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Hester Kaplan: Writer, Editor, Educator

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Hester Kaplan: Writer, Editor, Educator

Introduction to Hester Kaplan. 1:27 min. Interview: Raymond Elman.  Post-Production: Lee Skye.  Recorded via Zoom.  10/27/2025.  Miami-Providence.

 

HESTER KAPLAN is the author of two story collections, The Edge of Marriage (University of Georgia Press, and Norton), which received The Flannery O’Connor Prize for Short Fiction; and Unravished (Ig Publishing); the novels The Tell (HarperCollins) and Kinship Theory (Little, Brown). Her stories and essays have appeared in Agni Review, Ploughshares, Story, Glimmer Train, Southwest Review, and Indiana Review, among other journals and publications.  Her work has been widely anthologized, including in The Best American Short Stories, Creature Needs, Providence Noir, Beautiful Flesh, and others.

Recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, two fellowships in literature from the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts, she was named Mark Twain Fellow for her new book, Twice Born (Catapult, 2025).  Her work has received the McGinnis Ritchie Award for Non-fiction, The Salamander Award for Fiction, among other awards and recognitions.

She is a co-founder of Write Rhode Island!, a state-wide high school writing competition, and Goat Hill, a literary production group hosting events such as conversations and panels with authors, agents, and editors, as well as offering workshops, seminars, and novel and memoir development courses.

She works one-on-one with writers of fiction and non-fiction at all levels of experience as coach, mentor, and developmental editor, and designs programs for those looking for a graduate-level course of extended study.  She runs writing retreats, most recently in Mexico, Vermont, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts, as well as on-line writing workshops.  She has taught creative writing at Rhode Island School of Design, the Knight Science Journalism Program at MIT, the Newport MFA Program, and is on the faculty of Lesley University’s MFA Program in Creative Writing.

https://hesterkaplan.com/

 

The videos below were recorded via Zoom, are organized by Success Factor, and run between 30 seconds and 7 minutes. Click on any video. You must be connected to the Internet to view the videos.

 

EXPOSURE TO BROAD INFLUENCES:    0:35 sec.

Where did you grow up and what was your first awareness of art of any discipline?

 

CRITICAL THINKING:    1:01 min.

Both of your parents are celebrated writers and you went into the family business. My father had a toy company, but I never wanted to be in the toy industry.

 

UNDERSTANDS ARTISTS’ NEEDS:    0:57 sec.

We started taking our son to art openings when he was an infant. He is very visually talented, but when he was applying to colleges, he said, “No offense Dad, but I don’t want to be an artist.”

 

OVERCOMES CHALLENGES TO SUCCEED:    1:18 min.

When did you become aware that you have a talent for writing?

 

VALUES FIRST-RATE EDUCATION:     1:48 min.

Where did you go to school, and what did you learn that still informs you today?

 

CRITICAL THINKING:      6:40 min.

Tell us about your talented parents, writers Anne Bernays and Justin Kaplan; and your maternal grandfather, Edward Bernays, the father of modern public relations and the nephew of Sigmund Freud.

 

CRITICAL THINKING:       2:51 min.

How did being the nephew of Sigmund Freud impact your grandfather?

 

CREATES A UNIQUE PERSONAL BRAND:      0:53 sec.

I remember the story about your grandfather’s campaign to make women smoking in public socially acceptable.

 

CREATES A UNIQUE PERSONAL BRAND:       1:49 min

One of the things I loved about your father was his wry, offbeat sense of humor.

 

CRITICAL THINKING:      6:12 min.

How long did it take you to get to the point where you felt you could write a memoir about your relationship with your father, who, after all, was a Pulitzer Prize winning biographer?

 

CRITICAL THINKING:      3:38 min.

Was your father aware that you had not read his books? Did you read your mother’s books?

 

UNDERSTANDS ARTISTS’ NEEDS:       0:49 sec.

Justin told me that he stopped working on a biography of Charlie Chaplin because he decided that he didn’t like Chaplin very much.

 

UNDERSTANDS ARTISTS’ NEEDS:      1:29 min.

Your husband, Michael Stein, is both a writer and a doctor, whom we have interviewed for ArtSpeak. Was he writing before you met? Or did you suck him into the family business?

 

CRITICAL THINKING:      2:03 min.

Do you consider your book about your father to be a biography or a memoir?

 

INSIGHT & INSPIRATION:     1:19 min. 

Tell us about the title of your memoir about your father, “Twice Born.”

 

INSIGHT & INSPIRATION:    0:56 sec.

I equally enjoyed Justin’s biography of Walt Whitman.

 

UNDERSTANDS ARTISTS’ NEEDS:      1:49 min.

What did you think when your father became the editor of “Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations”?