Dan O'Brien [Host: Erin Slaughter]

On today's episode of The Lives of Writers, Erin Slaughter interviews Dan O'Brien.

Dan O’Brien is a playwright, poet, and essayist whose books include the poetry collection Our Cancers and the nonfiction work A Story That Happens. His newest poetry collection, A Survivor’s Notebook, is out today from Acre Books. And both his lyrical memoir From Scarsdale: A Childhood and a new collection of plays, True Story: A Trilogy, are out next week from Dalkey Archive Press.

Erin Slaughter is the author of the short story collection A Manual for How to Love Us and the poetry collections The Sorrow Festival, and I Will Tell This Story to the Sun Until You Realize That You Are the Sun. She is the managing editor of Autofocus  and was formerly the editor/co-founder of literary journal and chapbook press The Hunger. Her writing has appeared in Lit Hub, Electric Literature, CRAFT, The Rumpus, Prairie Schooner, Split Lip Magazine, and elsewhere

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PART ONE, topics include:

-- arriving once again at Sewanee

-- growing up in Scarsdale as a reader & writer

-- formative trauma and OCD

-- finding community in the theater

-- writing recent plays in poetic style

-- being disowned

-- confessional poetry and the impulse to write

-- the benefits of being a multi-genre writer

-- a background in comedy

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PART TWO, topics include:

-- a creative marriage with the actress Jessica St. Clair

-- confession and ethics and deletion

-- growing up in an abusive household

-- Scarsdale as a psychological more than geographical place

-- knowing or not knowing if family is reading your work

-- ironically fulfilling a myth

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PART THREE, topics include:

-- Dan's new poetry book A Survivor's Notebook

-- Dan's previous poetry book Our Cancers

-- loss of language and fragmentation

-- poetry and spiritualism

-- ghosts and the richness of belief

-- turning toward a deeper interest in the here and now

-- telling true stories

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Podcast theme music provided by Mike Nagel, author of Duplex. Here's more of his project: Yeah Yeah Cool Cool.

The Lives of Writers is edited and produced by Michael Wheaton.