Joanna and Evan Smith Rakoff: Interview
“I couldn’t reconcile those two worlds: It was so hard going back and forth, feeling like, well the New York Times wants me, but some Nowheresville Review won’t publish my poem.”
Inspired by Eric Puchner and Katharine Noel’s essay “I Married A Novelist” from Canteen’s fourth issue, Lee Bob Black interviewed another literary couple—Joanna and Evan Smith Rakoff. The Rakoffs, from their Lower East Side apartment, discuss creativity, uncertainty, parenthood, ignoring how-to-write books, being rejected by tiny literary magazines, and how love and creative frustration can cause you to kick your wife out of the house.
Joanna Smith Rakoff is the author of the novel A Fortunate Age (Scribner) and the forthcoming memoir My Salinger Year (Knopf). Evan Smith Rakoff is a writer and online editor at Poets & Writers. Lee Bob Black is the co-director of canTeens—Canteen magazine’s literacy program in Harlem. Full bios are at the bottom of this page.
Garth Risk Hallberg: Interview
“I’m pretty sure novels of this size are to the publishing world what a big old box of garlic is to the vampire world.”
Garth Risk Hallberg is the author of A Field Guide to the North American Family and was selected by Richard Bausch as one of 2008’s Best New American Voices. He blogs for the Millions and teaches at Fordham University, and New York magazine called him “one of the smartest literary-critical writers writing anywhere.” He lives in Brooklyn.