By: Powell's Staff,
on 12/12/2014
Few topics are more contentious at Powell's than agreeing on the "best" works of fiction. Our tastes run the gamut from experimental tragicomedies to multi-generational sagas to offbeat coming-of-age tales to surreal character studies... and so on. As such, rather than present selections from one perspective, we thought it wise to get a more representative [...]
By: Tom Spanbauer,
on 4/11/2014
Tell us about the places you have written. The actual place where you set up your writing desk. Were there windows you looked out of? What did you see? Faraway Places was written at 211 East Fifth Street, Apt. 1A, in Manhattan. My apartment was a studio about nine feet wide and not a lot [...]
By: Tom Spanbauer,
on 4/10/2014
In my novel, In the City of Shy Hunters, there were so many dead friends to write about. There's a line in Shy Hunters: "It's the responsibility of the survivor to tell the story." As I was writing the book, I felt the wisdom of that line very keenly. And since I was the one [...]
By: Tom Spanbauer,
on 4/9/2014
What for you is the relationship between writing and death? Not just literal death but dying emotionally, psychologically, spiritually. Dying to one's own ego, dying to what's allowed and what's forbidden. Writing about the dead and bringing them back to life through writing? I'll try to answer this part of the question: What is it [...]
By: Tom Spanbauer,
on 4/8/2014
You write about things that are deep and painful. Do you emotionally relive the painful feelings and experiences? Does the process of writing your novels bring pain or relieve it? I write about things that make us human. There is a great Zen saying that goes: when you meet someone, look them closely in the [...]
By: Tom Spanbauer,
on 4/7/2014
If you could dispense with a single point of advice/wisdom to a new but promising writer, what would it be? And why? Your best friend is in town and you haven't seen him or her in years. You have something very profound that has happened to you that your friend does not know about yet. [...]
By: Gigi Little,
on 3/28/2014
No one is better than Tom Spanbauer at exposing the hidden pain inside us. In I Loved You More, he reaches even deeper, plumbing the terror of death, love, AIDS, cancer, propinquity, and the complex business of being a man in the world. Books mentioned in this post Portland Noir (Akashic Noir) Kevin Sampsell Used [...]
