Rick Moody (with Francis Ford Coppola and William Kennedy)

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.

The filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola and the novelist William Kennedy—author of Ironweed and founder of the New York State Writers Institute—worked together in the 1980s on Coppola’s film The Cotton Club, a crime epic. In 2019, Coppola traveled to Albany, New York, to screen The Cotton Club for the New York State Writers Institute, and to speak with Bill Kennedy about filmmaking. In this episode, we’ll hear Coppola and Kennedy at that event.

At one point, Coppola mentions that he was inspired to bring an unfinished Apocalypse Now to the Cannes Film Festival—where it ended up winning the Palme D’Or—by James Joyce’s publication of parts of Finnegans Wake with the title “Work in Progress. “My idea,” Coppola says, “was to go to Cannes with the unfinished Apocalypse Now: Work in Progress. And I just wanted to show it so that they would stop imagining what a disaster it was. And then, surprisingly, we won the prize with it.”

Rick Moody, whose novel The Ice Storm was adapted into an Ang Lee film, listens in to that archival tape of Coppola’s conversation with Kennedy, and he talks about bringing his own work into the world through different media. From Coppola to Kennedy to Moody, we hear a similar openness to trying out new things. Moody says, of his own work, “It’s not about Rick Moody explicating Rick Moody’s experience—not at all. It’s me being a vessel for language doing what language wants to do.”