COLUMNS
Talk Show 27 with Daphne Beal, Charles Bock, Emily Chenoweth, John McNally, Irina Reyn and Peter Trachtenberg
/ Jaime Clarke
07.02.09
TALK SHOW 27: PAST INTO PRESENT
Daphne Beal's first novel In the Land of No Right Angles, was published by Vintage/Anchor Books in August. Her fiction has appeared in Open City and The Mississippi Review, and she has published nonfiction in Vogue, McSweeney's, and the New York Times Magazine. Her essay on Wisconsin was recently included in State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America. Visit Daphne at www.daphnebeal.com.
Charles Bock is the author of the New York Times bestselling novel Beautiful Children. Visit Charles at www.beautifulchildren.net
Emily Chenoweth is the author of the novel Hello Goodbye. A former fiction editor at Publishers Weekly, her work has appeared in Tin House, Bookforum, the anthology The Friend Who Got Away, and various and sundry other publications. Visit Emily at www.emilychenoweth.com.
John McNally’s most recent book is Ghosts of Chicago, a collection of short stories. He is also the author of another collection, Troublemakers, and two novels The Book of Ralph and America’s Report Card. He’s edited six anthologies, most recently Who Can Save Us Now?: Brand-new Superheroes and Their Amazing (Short) Stories (with Owen King), and published over fifty short stories, three of which have received citations in Best American Short Stories. A Chicago native, he is an Associate Professor of English at Wake Forest University in North Carolina.
Irina Reyn’s first novel What Happened to Anna K., published in August 2008, will be out in paperback this May. She is also the editor of the anthology, Living on the Edge of the World: New Jersey Writers Take On the Garden State. She teaches writing at the University of Pittsburgh and divides her time between Pittsburgh and Brooklyn. Visit Irina at www.irinareyn.com
Peter Trachtenberg is the author of 7 Tattoos: A Memoir in the Flesh and The Book of Calamities: Five Questions About Suffering and Its Meaning. The latter combines journalism, moral philosophy, and personal essay to explore the way that individuals and societies try to make sense of sickness, war, injustice, and loss. He’s the winner of a Whiting Writer’s Award, an artist’s fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Nelson Algren Award for Short Fiction. He currently teaches creative writing at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. Visit Peter at www.petertrachtenberg.com
––Name something from the past that you’d like to bring into the present.
Beal: Chuckwagons.
Bock: The automat. I don’t know if you remember these: but they started in the fifties and ran through the seventies. Basically it’s a cafeteria where all the food is inside machines. You put a dollar in the machine and a slotted door opens and behind the slot is a sandwich, or an apple, or what have you.
Chenoweth: I’m an indecisive person, and I couldn’t pick just one thing to bring back. So here are a few: 1.) the art of letter writing, 2.) extended family households, and 3.) the wooly mammoth.
McNally: It’s high time for the typewriter to come back into vogue, much as the turntable and albums have slowly been creeping back. I learned to type on a cast-iron Royal typewriter from the mid-1940s, a machine that’s heavy enough to kill someone with even a gentle whack to the head. I bought mine at a flea market in the 1970s when I was in grade school. My next typewriter was an electric Smith-Corona, the kind where you pop the big ribbon cartridge in and out from the side of it. A few years ago, a friend mailed to me an IBM Selectric, which sounds like a machine-gun when you type fast on it.
Reyn: This is more of a concept from the past (1970s and 1980s) and it’s only real in the cinematic sense: I would like to yank a dinner party out of one of Woody Allen’s movies and attend it in the present day.
Daphne Beal's first novel In the Land of No Right Angles, was published by Vintage/Anchor Books in August. Her fiction has appeared in Open City and The Mississippi Review, and she has published nonfiction in Vogue, McSweeney's, and the New York Times Magazine. Her essay on Wisconsin was recently included in State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America. Visit Daphne at www.daphnebeal.com.
Charles Bock is the author of the New York Times bestselling novel Beautiful Children. Visit Charles at www.beautifulchildren.net
Emily Chenoweth is the author of the novel Hello Goodbye. A former fiction editor at Publishers Weekly, her work has appeared in Tin House, Bookforum, the anthology The Friend Who Got Away, and various and sundry other publications. Visit Emily at www.emilychenoweth.com.
John McNally’s most recent book is Ghosts of Chicago, a collection of short stories. He is also the author of another collection, Troublemakers, and two novels The Book of Ralph and America’s Report Card. He’s edited six anthologies, most recently Who Can Save Us Now?: Brand-new Superheroes and Their Amazing (Short) Stories (with Owen King), and published over fifty short stories, three of which have received citations in Best American Short Stories. A Chicago native, he is an Associate Professor of English at Wake Forest University in North Carolina.
Irina Reyn’s first novel What Happened to Anna K., published in August 2008, will be out in paperback this May. She is also the editor of the anthology, Living on the Edge of the World: New Jersey Writers Take On the Garden State. She teaches writing at the University of Pittsburgh and divides her time between Pittsburgh and Brooklyn. Visit Irina at www.irinareyn.com
Peter Trachtenberg is the author of 7 Tattoos: A Memoir in the Flesh and The Book of Calamities: Five Questions About Suffering and Its Meaning. The latter combines journalism, moral philosophy, and personal essay to explore the way that individuals and societies try to make sense of sickness, war, injustice, and loss. He’s the winner of a Whiting Writer’s Award, an artist’s fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Nelson Algren Award for Short Fiction. He currently teaches creative writing at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. Visit Peter at www.petertrachtenberg.com
––Name something from the past that you’d like to bring into the present.
Beal: Chuckwagons.
Bock: The automat. I don’t know if you remember these: but they started in the fifties and ran through the seventies. Basically it’s a cafeteria where all the food is inside machines. You put a dollar in the machine and a slotted door opens and behind the slot is a sandwich, or an apple, or what have you.
Chenoweth: I’m an indecisive person, and I couldn’t pick just one thing to bring back. So here are a few: 1.) the art of letter writing, 2.) extended family households, and 3.) the wooly mammoth.
McNally: It’s high time for the typewriter to come back into vogue, much as the turntable and albums have slowly been creeping back. I learned to type on a cast-iron Royal typewriter from the mid-1940s, a machine that’s heavy enough to kill someone with even a gentle whack to the head. I bought mine at a flea market in the 1970s when I was in grade school. My next typewriter was an electric Smith-Corona, the kind where you pop the big ribbon cartridge in and out from the side of it. A few years ago, a friend mailed to me an IBM Selectric, which sounds like a machine-gun when you type fast on it.
Reyn: This is more of a concept from the past (1970s and 1980s) and it’s only real in the cinematic sense: I would like to yank a dinner party out of one of Woody Allen’s movies and attend it in the present day.
