OUTLAWS WITH TYPEWRITERS

E. L. Doctorow, author of "Ragtime," "Billy Bathgate," and "The March," discusses "Outlaw writers and the Novel Form." What's the deal with writers? Sure, some are placid tea-drinking creatures who quietly do their work--academics in their cubby holes--but an inordinate number are runaway trains, volatile drunkards, dope addicts, pugilists itching for a fight, misanthropes of various stripes, blowhards with guns, egotists, religious fanatics, trainspotters, and dark, tortured depressives powering through the eternal midnight of the soul. I'm just kidding. That's a myth. Still, there might be something to the myth of the writer in extremis.


The Doctorow interview in its entirety. (For Doctorow's brilliant defense of "the Arts" please read previous post here)


Steve Almond, author of "Candyfreak," "My Life in Heavy Metal" and other dangerous books, speaks at Aquinas College in 2008. He read and taught at a writers' workshop I attended this summer, and was hilarious and strange and unpredictable. Read a Steve Almond essay here.