Monday, May 08, 2006

What are you working on? : Ryan Blitstein

Journalist Ryan Blitstein, latest subject in my series of interviews with writers, speaks about the difference between writing news and novels:

The luxury of total control of the material I was writing about -- something that is inherently impossible when writing non-fiction -- was liberating, but also daunting, because there was so much pressure to come up with things that were actually interesting enough to carry someone across 300 pages about a subject that isn't "newsworthy" or "true" in the traditional sense.

Blitstein's latest piece in the SF Weekly is A Study in Size, about the success of small secondary schools and the difficulty the San Francisco school district has in accepting them.

Blitstein and previous interviewee Joshua Davis will be reading with me as well as Christine Comaford-Lynch on May 18 -- see the listing at the top of the page.

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