Shelby Foote, Arthur Golden and Carol Shields: Literary Pursuits

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Academy of Achievement

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4.6 • 943 Ratings

🗓️ 1 December 2020

⏱️ 60 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Three remarkable novelists, from very different backgrounds, peel back the curtain on how they write, why they write, and what they write. Arthur Golden is the author of Memoirs of a Geisha, the only book he's written, and a longtime bestseller. He describes why he rewrote the book three times before he got it right, and explains how he successfully gave voice to a character so unlike himself. Carol Shields is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Stone Diaries, and many other novels and plays. She talks about why she chose to write almost exclusively about the domestic lives of ordinary women, illuminating their struggles and triumphs. And Shelby Foote is the noted author of novels about the Civil War and the Civil Rights Movement, including Shiloh. He became best-known for his three volume history of the Civil War, and his appearance throughout Ken Burns' documentary on the same subject, but he always considered himself a novelist first and foremost. He talks here about his tumultuous life in the Mississippi Delta, and how adversity shaped him as a writer. (c ) American Academy of Achievement 2020

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, it's Alice. This may seem like an odd combination of novelists to put together in one episode,
0:10.0	but after I listened to each of their interviews this week, I was struck by the way their ideas overlapped and sometimes clashed.
0:19.0	Two of a writers, for example, stayed pretty close to home in their novels, writing, as the saying goes, what they knew.
0:26.8	The other strayed deep into foreign territory.
0:30.6	So think of this episode as a literary panel discussion.
0:34.0	Or better yet, as a spectacular dinner party
0:37.5	where you get to eavesdrop on three terrific writers talking about their lives,
0:42.0	their books, and their thoughts on the art of fiction,
0:46.0	even though I'm pretty confident that Shelby Foote, Carol Shields, and Arthur Golden never sat together at a table.
0:53.2	That's my bit of fiction.
0:55.2	This is what it takes a podcast about passion, vision, and perseverance from the Academy
1:01.1	of Achievement.
1:02.1	I'm Alice Winkler.
1:05.0	Academy, this child is gifted.
1:08.0	And I heard that enough that I started to believe it.
1:10.0	If you have the opportunity, not a perfect opportunity, and you don't take it. If you have the opportunity, not a perfect opportunity and you don't
1:14.7	take it, you may never have another chance.
1:16.9	It all was so clear. It was just like the picture started to form itself.
1:21.6	There was no way in which a lie could prevail over the truth, darkness
1:26.7	over light, death over life. Every day I wake up and decide, today I'm going to love my life. Decide.
1:35.0	My advice is if they don't break your leg once when you go in that place, stay out of there.
1:41.0	And then along come these differential experiences that you don't look for, you don't plan for,
	...

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