{"id":529,"date":"2012-04-25T00:25:44","date_gmt":"2012-04-25T00:25:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.maryrakow.com\/dev\/dev\/?page_id=529"},"modified":"2019-01-04T04:36:18","modified_gmt":"2019-01-04T04:36:18","slug":"interviews","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.maryrakow.com\/dev\/interviews\/","title":{"rendered":"readings &#038; interviews"},"content":{"rendered":"<h3>Readings<\/h3>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"http:\/\/player.vimeo.com\/video\/43000780?color=770000\" width=\"630\" height=\"473\" frameborder=\"0\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Lip Service West and SPAD presents writer Mary Rakow reading a selection from her work at Pegasus Books, Berkeley, CA.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><strong>\u201cLive From Prairie Lights.\u201d <\/strong>(Audio) Reading by Mary Rakow, Q &amp; A with Julie Englander.<br \/>\nUniversity of Iowa; November 18, 2002<br \/>\nWSUI 910 AM. The Writing University and Digital Research &amp; Publishing, University of Iowa.<br \/>\nListen to an mp3 of the interview:<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.maryrakow.com\/dev\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/05\/maryrakow2002.mp3\">Mary Rakow &#8212; Live From Prairie Lights<\/a><\/p>\n<p><a title=\"University of Iowa website\" href=\"http:\/\/digital.lib.uiowa.edu\/u?\/vwu,827\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">link to website\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n<h3>Interviews<\/h3>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\"><strong>&#8220;Three Questions for Mary Rakow,&#8221;\u00a0 <strong>Susan Salter Reynolds.<br \/>\n<\/strong><\/strong><em>The Los Angeles Times<\/em>, June 30, 2002<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\"><strong>Question<\/strong>: How do you compare the private horror of sexual abuse with the very public horror of the Holocaust?<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\"><strong>Answer<\/strong>: For me, to compare the two would come from a desire to place horrors on a kind of grid. It would be an act of cowardice. This kind of measuring dulls compassion, or at least it would in me. And writing&#8211;in fact all art&#8211;can and perhaps must be an act of compassion.<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\"><strong>Q<\/strong>: Do you feel the form of the novel is inadequate to describe the cruelty (and maybe also the beauty) of the world?<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\"><strong>A<\/strong>: Writers work the way that pleases them. You want this congruence between what you put on the page and what exists in your head. And when you&#8217;ve &#8220;nailed it,&#8221; then you feel intense pleasure. I think pleasure drives these things more than statements about the viability or death of certain forms. I did not set out to write a novel that was unusual in form or that engaged in these kinds of questions.<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\">I wrote &#8220;The Memory Room&#8221; so that the ink on the page, when read, was as close as I could get it to how I heard the words in my own head. I read very few novels and I finish even fewer. I mostly read poems. In most novels I&#8217;ve tried reading there is just way too much information compared to the sensation of movement.<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\"><strong>Q<\/strong>: You&#8217;ve said that you are a very &#8220;new&#8221; reader, by which I think you mean reading outside of academia. How has becoming a reader changed your writing?<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\"><strong>A<\/strong>: I only began reading fiction and poetry in my mid-40s, about halfway through &#8220;The Memory Room.&#8221; Now I read all the time. And the new work will form a kind of dialogue with what I read, as it must be for all writers. I am trying to learn, though late in the game, what the domain of the page is. What can happen on the page that cannot happen anywhere else.<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\">It is the moral seriousness of Rakow\u2019s book, as much as the literary inventiveness, that elevates her work to the realm of literature.<br \/>\n\u2013Jonathan Kirsch,\u00a0<em>\u201cArt After Auschwitz,\u201d\u00a0<\/em>The\u00a0Los Angeles Times.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Readings &nbsp; Lip Service West and SPAD presents writer Mary Rakow reading a selection from her work at Pegasus Books, Berkeley, CA. &nbsp; \u201cLive From Prairie Lights.\u201d (Audio) Reading by Mary Rakow, Q &amp; A with Julie Englander. University of Iowa; November 18, 2002 WSUI 910 AM. The Writing University and Digital Research &amp; Publishing, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","template":"template-fullpage.php","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-529","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.maryrakow.com\/dev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/529","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.maryrakow.com\/dev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.maryrakow.com\/dev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.maryrakow.com\/dev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.maryrakow.com\/dev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=529"}],"version-history":[{"count":67,"href":"https:\/\/www.maryrakow.com\/dev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/529\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1300,"href":"https:\/\/www.maryrakow.com\/dev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/529\/revisions\/1300"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.maryrakow.com\/dev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=529"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}