Erin Slaughter interviews Dan O'Brien. Topics include: Sewanee, Scarsdale, formative trauma, community in theater, confessional poets, a creative marriage, confession and ethics, being disowned, Dan's new books A SURVIVOR'S NOTEBOOK, FROM SCARSDALE, and TRUE STORY, spiritualism, ghosts, the here and now, and more.
On today's episode of The Lives of Writers, Erin Slaughter interviews Dan O'Brien.
Dan O’Brien is a playwright, poet, and essayist whose books include the poetry collection Our Cancers and the nonfiction work A Story That Happens. His newest poetry collection, A Survivor’s Notebook, is out today from Acre Books. And both his lyrical memoir From Scarsdale: A Childhood and a new collection of plays, True Story: A Trilogy, are out next week from Dalkey Archive Press.
Erin Slaughter is the author of the short story collection A Manual for How to Love Us and the poetry collections The Sorrow Festival, and I Will Tell This Story to the Sun Until You Realize That You Are the Sun. She is the managing editor of Autofocus and was formerly the editor/co-founder of literary journal and chapbook press The Hunger. Her writing has appeared in Lit Hub, Electric Literature, CRAFT, The Rumpus, Prairie Schooner, Split Lip Magazine, and elsewhere
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PART ONE, topics include:
-- arriving once again at Sewanee
-- growing up in Scarsdale as a reader & writer
-- formative trauma and OCD
-- finding community in the theater
-- writing recent plays in poetic style
-- being disowned
-- confessional poetry and the impulse to write
-- the benefits of being a multi-genre writer
-- a background in comedy
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PART TWO, topics include:
-- a creative marriage with the actress Jessica St. Clair
-- confession and ethics and deletion
-- growing up in an abusive household
-- Scarsdale as a psychological more than geographical place
-- knowing or not knowing if family is reading your work
-- ironically fulfilling a myth
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PART THREE, topics include:
-- Dan's new poetry book A Survivor's Notebook
-- Dan's previous poetry book Our Cancers
-- loss of language and fragmentation
-- poetry and spiritualism
-- ghosts and the richness of belief
-- turning toward a deeper interest in the here and now
-- telling true stories
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Podcast theme music provided by Mike Nagel, author of Duplex. Here's more of his project: Yeah Yeah Cool Cool.
The Lives of Writers is edited and produced by Michael Wheaton.