“What a thing! To see with our own eyes into the honest self of another!”
Elizabeth Strout, “Elizabeth Strout on Judith Joy Ross’s ‘breathtaking’ photography,” FT Magazine, March 11, 2022.
How do we become aware of class in America?
“Always, I have wondered: What does it feel like to be another person? This question is the furnace behind my work. But when you write about people, you are writing about class. Time and place in history determine a great deal, and if you consider place to be a place in society, then that shapes a life, as well.”
How do we become aware of class in America? Elizabeth Strout, Washington Post, August 28, 2017
The Guardian: "My writing day"
“I am a very messy worker – I push these scenes around our table. It is a big table, and over time I realise which scenes are connected. I have never written anything from beginning to end, not a story or a novel. I just collect different scenes, and the ones that aren’t any good to me, get slipped on to the floor and eventually into the wastebasket.”
Elizabeth Strout, "My writing day: Elizabeth Strout: ‘I have never written anything from beginning to end’"
The Guardian, March 4, 2017
On Writing Olive Kitteridge
“I am always interested in the fact that in small communities people believe they know each other, and yet they know only a sliver of that person. It fascinates me to think of the point of view of every person being different.”
Waterstones bookshops in the UK has selected Olive Kitteridge as their Fiction Book of the Month for August. They invited me to write a little something on writing Olive Kitteridge for their blog. So there it is!
WE - Women for Expo: "Poetry is my Food"
“All my life, I have been struck again and again with the fact that poets seem to know things that we others don’t and that what they give us, if we can receive it, is a truth that relieves the depth of our natural aloneness.”
For WE - Women for Expo's Novel of the World, a brief essay on the theme of feeding and nourishment, "Poetry is my Food."