Writers and Writings: Recent Episodes
Aaron Cline Hanbury
A show about writers, writings, and a little bit of everything else. I’m Aaron Cline Hanbury, and in each episode, I speak with a writer of some variety about his or her work. Or maybe someone else’s work. The point is to chase what’s interesting and good, to find out how writers write, what they learn in the process, and what we can learn, too.
She calls it reading iconically. Which is to say, Jessica Hooten Wilson approaches literature like an icon, an object that itself can be beautiful but points toward something else. That’s what she writes about in The Scandal of Holiness, it’s really what she’s been writing about for years, and that’s what we talked about for today’s conversation.
From the introduction of his new book: “We enter the bookstore, see all the books arrayed there, and think: so many books, so little time; but the truth goes the other way: books do not take time, they give time. They enable us to see the dimensions of life, a gift and a vision that are unavailable to us as we live day to day.” And that’s what we’re talking about today.
Maybe, when you fantasize about your writing life, you picture a quill pen and scrolling parchment. But probably not. More than likely, you think about the machine that still stars in almost every novel and film about writers: the typewriter. In a new book, historian Martyn Lyons looks at the relatively short life of the typewriter and how its most famous users approached their work on the famed machines.
Romanticism gave the writing world its share of luminaries. Poe, Dickinson, Wadsworth. But despite its good reads, the movement also left us some poor assumptions about the nature of writing itself. You know, ideas about those uncontrollable moods of inspiration that end in a great novel. The reality of writing is a lot more, well, unromantic. And simpler.
I like them. I work on them, and I read them. Because there’s a certain magic to the way a magazine is more than just words or just pictures. It’s not just an aesthetic: a magazine can host a whole conversation, bringing ideas big and small, conflicting and complementary into view. That’s what good magazines do. Good magazines like The Point. But it’s not easy. Just ask the magazine’s founding editor.
Picture this: Drawing and writing a full-page, stand-alone comic strip every week, doing commissioned illustrations for children’s books, and publishing more comics in places like the New Yorker, all while working your day job as an orthodontist — and being a father of five. It’s hard to imagine, but actually easy to picture. Because that’s Grant Snider.
There’s a saying that goes like this: The unexamined life is not worth living. Socrates, right? As often as that idea gets batted around, though, the big questions about life — why are we here? what really matters? — seem mainly to go ignored. That’s what the preeminent social critic Os Guinness writes about in his newest book. Which highlights another interesting phenomenon: Searching for answers to the deepest questions almost always centers around reading and, yep, writing.
We really only have two choices: We either go home or we go somewhere else. For a good percentage of educated, upwardly mobile Americans, the default choice seems to be to leave. But why? And, more importantly, what are we leaving behind?
In the pages of America’s papers and magazines, Roosevelt Montás has stirred up a debate. These so-called great books, what do they really offer society? And to which part of society, exactly?
You meet two kinds of readers: Those with a cultish devotion to the writing of Wendell Berry and those who haven’t read it (or read it carefully). Okay, both of those are extremes. But barely.
You’ll hear writers claim to write in order to discover something. Or just to emote. You don’t hear as much about — not with fiction, at least, and not outside scare quotes — storytelling with an agenda, with something to say. But some things need to be said — for example, the preferential algorithm life is dumb — and said in a way that doesn’t just instruct but fires the imagination.
Books end, of course, and most fiction stories, too. But real-life stories don’t. For a writer — particularly the memoirist — this poses questions about where and how a literary project begins and ends.
To talk about food — or to write about it — is to discuss nearly every part of our culture. Geography. History. Economics and politics, too. So when you talk to the author of one of the most acclaimed food histories in recent memory, yeah, you talk about nearly everything.
In the fog of his dad’s suicide, my friend Craig tried to get lost in G.K. Chesterton’s nightmare, The Man Who Was Thursday. Instead, he found his way back to reality.
On TV, only nerds worry about vocabulary and definitions. To fix the crises of truth and trust around us — which is to say, to learn to talk to one another — we all need to become word nerds.
The fun of reading, at least part of it, is the way one book you read plays in your head with other books you’ve read. Just try A Children’s Bible by Lydia Millet. (And then listen to me talk to her about it.)
You know “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” I did, too. What I didn’t know was the man — who happens to share with me a hometown — behind the Black national anthem.
Up until now, the writing of James K.A. Smith has mirrored his teaching. Ideas translated for this audience or that. But with On the Road with Saint Augustine, he’s doing something different.
No writer writes enough. That’s why these two poets initiated an aggressive, substantial project to write an original poem every day.
Introducing Writers and Writings podcast, a show about books, authors, and a little bit of everything else.