These are the archives from two hour special finale of “The Literally Literal” featuring long-format interviews with writer Andre Dubus III, poet and memoirist Honor Moore, WSUM General Manager Dave Black, and the great American Romantic macabre writer Edgar Allan Poe back from the dead. There individual interviews are all available below:

Andre Dubus III is the son of Andre Dubus, and a fantastic writer in his own right with a National Magazine Award and Pushcart Prize for his short fiction, and a novel The House of Sand and Fog which was an Oprah Book Club selection, a National Book Award Finalist, and movie starring Ben Kingsley. His most recent book is The Garden of Last Days, and it concerns some events around 9/11. (click on the blue box to listen)

Honor Moore is an acclaimed poet and writer of nonfiction. Her collections of poems are Red Shoes (2005), Darling (2001), and Memoir (1988), and she is the author of a biography, The White Blackbird, A Life of the Painter Margarett Sargent by Her Granddaughter (1996), which was a New York Times Notable Book. She edited Amy Lowell: Selected Poems for the Library of America (2004) and co-edited The Stray Dog Cabaret, a collection of translations of the Russian Modernist poets by Paul Schmidt (2006). [from Honormoore.com] On the show she talks about her memoir The Bishop’s Daughter a NYT Editor’s Choice and a National Book Critics Circle “Good Read.” (click on the blue icon to listen)

The third interview is with WSUM General Manager Dave Black discussing the origins of WSUM and the future of the station and radio in Madison.

Finally, we have our interview with Edgar Allan Poe back from the dead, the first blue box is the new interview, and the second is the first interview from the show’s pilot in November 2004.

(click on the blue box to listen) This an archived interview from May 7th, 2008 with with writer and psychologist Daniel Tomasulo. We discuss his first published non-academic work Confessions of a Former Child: A Therapist’s Memoir. We learn how he used to control a large portion of NY and NJ’s streelights as well as why someone with a PHD in Child Development felt they had a problem when they became a child developer.

Daniel J. Tomasulo, is a psychologist, psychodrama trainer, writer on faculty at New Jersey City University, and MFA. He has gained international recognition for development of IBT, the Interactive-Behavioral Model of group psychotherapy for people with intellectual and psychiatric disabilities. He is a consulting editor for The Journal of Group Psychotherapy, Psychodrama, and Sociometry, and recipient of their Innovator’s Award for development of the IBT Model.

(click on the blue icon to listen!) This is an archived interview with UW Anthropologist Kirin Narayan from Wednesday, February 6th 2008 show.  We talked about Gurus, “Rahoul Beings,” and she sang taught a Sanskrit Chant.

 Kirin Narayan is professor of Anthropology at UW-Madison, and one of the leading Folklorists of South Asia.  Her research concerns women’s oral traditions in North India, narrativity and ethnography, and the South Asian diaspora.  She is the winner of the Victor Turner Prize for Ethnography, and the co-winner of the Elsie Clews Parsons Prize for Folklore.  She has just published a memoir, My Family and Other Saints, which was reviewed very favorably in the New York Times.

This is an archived interview from the December 5th, 2007 show featuring an interview with Peter Sagal, the host of NPR weekly news quiz show, Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me.  We talked about the show, Carl Kassell, swingers, and porn stars.  The last two items being topics in his new book, The Book of Vice: Very Naughty Things (And How to Do Them).

Peter Sagal has been the host of Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! since May, 1998. A native of Berkeley Heights, N.J., he attended Harvard University and subsequently squandered that education while working as a literary manager for a regional theater, a stage director, an actor, an extra in a Michael Jackson video, a travel writer, an essayist, a ghost writer for a former adult film impresario and a staff writer for a motorcycle magazine.   [NPR Bio]

This is an archived show from October 31st, 2007, and it features an interview with Fiction writer and essayist George Saunders.  The interview starts about ten minutes into the recording, the poems read this week were by Charles Wright and Langston Hughes. (JUST CLICK ON THAT BLUE ICON)

George Saunders’ writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, and GQ, among many other periodicals. Among his books are In Persuasion Nation, and The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil. He is Currently a professor at Syracuse University, he has won the National Magazine Award for fiction in 1994, 1996, 2000, and 2004 and second prize in the O. Henry Awards in 1997.  In 2006 he was awarded both a Guggenheim fellowship and MacArthur Grant, which is typically referred to as a genius grant.  He went on the show to talk about his new book of essays, The Braindead Megaphone. 

This is an archived show from September, 19th, 2007 featuring an interview with the Host of WPR’s Here on Earth: Radio Without Borders, Jean Feraca. During the show she discusses her new memoir out by UW Press, I Hear Voices: A Memoir of Love, Death, and Radio.

Jean Feraca is 25-year veteran of public talk radio, and is Wisconsin Public Radio’s Distinguished Senior Broadcaster and has been host and co-producer of the Ideas Network’s award-winning call-in news and cultural affairs program, Conversations with Jean Feraca, from 1990 to 2003.

She was the recipient of The Nation’s 1975 Discovery Award and was named “one of the most promising poets of her generation.” She published her first book of poems, South From Rome: Il Mezzogiorno, with a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her work is anthologized in The Dream Book, which won The American Book Award in l986. She received a Wisconsin Arts Board Fellowship to complete Crossing the Great Divide, her second book, which was published in l992 and nominated for a Pushcart Prize. In l996 she was named the lead poet in a major public series commissioned by Wisconsin’s Dane County Cultural Affairs. She is a member of Poets and Writers, Inc. and is listed in the International Who’s Who in Poetry, and Who’s Who in American Writers, Editors and Poets. Also in 1996, she was featured as “A Woman for Lears,” in Lears Magazine. Madison Magazine named her one of its “10 Most Talented”.

This is an archived show from May 16th, 2007. It is special episode in that it spands longer than hour, and features a reading by a number of different incarcerated writers from The Oakhill Correctional Facility in Oregon, WI.

The readers and writers performing are all members of a creative writing class that meets every Monday, and is run by UW Grad Students Marianne Erhardt, and Ray Hsu.

The class is supported by the UW Madison Center for the Humanities’ Humanities Exposed Program (HEX) and the UW Madison Department of English. This broadcast will feature the members of this writing class reading their poetry and spoken word pieces, as well as singing some original songs.

The program is structured as an “open mic” or reading, but their will be short breaks to allow commentary by Ray Hsu and Marianne Erhardt.

This is an archived interview from September 2006 with best selling author Bret East Ellis.  This is only the interview portion of the show, and it was one of my favorites.  There is a transcript of the interview published in the Spring 2007 issue of The Madison Review.

Bret Easton Ellis (born March 7, 1964 in Los Angeles, California) is an American author. He is considered to be one of the major Generation X authors^[1] and was regarded as one of the so-called literary Brat Pack,^[2] which also included Tama Janowitz and Jay McInerney.  Many of his books have been turned into major motion pictures including: American Pyscho and Rules of Attraction.  His most recent book, Lunar Park, was discussed on the show.

This is an interview from May, 2006 with Poet and Wisconsin Professor Amaud Jamaul Johnson. During the interview he talks about his writing process, and reads several beautiful poems from his collection Red Summer.

Amaud Jamaul Johnson was born and raised in Compton, California. He was educated at Cornell University, Howard University and El Camino College. He is a former Wallace E. Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University. His honors include a nomination for The Pushcart Prize and support from the Cave Canem Foundation, the Hurston/Wright Foundation, and The Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. His poetry has appeared in Rivendel and New England Review and on Poetry Daily. Johnson’s book of poetry, Red Summer, which examines a series of “race riots” which occurred during the summer of 1919, was selected as winner of the 2004 Dorset Prize and will be published by Tupelo Press in spring 2006. He is an assistant professor of English in the creative writing program at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. [Wisconsin Academy]

This is an archived interview from Spring 2006 with Crime Novelist and Young Adult author Pete Hautman.  On this episode we discuss writing for two different age groups, pineapple slicing, the reticulated elf weasel, and poker.

Pete Hautman is the author of many well received young adult novels, one of which, Godless, won the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature. Hautman moved to St. Louis Park, Minnesota at the age of five. He later graduated from St. Louis Park High School and attended the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and the University of Minnesota over the next eight years, without receiving a degree from either institution. After working at several jobs which he describes as “ill-suited”, Hautman published his first novel, Drawing Dead, in 1993. He loves to cook, has two small dogs, and is currently living with mystery writer Mary Logue. [wikipedia]