Knew Then What I Know Now, Van Meter writes about growing up gay in the suburban Midwest, about gender and masculinity, and coming out. With poetic language and profound empathy, the book essentially examines how we learn to love.

Van Meter recently visited Minneapolis from San Francisco to read at Magers and Quinn as part of Gay Pride week and generously took time out for a conversation with me about this collection.

Q&A: Ana Maria Spagna

Ana Maria Spagna won the the 2009 River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Prize for Test Ride on the Sunnyland Bus, an account of her search to understand her father's role in the civil rights movement.

In 1957, her father, Joseph Spagna, rode a bus in Tallahassee, Florida, with five other young men who planned to get arrested and take their case to their U.S. Supreme Court. In her book, Spagna chronicles her journey to learn what really happened. Last fall, from her home in the remote town of Stehekin, Washington, she answered some questions about how her book came to be.