COLUMNS
Talk Show 21: with Sven Birkerts, Lisa Gabriele, Yael Goldstein Love & Adrienne Miller
/ Jaime Clarke
01.15.09
TALK SHOW: Place and Time
Sven Birkerts is the author of Readings, The Gutenberg Elegies, Reading Life: Books for the Ages, Art of Time in Memoir: Then, Again, and a memoir, My Sky Blue Trades. He is the Director of the Bennington Writing Seminars, and is the editor of Agni. He lives in Arlington, Massachusetts.
Lisa Gabriele is the author of Tempting Faith DiNapoli and the forthcoming The Almost Archer Sisters, both published by Simon and Schuster. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Salon, Nerve, Glamour, Vice, and The Washington Post. She lives in Toronto where she also directs and produces for television and radio. Visit Lisa at www.lisagabriele.com.
Yael Goldstein Love is the author of the novels Overture (Doubleday, 2007) and The Passion of Tasha Darsky (Broadway, 2008), which are actually the same novel. To make sense of this, you can visit her website at www.yaelgoldsteinlove.com.
Adrienne Miller is the author of the novel The Coast of Akron, and is the former literary editor of Esquire. She lives in New York City with her husband, and is finishing her second novel.
––Name a place and time in which you'd like to have lived.
Birkerts: The question is really, for me, which novel would I most happily pull around myself? A different answer every day, but the answers are interesting. Today I’m thinking something from Balzac, Paris in the late 19th century, or Schnitzler, Vienna in the early 20th.
Gabriele: I would love to have lived in the 1890s, in Dawson City, Yukon.
Love: Medieval Europe. Doesn’t really matter which country or which century, but I’ve got to be lower class wherever I am. No noble/monastery life for me. Preferably I’d be a drudge within a noble house, but I’d take peasant, too. This is a longstanding dream. When I was four years old my favorite game was to dress up in drab-colored, raggedy clothes, fill a bucket with water, and flood the kitchen. I called this game ‘scullery maid.’ There’s a lot of photographic evidence of this, by the way. My mother claims not to even know where I learned the term ‘scullery maid’ much less what attracted me to the role. She gets defensive whenever those pictures surface, and insists on pointing out that I never had chores as a child.
Miller: Late eighteenth-century America, probably Philadelphia.
Sven Birkerts is the author of Readings, The Gutenberg Elegies, Reading Life: Books for the Ages, Art of Time in Memoir: Then, Again, and a memoir, My Sky Blue Trades. He is the Director of the Bennington Writing Seminars, and is the editor of Agni. He lives in Arlington, Massachusetts.
Lisa Gabriele is the author of Tempting Faith DiNapoli and the forthcoming The Almost Archer Sisters, both published by Simon and Schuster. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Salon, Nerve, Glamour, Vice, and The Washington Post. She lives in Toronto where she also directs and produces for television and radio. Visit Lisa at www.lisagabriele.com.
Yael Goldstein Love is the author of the novels Overture (Doubleday, 2007) and The Passion of Tasha Darsky (Broadway, 2008), which are actually the same novel. To make sense of this, you can visit her website at www.yaelgoldsteinlove.com.
Adrienne Miller is the author of the novel The Coast of Akron, and is the former literary editor of Esquire. She lives in New York City with her husband, and is finishing her second novel.
––Name a place and time in which you'd like to have lived.
Birkerts: The question is really, for me, which novel would I most happily pull around myself? A different answer every day, but the answers are interesting. Today I’m thinking something from Balzac, Paris in the late 19th century, or Schnitzler, Vienna in the early 20th.
Gabriele: I would love to have lived in the 1890s, in Dawson City, Yukon.
Love: Medieval Europe. Doesn’t really matter which country or which century, but I’ve got to be lower class wherever I am. No noble/monastery life for me. Preferably I’d be a drudge within a noble house, but I’d take peasant, too. This is a longstanding dream. When I was four years old my favorite game was to dress up in drab-colored, raggedy clothes, fill a bucket with water, and flood the kitchen. I called this game ‘scullery maid.’ There’s a lot of photographic evidence of this, by the way. My mother claims not to even know where I learned the term ‘scullery maid’ much less what attracted me to the role. She gets defensive whenever those pictures surface, and insists on pointing out that I never had chores as a child.
Miller: Late eighteenth-century America, probably Philadelphia.
