{"id":84685,"date":"2015-04-10T12:38:40","date_gmt":"2015-04-10T16:38:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=84685"},"modified":"2015-04-10T13:01:43","modified_gmt":"2015-04-10T17:01:43","slug":"people-and-rooms-an-interview-with-gail-godwin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/04\/10\/people-and-rooms-an-interview-with-gail-godwin\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cPeople and Rooms\u201d: An Interview with Gail Godwin"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/unS82kGiUKE?rel=0\" width=\"600\" height=\"338\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>At <a href=\"http:\/\/92yondemand.org\/Topic\/poetry-center-online\/\">92Y\u2019s Unterberg Poetry Center<\/a>, <em>The Paris Review<\/em> has copresented an occasional series of live conversations with writers\u2014many of which have formed the foundations of interviews in the quarterly. Recently, 92Y and <em>The Paris Review<\/em> have made recordings of these interviews available at <a href=\"http:\/\/92yondemand.org\/Topic\/paris-review-series\/\">92Y\u2019s Poetry Center Online<\/a> and here at\u00a0<em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/92y\">The Paris Review<\/a><\/em>. Consider them deleted scenes from our Writers at Work interviews, or directors\u2019 cuts, or surprisingly lifelike radio adaptations.<\/p>\n<p>This week we\u2019re rolling out the four latest editions to the collection: <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/audio\/6026\/92y-emthe-paris-review-em-interview-series-horton-foote-horton-foote\" target=\"_blank\"><strong>Horton Foote<\/strong><\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/audio\/6024\/92y-emthe-paris-review-em-interview-series-gail-godwin-gail-godwin\" target=\"_blank\"><strong>Gail Godwin<\/strong><\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/audio\/6025\/92y-emthe-paris-review-em-interview-series-reynolds-price-richard-price\" target=\"_blank\"><strong>Reynolds<\/strong> <strong>Price<\/strong><\/a>, and <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/audio\/6027\/92y-emthe-paris-review-em-interview-series-tony-kushner-tony-kushner\" target=\"_blank\"><strong>Tony Kushner<\/strong><\/a>. All are Southerners, and as coincidence would have it, we\u2019re just in time for the 150th anniversary of Lee\u2019s surrender at Appomattox Court House and the end of the Civil War, on April 9. <!--more--><\/p>\n<p>Today, the last of our four Southerners: a conversation between <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/audio\/6024\/92y-emthe-paris-review-em-interview-series-gail-godwin-gail-godwin\" target=\"_blank\"><strong>Gail Godwin<\/strong><\/a> and <strong>John Irving <\/strong>from April 4, 1986. Godwin touches on her approach to trends in storytelling, or her careful distance from those trends:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>I like to think of people \u2026 one hundred years from now reading my books and thinking, Well, they did things a little archaically back then, but they\u2019re very similar \u2026 so yes, I am timeless, though contemporary \u2026 I like to spread myself out, I like to describe people and rooms, plot. I don\u2019t like to write novels about gray people floating through the mall and you only can decipher who they are through the brand of their tennis shoes \u2026 That\u2019s the fad now. When I was in college at Chapel Hill, the fad was, you had to write a story about old granny sitting on the porch and remembering the past \u2026 I came back to the Iowa Workshop and everyone was writing a story about a story that was writing a story that was writing a story \u2026 And I don\u2019t choose to do that either. In that sense I\u2019m very old-fashioned, and also ahead of the times.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>You can also check out some previous installments of the 92Y series: <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/11\/20\/the-poets-speak\/\">the poets<\/a> (<strong>Maya Angelou<\/strong>, <strong>Denise Levertov<\/strong>, and <strong>Gary Snyder<\/strong>) and <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/03\/24\/take-a-mental-vacation-listen-to-travel-writers\/\">the travel writers<\/a> (<strong>Paul Theroux<\/strong>, <strong>Jan Morris<\/strong>, and <strong>Peter Matthiessen<\/strong>).<\/p>\n<p>We are able to share these recordings thanks to a generous gift in memory of Christopher Lightfoot Walker, longtime friend of the Poetry Center and <i>The Paris Review<\/i>.<\/p>\n<p><em>Dan Piepenbring is the web editor of <\/em>The Paris Review.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>At 92Y\u2019s Unterberg Poetry Center, The Paris Review has copresented an occasional series of live conversations with writers\u2014many of which have formed the foundations of interviews in the quarterly. Recently, 92Y and The Paris Review have made recordings of these interviews available at 92Y\u2019s Poetry Center Online and here at\u00a0The Paris Review. Consider them deleted [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":38,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7646],"tags":[11557,16112,17697,5227,17729,12365,1132,7446,173,7221,165,14627,16536,17696,10113],"class_list":["post-84685","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-look-2","tag-92y","tag-92y-ungerberg-poetry-center","tag-appomattox","tag-audio","tag-gail-godwin","tag-interview-series","tag-interviews","tag-john-irving","tag-north-carolina","tag-poems","tag-poetry","tag-recordings","tag-southern-writers","tag-southerners","tag-writers-at-work"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v25.4 (Yoast SEO v25.4) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Listen: An Archival Interview with Gail Godwin<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"In this 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