First Draft: A Dialogue of Writing is a weekly show featuring in-depth interviews with fiction, nonfiction, essay writers, and poets, highlighting the voices of writers as they discuss their work, their craft, and the literary arts. Hosted by Mitzi Rapkin, First Draft celebrates creative writing and the individuals who are dedicated to bringing their carefully chosen words to print as well as the impact writers have on the world we live in.
In this episode, Mitzi talks to Peter Orner about his new novel, The Gossip Columnist’s Daughter.
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From the episode:
Mitzi Rapkin: Chicago is such a part of almost all of your writing. I think for your character too, these childhood moments are just indelible in our brain. I’m curious about how you articulate the impact of your childhood in Chicago and how that comes out in your work again and again. It’s such a love affair with the place, but it’s also a love affair with who we were and how we thought of the world as children.
Peter Orner: I left Chicago for college when I was, whatever age that was, 17,18. I went back a few times when I don’t know, things were falling apart in my life, and I’d come home and I’d wait tables, and then I’d leave again. I haven’t been there full time since I was in my early 20s. But, you know, I think we all carry those places around like a mythical sense. And, you know I love the idea of just doubling down on a place so intensely. I teach a class at Dartmouth, one book class on Ulysses, which maybe sounds a little pretentious, but it’s the least pretentious book in the world. Actually, it’s just a joke. It’s an extended joke and a love song, to where James Joyce can’t be. You know, he did go back a few times to Ireland in his life, but mostly he lived outside of it. But as part of that recreation, he would do things like write to his brother, Stanislaus and ask , there’s a fence in front of a house on Eckles Street, I need you to go measure that fence, and I also need you to go see if it’s climbable, because that’s what Leopold Bloom does at the end of the book. He climbs over the fence because he doesn’t have his key. And so that kind of obsessiveness, I sort of learned from him as a kind of a beautiful way of doing research and trying just to be really specific, not to prove anything, but just because.
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Peter Orner is the author of seven acclaimed books including Maggie Brown & Others, Love and Shame and Love, Esther Stories, finalist for the Pen/ Hemingway Award, and Am I Alone Here?, finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, the Paris Review, Best American Stories, and been awarded four Pushcart Prizes. A former Guggenheim fellow and recipient of the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Orner is chair of the English and Creative Writing Department at Dartmouth College. He lives with his family in Vermont, where he’s also a volunteer firefighter.
First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing
First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing is a literary podcast produced and hosted by Mitzi Rapkin. Each episode features an in-depth interview with a fiction, non-fiction, essay, or poetry writer. The show is equal parts investigation into the craft of writing and conversation about the topics of an author’s work.
