Interview with Aram Saroyan

In an interview with Yvonne Georgina Puig for the online culture and arts magazine This Recording, Black Sparrow author Aram Saroyan discusses his early literary influences (“for me,” Saroyan says, “the initiating figure was Robert Creeley”), his writing process (“these days I usually do a first draft in hand in one of those lined school notebooks that you can buy at Staples”), his perspective on the difficulties facing an author in modern America (“Artists are like window dressing on the main action, and I think it’s easy to lose your balance or paint yourself into a corner”), and many of the essays and critical pieces that appear in the 2010 collection Door To The River. Saroyan responds to Puig’s questions with the same unfussy, candid thoughtfulness that I personally admire in his writing:

Yvonne Georgina Puig: Is it more important to write well or love well?

Aram Saroyan: The best writing surely has love in some form in it and surely loving relationships play a part in bringing that into one’s writing. I don’t think it’s either/or, and both can be hard at times. But given the choice anybody’s going to want to choose loving over writing, no contest, right?”

The rest of the interview can be found here.