What makes a good reader is really, I think, fundamentally anyone who is there for the ride.

Hi, this is Meg Wallitzer.

Recently I sat down with my friend writer Michael Cunningham.

Michael Cunningham is an American novelist, screenwriter, and educator.

He is best known for his novel The Hours, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the Penn Falkner Award,

and was later adapted into an Oscar-winning film

and an opera. What happens when two writers get together? Well, of course, we talk about writing,

specifically his story Jacked, which we featured on selected shorts, but we also nerd out about

the semicolon. And because I'm conducting the interview, of course Scrabble is in the mix.

Michael Cunningham is charming, interesting, curious, and a great storyteller. I hope you enjoy our

conversation, which we're sharing with you as a bonus podcast.

Hi, Michael. Nice to see you. Yeah. Nice to have you here. Nice to be talking to you as ever.

We get so few chances. I, so many things I want to talk to you about today. So your story

Jacked is a reimagined Jack in the Beanstalk and from your collection, a Wild Swan, which is

reimagined fairy tales. Have you always been drawn to those stories? Yes, I've always been drawn to those stories. I think they were the first stories I knew when I was a little kid.

My mother would read a story to me every night or sometimes the same story over and over and over again at my insistence.

And until I got a little older and knew better, we would get to the end.

And they lived happily ever after, and my mother would stop reading.

And I would say, go on.

And she would say, well, that's the end of the story.

That can't be the end of the story.

What does Snow White?

...