Typewriter interview with Elisa Gabbert - Austin Kleon
My typewriter interview with Mary Ruefle went over so well, I thought it might be fun to do another one. Up next is writer Elisa Gabbert. Like Ruefle, she’s a poet whose essays knock me out. The author of seven collections of poems and essays, her latest book, Any Person Is the Only Self, is her best yet. She’s also one of the few people who make it hard for me to quit Twitter: @egabbert.
Elisa started keeping notes on all the books she finished in 2015 and started publishing the notes in 2016. You can read them all here. They’re so good they’ve made me reconsider how I do my year-end lists. (Last year she wrote an essay for The Washington Post about how sharing the reading list — show your work! — has changed her reading life: “I began reading to impress myself, to be better than myself.”)
Solid picks by Don Henley, Tom Petty, Stevie Nicks, The Cars, David Bowie, and Bill Withers. (A few of these were on her playlist for her first essay collection, The Word Pretty.)
