paperpools

I was recently interviewed by Jeremy Kitchen and Michael Sack for Eye 94 Radio (105.5 FM in Chicago), Lumpen Radio's books and literature program. Shortly before the interview began I got a call from someone at the studio to run through things that should not be said on air (basically various bad words, which would be tricky to bleep out).  This helpful person reminded me that this would be a live show, not a podcast.

If I had been writing my replies for an email interview, for example, I would probably have edited them down for brevity and coherence, but instead (in my memory, at least) I babbled madly on.  I've now been sent a link to a recording; needless to say, I can't bring myself to listen to it.  Still, what's done is done.  YOU can listen to it here.

The Paris Review has commissioned a series of video interviews with authors talking about their first book.  Tom Bean and Luke Poling came up to my cottage in Vermont back in March to talk to me about The Last Samurai; the video is now up here.

What do you think about hair dye?
Hm. When I got to Berlin I would go to this or that Frisür with the idea of having some highlights, and the hairdressers would try to persuade me to include brown highlights as looking more natural. Every time I would get dragged into a discussion of the Natural. I slightly felt that the Natural could be mine without recourse to a hairdresser, by the simple expedient of leaving the hair to its own devices. My German is not really up to discussions of the Natural and the Artificial, though, let alone the Natural as understood by early 21st century German hairdressers.

Emily Segal invited me to give an interview for Berlin Fashion Week way back in late 2009/early 2010. I was staying with my mother, but for a couple of days every so often I would go to my sister's apartment and collapse on the bed. (The theory was that I would pull together 100 pages for Bill, but there was no energy.)  In the midst of all this, anyway, I was trying to write answers to interview questions.  The feeling was of writing with a prosthetic head. I finally apologised for what struck me as a dead loss; was under the impression that ES agreed and had dropped the piece, but now I find it is online.  For better or worse, here.

(There are authors who never give interviews, and then there are authors, it seems, who never stop giving them.)

Interview with Mitzi Akaha in Axiom Magazine.

I gave an e-interview to Mike Lee a while back for his website, GGGOZU.COM. His photographer turned up shortly before the Elevenses at Three at McNally-Jackson. The whole thing here.