Conversations on community, creativity & craft

I began conducting and then collecting the following radio, online, and print interviews about writing, art and the writing and art life when I accepted the producer/host position in 2005 for WCBN-FM’s Living Writers Show in Ann Arbor, where I’d moved to study for my MFA. I continue to love talking to creative people about their passions and preoccupations. I hope you enjoy!

Live-Broadcast Radio Interviews

The Living Writers Show, WCBN-FM Ann Arbor. Poets & prose writers read from their work and talk about their passions and preoccupations with host-producer, Ashley David. Live broadcasts were engineered by Chaz Berret and aired Wednesdays from 4:30-5:15 p.m. (2005-2007). The roster follows, and recordings of the interviews are provided when available (and as I have time to upload them to the site).

• Uwem Akpan—fiction writer and Jesuit priest from Nigeria—

  

  reads from his work and talks about callings, writing Africa, and the role geography plays in the life a child. (aired:  12/6/06)

  

• Suad Amiry—architect and former Palestinian Minister of Culture—reads from her memoir, Sharon and My Mother-in-law, and talks about the day-to-day of living in the occupied West Bank. (aired:  12/21/05) 

  

• Nicholas Delbanco—novelist, essayist, teacher, and chair of the Hopwood Awards committee—reads from his most recent novel, The Vagabonds, and talks about crafting a writing life, the responsibility of mentorship, and the Avery Hopwood awards and legacy at the University of Michigan. (aired:  2/8/06) 

  

• Robert Hershon—poet, editor, and publisher of Hanging Loose Press—reads from his newest book, Calls from the Outside World, and talks about the absurd, the fabulous, politics, Brooklyn, and Rosemary Clooney, and making poems, among other things… (aired:  4/26/06) 
• Richard Rhodes—Pulitzer prize-winning author—reads from his most recent book, John James Audubon: The Making of an American and talks about birds, conservation, expansion, the making of a country, and nuclear disarmament. (aired:  5/3/06) 

  

• Ari Weinzweig—food & business writer and founding partner of Zingerman’s Community of Businesses—reads from his Guide to Good Eating and talks about globalization, consumption, community…and of course, American food. (aired:  3/29/06)
• Colson Whitehead—MacArthur Fellowship and Whiting Award recipient and Pulitzer Prize finalist—reads from his newest book, Apex Hides the Hurt, and talks about snakes, beetles, co-conspirators, and the color line. (aired:  4/19/06)
• David Wojahn—poet—reads from his work and discusses regionalism and the location of literary heart, the difference between Junior Parker and Elvis, and the implications of gussying up the plain and painful. (aired:  2/7/07)

P.S. The show is still alive and well and currently hosted by T Hetzel. You can listen live on WCBN-FM or subscribe to the podcasts on iTunes.

Online Text-based Interviews

• In February 2012, I was profiled for The University of Georgia’s “Amazing Students” column on UGA.EDU. Check it out here.

  

• Sean Hill, poet and author of Blood Ties & Brown Liquor, and I chatted by email in the early months of 2011 about his work plus origins, wanderings, reconciliation, and the evolution of a student-run multicultural journal—in the Reconciliation issue of Mandala Journal. Check it out here.
• José Romelo Lagman, photographer, and I chatted by email in April 2010 about rooted cosmopolitanism for Mandala Journal Blog. Check it out here. And, while you’re at it, check out his photo-essay, “Rooted Cosmopolitanism.”