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.
In this episode, Mitzi talks to Colum McCann about his new novel, Twist.
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From the episode:
Mitzi Rapkin: I’m curious about your thoughts on what fiction can do. You have a few lines in Twist where your character is questioning what it can do.
Colum McCann: Well, I do think writing is in a place where it’s in a sort of crux. I do think that all arts are at a point where they’ve been being questioned. I do think, for instance, writers were much more important and much more listened to, certainly say in Ireland and places like that years ago, but even in the United States, you think of Joan Didion, and what she had to say was important. And you know Tom Wolfe, and you know all the new journalists who were exploring this new territory. I think writers nowadays, we don’t have such an important place, such an important public place, or public facing place in what goes on. So, I think that we have to work out of a reckless inner need. I do think that the work will constantly be as important, because stories and storytelling are the heart of who we are, and we must tell the stories of what’s happening around us. But certain things have shifted. Technology has shifted us, and that’s not blaming the little machine. I don’t believe in blaming the machine or even the wires themselves. It’s our relationship to the machine and little squirts of dopamine that we allow to be dropped into our head every time we pick up our phone and we follow it along. Now, there are people behind the curtain who are sort of like holding those big vats of dopamine up and sort of laughing maniacally as the rest of us get our little drops of dopamine and we follow what it is that they want us to follow. And I don’t think that’s a conspiracy theory at all. But who’s at fault here? Is it us, or is it the people who have created the availability of this, what is essentially a drug, or is it a combination of these things? Or the outer structures or the governments, or the corporations that are doing all this, or all of the above? And how does the writer then fit into all of this? He assumes novels and plays that they once had a power beyond the power that they have now. Maybe that’s because of his own failings. He’s just a two-time novelist and not a very successful one. And I based him on someone in my head, but, you know, I think that essentially, he is correct when he says, maybe we’re not as powerful, or maybe what we have to say is not as penetrating, as much as how it used to penetrate and now, we have got to work from a reckless inner need.
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Colum McCann is the Dublin-born author of thirteen books. He has won numerous international honors including the U.S National Book Award and an Oscar. His work has been published in over 40 languages. He is the co-founder of Narrative 4, a global non-profit that uses storytelling to build community engagement in schools around the world. His new novel is called Twist.
