Amiri Baraka: “Politics is to protect truth and beauty”
“Politics is to protect truth and beauty.” Amiri Baraka, famed leader of the Black Arts Movement, was a poet, playwright, jazz critic, and actor. He was also a notorious political revolutionary who did not cease protesting despite arrests and beatings by the Newark police and struggling to install an honest government that would respond to…
Read MoreEnjoy the latest issue of INTERFACES
Voilá, the latest issue of INTERFACES, internationally renowned journal of text and image. This issue focuses on images and memories, with fascinating discussions ranging from fiction that uses photographs with its text, to Ken Burns’ recontextualizing photojournalism in his Vietnam War documentary and, as an added treat, my on-camera interview with Jules Feiffer, the brilliant…
Read MoreSusan Minot Paints Everything, Everywhere
“I like to say ‘I write,’ or ‘I paint,’ and not ‘I am an anything.” The award-winning writer of novels, short stories, screenplays, and poems, Susan Minot says she grew up in a family in which everyone always had something before them to do with their hands. It is a habit that has stayed with…
Read MoreLawrence Ferlinghetti is turning 100!
Legendary poet, artist, publisher and social activist Lawrence Ferlinghetti will celebrate his 100th birthday on March 24. My on-camera interview with him in 2001 has been edited into a four minute homage by Michelle Memran, producer and director of last year’s critically lauded film “The Rest I Make Up.” After producing no fewer than 30…
Read MoreCharlie Brown and Spider-Man inspired Clifford Thompson
Writer-Artist 14: Clifford Thompson “Being at odds with the world around you is a common theme among personal essayists, and my first model of an artistic treatment of such themes was Peanuts.” Writing and Art Were a Single Pursuit Even as a child of seven or eight, Thompson says his attempts at writing and art…
Read MoreI Am Honored by the Award- Winning Journal INTERFACES
INTERFACES, The award-winning international journal of text and image, co-published, in French and English, by the College of the Holy Cross, the Sorbonne, and the University of Bourgogne, has done me the honor of making me a contributor. In the current issue, Maurice Géracht of Holy Cross introduces me and The Writer’s Brush interview series…
Read MoreAn Interview with Jules Feiffer
“My goal was to overthrow the government…” – Jules Feiffer What a treat it was to chat with Jules Feiffer, Pulitzer Prize and Academy Award-winning cartoonist, playwright, screenwriter, novelist, author of more than 35 books, illustrator, and for decades the most widely read satirist in America. Enjoy this candid interview in which he explains how…
Read More“Eating with my Eyes”: The Landscapes of Guy de Maupassant
Writer-Artist 13: Guy de Maupassant “I have the clear and profound feeling of eating with my eyes, and digesting colors as you would digest meat and fruit.” Achieved Greatness and Wished for More France’s greatest short story writer—his first collection of short stories was in its twelfth printing in less than two years, and his…
Read MoreA Fun Discussion of The Writer’s Brush with Mark Lynch of WICN
A Sit Down with Mark Lynch I sat down last week for a fun discussion with the ever-insightful, enthusiastic Mark Lynch of WICN about my 40-year labor of love, The Writer’s Brush: Paintings, Drawings, and Sculpture by Writers. We covered Charles Bukowski’s drawings of poodles, Edgar Allen Poe’s self-portrait, D.H. Lawrence’s painting of The Rape of…
Read MorePoly-poly-math: Lera Auerbach is a Quadruple Threat
Writer-Artist 12: Lera Auerbach “Borderless creativity” A Living Renaissance Woman Lera Auerbach has resisted creative pigeonholing from her earliest years. Playing the piano and composing at four, she was told she must choose, that it was not possible to become both a virtuoso performer and serious composer. When, at 12, she informed her piano instructor that…
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