Lena Crown interviews Richard Scott Larson. Topics include: blocking out time, writing as a critic, an early interest in horror, a crisis of fiction, memoir vs book-length essay, the new memoir THE LONG HALLWAY, visibility, hiding queerness, masks, Michael Myers/Halloween, loneliness and observation, film form, fear and shame, and more.
On today's episode of The Lives of Writers, Lena Crown interviews Richard Scott Larson.
Richard Scott Larson is the author of the memoir The Long Hallway (UW Press). He has received fellowships from MacDowell and the New York Foundation for the Arts, and his creative and critical work has appeared in The Sun Magazine, Los Angeles Review of Books, Harvard Review, and other journals and anthologies.
Lena Crown is a book editor for us at Autofocus Books. Her essays are published or forthcoming in The Rumpus, Guernica, Gulf Coast, Narratively, North American Review, The Offing, and elsewhere, and her poems have appeared in Bellevue Literary Review, The Boiler, Poet Lore, No Contact, and Variant Lit.
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Full conversation topics include:
-- blocking out time to write
-- doing residencies
-- horror movies and mass-market fiction as a kid
-- writing as a critic and with the NBCC
-- the role of film in his life and the book
-- a crisis of fiction
-- memoir vs book-length essay
-- the new memoir THE LONG HALLWAY
-- gender, sexuality, and horror
-- visibility and hiding queerness
-- masks and Michael Myers in Halloween
-- horror tropes appearing in memoir
-- loneliness and observation
-- film form
-- fear and shame
-- the Midwestern suburbs
-- epiphany, revelation, and resolution (or lack of)
-- examining our own cruelties
-- writing about family
-- the next book and gymnasts
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Podcast theme music by Mike Nagel, author of Duplex and Culdesac. Here's his music project: Yeah Yeah Cool Cool.
The Lives of Writers is edited and produced by Michael Wheaton, author of Home Movies.