First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing

James Salter grew up in New York City and was a career officer and Air Force pilot until his mid-thirties, when the success of his first novel, The Hunters(1957), led to a fulltime writing career. Salter’s potent, lyrical prose has earned him acclaim from critics, readers, and fellow novelists. His novel, A Sport and a Pastime (1967), was hailed by the New York Times as “nearly perfect as any American fiction.” His latest book, All That Is, was published to critical acclaim in 2013. He died in 2015. This interview was recorded in November 2014.
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Jess Row is the author of the novels The New Earth and Your Face in Mine as well as a collection of essays, White Flights: Race, Fiction, and the American Imagination. His short story collections include The Train to Lo Wu, Nobody Ever Gets Lost and the newly published Storyknife. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Tin House, Conjunctions, Ploughshares, Granta, n+1, and elsewhere, has been anthologized three times in The Best American Short Stories, and has won two Pushcart Prizes and a PEN/O. Henry Award. He has received a Guggenheim fellowship, an NEA fellowship in fiction among other honors. He directs the undergraduate creative writing program in the Department of English at NYU and is an ordained senior dharma teacher in the Kwam Um School of Zen.
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Richard Russo is the author of 11 novels, including most recently, Under the Falls, Somebody’s Fool, Chances Are . . . , Everybody’s Fool, and That Old Cape Magic; two collections of stories; and the memoir Elsewhere. In 2002 he received the Pulitzer Prize for Empire Falls, which, like Nobody’s Fool, won multiple awards for its screen adaptation, and in 2023 his novel Straight Man was adapted into the television series Lucky Hank. In 2017 he received France’s Grand Prix de Littérature Américaine. He lives in Port­land, Maine.
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Michael Cunningham is a novelist, screenwriter, and educator. His novel The Hours received the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1999. He has taught at Columbia University and Brooklyn College. He is currently a professor in the practice at Yale University. His new book is Unsayable: A Life in Writing.
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Rachel Eliza Griffiths is a poet, multimedia artist, memoirist and novelist. Her literary and visual work has been widely published in magazines, journals, and anthologies, including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poets and Writers, and Best American Poetry, among others. Some of her poetry collections include Miracle Arrhythmia, Mule and Pear, Seeing the Body, and Lighting the Shadow. Griffiths’ hybrid collection of poetry and photography, Seeing the Body was selected as the winner of the 2021 Hurston/Wright Foundation Legacy Award in Poetry, the winner of the 2021 Paterson Poetry Prize, and a finalist the 2020 NAACP Image award. Her debut novel, Promise was a Kirkus Reviews and Chicago Public Library Best Book of the Year. Her memoir is called The Flower Bearers.
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