Interviews from the Edge: 50 Years of Conversations about Writing and Resistance

Interviews from the Edge presents a selection of conversations, drawn from 50 years of the international journal New Orleans Review, that dive head-first into the most enduring aesthetic and social concerns of the last half century.


From reflections on the making of literature and films to personal accounts of writing inside racial divides and working against capital punishment, the writers, poets, and activists featured in this book offer not only a fresh perspective on our present struggles but also perhaps a way through them -- for writers and readers alike.

Interviewees include: Ernest J. Gaines, Joseph Heller, Christopher Isherwood, Anaïs Nin, Lina Wertmüller, Bertrand Tavernier, Eudora Welty, James Tate, Jorge Luis Borges, Catharine Stimpson, Carolyn Heilbrun, Armando Valladares, James Baldwin, John Ashbery, Valerie Martin, Jack Gilbert, Sheila Heti, Susan Bernofsky, Francine Prose, Harold Jaffe, Yuri Herrera, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Luisa Valenzuela, and Sister Helen Prejean.

"I think it's frightfully important, and this is really much more difficult than it sounds, only to say what you absolutely believe." --Christopher Isherwood

"Most American writers probably do not think of their writing as a kind of activism. And it shouldn't have to be-I don't think we can impose that on writers-but it can be. I think for many writers, the ones I admire-it is." --Viet Thanh Nguyen

"Do you become a writer because you desire to become famous and make a lot of money? Or do you become a writer because there's something you discovered, this spark, this flash, that you want to share with other human beings knowing that they can enter into the words too?" --Sister Helen Prejean

"The hardest part of developing a style is that you have to learn to trust your voice. If I thought of my style, I'd be crippled. Somebody else said to me a long time ago in France, 'Find out what you can do, and then don't do it.'" --James Baldwin

"As I have grown older, I have come to see that the romantic notion of the outsider in love with death doesn't solve a thing. It only makes life worse. We have to find ways to create communities." --Valerie Martin

Mark Yakich is Gregory F. Curtin, S.J. Distinguished Professor of English at Loyola University New Orleans, USA, where he is Director of the Center for Editing & Publishing. He is the author of many poetry collections, including Unrelated Individuals Forming a Group Waiting to Cross (2004), The Importance of Peeling Potatoes in Ukraine (2008), and Spiritual Exercises (2019), all from Penguin Books. His unconventional guide to reading and writing poems, Poetry: A Survivor's Guide (2nd Ed., Bloomsbury, 2022), is taught worldwide.

John Biguenet is the Robert Hunter Distinguished University Professor at Loyola University New Orleans, USA. He has published ten books, including Oyster, a novel, and The Torturer's Apprentice: Stories, as well as The Rising Water Trilogy: Plays and Silence (Bloomsbury, 2015). Six of his plays have been produced nationally and internationally. An O. Henry Award winner for short fiction and past president of the American Literary Translators Association, he worked as a student intern on the first issue of New Orleans Review in 1968 and edited the magazine from 1980 to 1992.