TS 6: First Day of School
Hosted by Jaime Clarke

Guests

Susan Cheever is the author of twelve books including five novels, two biographies and four memoirs; she is working on a book about addiction and on a biography of Louisa May Alcott, and she teaches at the Bennington Writing Seminars and at the New School.

Rachel Kadish is the author of the novels From a Sealed Room and Tolstoy Lied: a Love Story, as well as numerous short stories and essays. She has been a fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts and a writer-in-residence at Stanford University. She currently teaches writing in Lesley University’s MFA program. Visit her at www.rachelkadish.com.

Daphne Kalotay is the author of Calamity and Other Stories, which was short listed for the 2005 Story Prize and includes work from Missouri Review, Prairie Schooner, AGNI, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Literary Review and Good Housekeeping. She lives in Brookline, MA. Visit her at www.daphnekalotay.com.

Mameve Medwed (named for two grandmothers, Mamie and Eva) is the author of the novels, Mail, Host Family, The End of an Error, How Elizabeth Barrett Browning Saved My Life, (2007 Massachusetts Honor award for Fiction) and the forthcoming Of Men and Their Mothers. Her stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in Yankee, Boston Globe, Missouri Review, Newsday and The Washington Post. Born in Bangor, Maine, she lives in Cambridge. Visit her at www.mamevemedwed.com.

Hannah Tinti is the editor of One Story magazine. Her short story collection, Animal Crackers, has sold in fifteen countries, and was a runner-up for the Pen/Hemingway award. She recently completed a novel about graverobbers that will be published in July 2008. Visit her at www.hannahtinti.com.

Vendela Vida is the author of two novels, Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name and And Now You Can Go. Her first book, Girls on the Verge, was a journalistic study of female initiation rituals in America. She is the a co-editor of The Believer magazine, the editor of The Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers, and a founding board member and teacher at 826 Valencia, a nonprofit youth writing lab.


––When and where was your first day of school?

Cheever: My first day of school was sometime in the 1940s when there were still dinosaurs in Central Park and all the men wore hats and some of them were still in uniform from W.W. II, which had ended recently. It was a nursery school called Walt Whitman that my bohemian parents (in those days that meant left wing, not hailing from a province of Czechoslovakia) thought was cool—although they wouldn't have used that word either. Did we even speak English back then?