On Writing and Living

A Conversation with Colum McCann

Authors

  • Phillip Sipiora University of South Florida Author

Keywords:

Colum McCann, interview, Let the Great World Spin, James Joyce, the writing process, Irish literature

Abstract

In a conversation recorded at the 2017 Norman Mailer Society Conference in Sarasota, Florida, the novelist Colum McCann discusses Mailer’s influence on him, his Dublin upbringing and his journalist father, and the cross-country bicycle journey that shaped him as a young writer. He reflects on the tightrope metaphor of Let the Great World Spin, writing as exploration rather than plan, his complicated relationship with James Joyce, uncertainty and Heisenberg, his Catholic upbringing, Letters to a Young Writer, and why storytelling and the imagination can resist the reach of new technology.

Author Biography

  • Phillip Sipiora, University of South Florida

    Phillip Sipiora is Professor of English and Film Studies at the University of South Florida. He is the author or editor of five books and has published approximately three dozen scholarly essays. He has lectured nationally and internationally on twentieth-century literature and film and is the Founding Editor of The Mailer Review. He is the editor of a forthcoming volume, Ida Lupino: The Pioneering Lens (Bloomsbury Academic Press, 2019).

Downloads

Published

2018-10-25

Issue

Vol. 12 No. 1 (2018)

Section

Interviews

How to Cite

Sipiora, Phillip. “On Writing and Living: A Conversation With Colum McCann”. The Mailer Review, vol. 12, no. 1, Oct. 2018, pp. 33–50, https://mailerreview.org/journal/article/view/643.