December 2000 
An Interview with Stanley Plumly
Jeffrey Greene
This interview was conducted on October 30, 1999 at a sparsely furnished, one-room apartment that Stanley Plumly uses for writing. The apartment has two desks, each with a typewriter. The one he reserves for poetry is set in the middle of the room, facing a large picture window with a ninth-floor view over the trees and tall buildings in prosperous Bethesda , Maryland.
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Cry, Cry, Cry: Handling Emotion in Fiction Writing
Debra Spark
Last October, I gave birth to my first child. In the months before my son was born, my writer friends-my female writer friends-uncheerily warned me about what motherhood would mean for my literary future, telling me, first, of course, that I'd never find time to write. And, too, that I'd never find time to read, unless I didn't mind, say, propping a book on my son's head while I nursed him, and even then I could count on being too overwhelmed for that particular gymnastic feat.
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An Infinity of Traces
Dave Mura
It started with an oration. On a bench overlooking the mall of the University of Minnesota campus, in a place where I'd heard many such hyperactive speeches, I ranted about the marginality of poetry, its neglect by the masses and even by most educated people. I talked about the suicides of poets, Berryman off the bridge, the attrition and heart attack of Delmore Schwartz, dying alone in a New York fleabag hotel. If this was the fate of one of my literary heroes, who would ever read my poems? I asked. Or care that I wrote them?
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Self-Censorship & the Alternatives
André Schiffrin
I recently attended a meeting of the Freedom to Read Committee of the American Association of Publishers, the industry's official anticensorship group to which I belonged on and off over the years.
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Daddy, Daddy, You Bastard, or the Art of Being Influenced
William Greenway
Everyone thinks that literary influence is a good thing, and it is, up to a point. As Harold Bloom points out in The Anxiety of Influence, we're inevitably influenced by our favorite writers; they made us want to start writing in the first place. We imitate our favorites, and then we take what they give us forward into our own new artistic life, hopefully leaving behind the idiosyncrasies that made our mentor unique, but in our work would be only bad habit or parody.
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An Interview with Ann Beattie
Michelle Scarff
Ann Beattie grew up in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. and earned a BA from the American University and an MA from the University of Connecticut. In 1976, she simultaneously published her first novel, Chilly Scenes of Winter, and her first collection of short stories, Distortions. In total, she has published seven novels, including Picturing Will (1990) and Another You (1995), and six collections of short stories, including The Burning House (1982), What Was Mine (1991), and Park City: New and Selected Stories (1998).
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The Emergency Kit of J.G. Ballard
Ando Arike
When Princess Diana died in 1997, sparking a world-wide media frenzy that indelibly imprinted that wrecked Mercedes in the minds of millions around the globe, Salman Rushdie commented in The New Yorker: "It has all been so disturbingly novelistic, and the novel I'm thinking of isn't a fairy tale, although Diana's story did begin like a fairy tale, nor is it a soap opera, although goodness knows the long saga of the battling Windsors has been sudsy enough. I'm thinking of J.G. Ballard's Crash... "
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