Home » Literary Arts » Interview: Alec Wilkinson – Author, Journalist, Critic, Musician

Interview: Alec Wilkinson – Author, Journalist, Critic, Musician

INTRODUCTION- 33 sec.

Introduction to Alec Wilkinson.

Alec Wilkinson is a writer who has been on the staff of The New Yorker magazine since 1980. Before that he played guitar in rock and roll bands. For The New Yorker, he frequently writes music criticism in the form of Profiles and stories for “Talk of the Town.” Wilkinson has written ten books: Midnights (1982), Moonshine (1985), Big Sugar (1989), The Riverkeeper (1981), A Violent Act (1993), My Mentor (2002), Mr. Apology (2003), The Happiest Man in the World (2007, about Poppa Neutrino, the only man to cross the Atlantic in a raft made of found materials), and The Protest Singer: An Intimate Portrait of Pete Seeger (2009). His most recent book, The Ice Balloon (2012), is an account of the Swedish visionary aeronaut S.A. Andree’s attempt, in 1897, to reach the North Pole in a hydrogen balloon.

We interviewed Doty at the Miami Book Fair, MDC. The videos below are organized by topic and run between 30 seconds to 6 minutes. Click on any video.

EARLY INFLUENCES – 52 sec.

You were exposed to music, art, and literature at an early age. What was your first awareness of any art discipline?

EDUCATION – 1:55 min.

What was the impact of Bennington College on your career?

JUST DO IT – 2:43 min.

Why did you think you could change disciplines from music to writing?

DEVELOPING A VOICE – 5:41 min.

Who were your role models? How did you develop your voice?

BE OPEN MINDED – 4:15 min.

How did the great New Yorker editor William Maxwell shape your writing?

SEIZE THE MOMENT – 1:40 min.

Why did William Maxwell invest so much time in you when you were just getting started?

CONSTRUCTIVE CRITICISM – 5:07 min.

What are you trying to accomplish when you write articles about artists? And how would you describe your form of criticism?

CHALLENGING SITUATIONS – 2:34 min.

Describe a challenging situation that you overcame successfully.

GLOSSARY

Saul Bellow – (1915–2005) Canadian-born American writer. Bellow was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the Nobel Prize for Literature, and the National Medal of Arts. He is the only writer to win the National Book Award for Fiction three times, and he received the Foundation's lifetime Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 1990.

Bruce Chatwin – (1940–1989) was an English writer whose best known works are In Patagonia (1977) and The Songlines (1987). Chatwin was also a novelist and a journalist who interviewed diverse figures such as Indira Gandhi and André Malraux.

John Cheever – (1912–1982) American novelist and short story writer. His fiction is mostly set in the Upper East Side of Manhattan, the Westchester suburbs, old New England villages based on various South Shore towns around Quincy, Massachusetts, where he was born, and Italy, especially Rome. He is recognized as one of the most important short fiction writers of the 20th century.

John Coltrane – (1926–1967) American jazz saxophonist and composer. Working in the bebop and hard bop idioms early in his career, Coltrane helped pioneer the use of modes in jazz and was later at the forefront of free jazz. He organized at least fifty recording sessions as a leader during his career, and appeared as a sideman on many other albums, notably with trumpeter Miles Davis and pianist Thelonious Monk.

William Faulkner – (1897–1962) American writer and Nobel Prize laureate from Oxford, Mississippi. Faulkner wrote novels, short stories, a play, poetry, essays and screenplays. He is primarily known for his novels and short stories set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, based on Lafayette County, Mississippi, where he spent most of his life. Faulkner is one of the most celebrated writers in American literature.

Adam Gopnik – (b. 1956) Canadian-American writer, essayist and commentator. He is best known as a staff writer for The New Yorker, to which he has contributed non-fiction, fiction, memoir and criticism since 1986.

Shirley Hazzard – (b. 1931) Australian author of fiction and non-fiction. She was born in Australia, but holds citizenship of the United Kingdom and the United States. Her 2003 novel The Great Fire won the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction.

Ernest Hemingway – (1899–1961) American author and journalist. His economical and understated style had a strong influence on 20th-century fiction, while his life of adventure and his public image influenced later generations. Hemingway produced most of his work between the mid-1920s and the mid-1950s, and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954. Many of his works are considered classics of American literature.

Edward Hirsch – (b. 1950) American poet and critic who wrote a national bestseller about reading poetry. He has published nine books of poems, including The Living Fire: New and Selected Poems (2010), which brings together thirty-five years of work, and Gabriel: A Poem (2014), a book-length elegy for his son that The New Yorker calls “a masterpiece of sorrow.” Alec Wilkinson wrote about Hirsch for The New Yorker, and had a public discussion with Hirsch at the 2014 Miami Book Fair International.

William Maxwell – (1908–2000) American editor, novelist, short story writer, essayist, children's author, and memoirist. He served as fiction editor for The New Yorker from 1936 to 1975. An editor devoted to his writers, Maxwell became a legendary mentor and confidant to many of the most prominent authors of his day. Although best known as an editor, Maxwell was a highly respected and award winning novelist and short story writer.

John McPhee – (b. 1931) American writer and a Pulitzer Prize recipient. He is widely considered one of the pioneers of creative nonfiction. In 2008 he received the George Polk Career Award for his "indelible mark on American journalism during his nearly half-century career.” Since 1974, McPhee has been the Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton University.

Vladimir Nabokov – (1899–1977) Russian-American novelist. While Nabokov's first nine novels were in Russian, he later rose to international prominence as a writer of English prose. Nabokov's Lolita (1955) is his most famous novel, and often considered his finest work in English.

The New Yorker magazine – (Est. 1925) A weekly magazine on politics, international affairs, popular culture and the arts, science and technology, and business along with fiction, poetry, humor, and cartoons. Arguably America’s best magazine. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine

J.D. Salinger – (19192010) American writer who won acclaim early in life, primarily for his novel The Catcher in the Rye. He led a very private life for more than a half-century. He published his final original work in 1965 and gave his last interview in 1980.

James Salter – (b. 1925) American novelist and short-story writer. Originally a career officer and pilot in the United States Air Force, he resigned from the military in 1957 following the successful publication of his first novel, The Hunters. After a brief career in film writing and film directing, Salter published the novel Solo Faces in 1979.

Hunter Thompson – (1937–2005) American journalist who became internationally known with the publication of Hell's Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs (1967) and became a counter cultural figure, with his own brand of New Journalism which he termed "Gonzo," an experimental style of journalism where reporters involve themselves in the action to such a degree that they become central figures of their stories. The work he remains best known for, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream (1971), constitutes a rumination on the failure of the 1960s counterculture movement.

John Updike – (1932–2009) American novelist, poet, short story writer, art critic, and literary critic. Updike's most famous work is his "Rabbit" series, which chronicles the life of the middle-class everyman Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom over the course of several decades, from young adulthood to death. Both Rabbit Is Rich (1982) and Rabbit at Rest (1990) were recognized with the Pulitzer Prize.

Wellfleet, MA – A small village with a year-round population of less than 3,000 people, near the northern end of Cape Cod in Massachusetts. Wellfleet was settled by Europeans in the 1650s, and is famous for the tastiness of its oysters. Alec Wilkinson spent his summers in Wellfleet. In the 1970s Wilkinson served as a Wellfleet police officer, and wrote his first book of nonfiction, Midnights, which was edited by William Maxwell and published in 1982.

Eudora Welty – (1909–2001) American author of short stories and novels about the American South. Her novel The Optimist's Daughter won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973. Welty was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, among numerous awards including the Order of the South. She was the first living author to have her works published by the Library of America.

Edmund Wilson – (1895–1972) is widely regarded as the preeminent American man of letters of the twentieth century. Over his long career, he wrote for Vanity Fair, helped edit The New Republic, served as chief book critic for The New Yorker, and was a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books. Wilson was the author of more than twenty books, including Axel’s Castle, Patriotic Gore, and a work of fiction, Memoirs of Hecate County.