First Draft: A Dialogue of Writing is a weekly show featuring in-depth interviews with fiction, nonfiction, essay writers, and poets, highlighting the voices of writers as they discuss their work, their craft, and the literary arts. Hosted by Mitzi Rapkin, First Draft celebrates creative writing and the individuals who are dedicated to bringing their carefully chosen words to print as well as the impact writers have on the world we live in.
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In this episode, Mitzi talks to Andrew Porter about his new novel, The Imagined Life.
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From the episode:
Mitzi Rapkin: As a writer, I think, you’re working towards a body of work, not just one book. So remembering your short stories while I was reading this novel made me think about tone and voice and subject and how someone’s creativity and craft reflects on their life. And I don’t know if you think about this and how these pieces fit together, or how your style or interests are evolving, but I’m wondering if what I’m saying touches anything in you?
Andrew Porter: Yeah, you know, this is my fourth book, and so really, for the first time, I’ve been getting the question of what do you think unites your books? And so I’ve had to reflect on that a little bit. And there are a lot of connections thematically. And one of the big things that that I came to realize, which maybe should have been obvious to me, is this theme of disappearance. And you know, it’s right there in the very first story of my first short story collection and in many of the stories in that book. It’s in my first novel which is partly about a disappearance. And obviously, my third collection is called The Disappeared. And then this book is about the disappearance of the father, and so I’m not sure what that’s about. In some ways I don’t know that I want to think too deeply about it and try to answer that question, because it’s obviously fueled a lot of fiction, but there’s some preoccupation I have with this idea of people or things disappearing.
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Andrew Porter is the author of four books, including the short story collection The Theory of Light and Matter, which won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, the novel In Between Days, which was a Barnes & Noble “Discover Great New Writers” selection, an IndieBound “Indie Next” selection, and the San Antonio Express News’s “Fictional Work of the Year,” the short story collection The Disappeared, which was longlisted for The Story Prize and the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, and the novel The Imagined Life.