Ada Calhoun on the Satisfaction of Being a Ghostwriter “Fixer”
From Micro, a Podcast for Short But Powerful Writing
This episode is part of an interview series for Miami Book Fair, where members of Team Micro interview authors appearing at the fair about their work. For more information about MBF’s programming and to check out the incredible roster of authors appearing this year, visit miamibookfair.com. And be sure to follow them at @miamibookfair and #MBF2022 for more updates.
*
In this episode of Micro, M.M. Kaufman talks to Ada Calhoun about her latest book, Also a Poet.
Subscribe and listen in full, wherever you get your podcasts!
*
From the episode:
Ada Calhoun: As a ghostwriter, I’ve seen projects in various states of chaos and disorder and implosion. But I always thought of it as something that usually happened to other people. I was often brought in as a fixer on projects; that’s become, in the last few years, something that as a ghostwriter, I do often. Called in when the project seems to be falling apart. And then I come in and I save the day. It’s a good feeling. And I thought, that’s what’s going to happen here, I’m going to figure out a way to fix everything.
It was a real comeuppance for me to realize I could not turn my way out of this moment. I had to do something completely different. And it was totally different than any other book I’ve done before. My previous books required a lot of research or thinking through a question, but usually it was things that I wasn’t living in that exact moment. Whereas this one, more than the others, I was writing it as I was going through it. So it almost feels like a real-time experience.
_____________________________
Micro is edited and curated by Dylan Evers and produced and hosted by Drew Hawkins. Theme song is by Matt Ordes. Follow the show on Twitter at @podcastmicro.
Ada Calhoun is the New York Times–bestselling author of Why We Can’t Sleep, St. Marks Is Dead, Wedding Toasts I’ll Never Give, and Also a Poet: Frank O’Hara, My Father, and Me—featured on the TODAY Show, named one of the best books of 2022 by Oprah Daily and Vogue, and called “molten with soul” in a New York Times rave.
M.M. Kaufman is a fiction writer based in Georgia. She is a Fulbright Scholar and earned an MFA in the University of New Orleans’ Creative Writing Workshop. She is currently the Managing Editor at Rejection Letters and works on the team for Micro Podcast. Her fiction is published with The Normal School, Hobart, Metonym Journal, Sundog Lit, Daily Drunk Mag, (mac)ro(mic), HAD, Olney Magazine, the Miller Aud-cast, Pine Hills Review, and elsewhere. Find her on Twitter @mm_kaufman and on her website mmkaufman.com.
