Being Patient and Indulgent w. GARTH GREENWELL

Episode 10

Garth Greenwell is the author of What Belongs to You, which won the British Book Award for Debut of the Year, was longlisted for the National Book Award, and was a finalist for six other awards, including the PEN/Faulkner Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice, it was named a Best Book of 2016 by over fifty publications in nine countries, and is being translated into eleven languages. His short fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, A Public Space, and VICE, and he has written criticism for the New Yorker, the London Review of Books, and the New York Times Book Review, among others. He lives in Iowa City.

Discussed In This Episode

Our relationship to language. The codes of cruising. Writing a novel one sentence at a time. 4:15 a.m. alarms and the anchor of a daily writing practice. Composing by hand versus on a computer. "Be patient and be indulgent." Loving long sentences and other writerly eccentricities. Triangulating for the right expression. Standing, moving and speaking with your sentences. Desire. "I think the gains made by queer people have been made, to a very great extent, by sort of keeping people from thinking about men having anal sex." Economic anxiety. "The idea that I could write something and someone would pay me for it—I still don't really believe that." MFA cynicism. Finding an agent.

Being Patient and Indulgent w. GARTH GREENWELL

Episode 10

Discussed In This Episode

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