Sam Lipsyte

Kurt Vonnegut Radio with Gabe Hudson

Sam Lipsyte

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Sam Lipsyte

Gives a Master Class in Writing Prose Fiction

Aug 07, 2023

Hey People,

Welcome to Kurt Vonnegut Radio. My apologies if you're receiving this KVR episode with novelist Sam Lipsyte for a second time. (I assure you this won't happen again.) I'm still learning my way around Substack and in my previous Sam Lipsyte post I failed to load the cool podcast playing device (see above) that Substack kindly provides for our listeners.

And after getting feedback back from you the listeners I learned that many of you like it when I include the podcast playing device in the actual post. And since these episodes of Kurt Vonnegut Radio are evergreen, and because me and the producer Jude worked so hard on this episode (and Sam graciously gave so much of himself for this interview), I want this Sam Lipsyte episode to exist with the podcast playing device alongside it.

(I love feedback, sincerely, you are welcome to HMU at: gabehudsonpod@gmail.com. You can recommend guests, whatever. I think of this community as something that we’re building together.)

About this episode: Get ready to hear a Master Class in writing from Sam Lipsyte

(FWIW I have listened to and read almost every interview Sam has given over the years, and I have never heard him talk with such specificity about craft and his strategies on the page or about the time he spent studying with the legendary editor Gordon Lish)

I'll be honest I was nervous going into this interview with Sam. I've known Sam for over 20 years, we came up together in the literary world, and we also had the same agent for many years: the great Ira Silverberg. But sometimes knowing your interview subject can lead to different kinds of pitfalls. Like the last thing I wanted to do when interviewing Sam was to play it all cool.

What I love about doing these interviews is I get to geek out and be excited and ask my guests questions that nobody ever asks them. Because either it wouldn’t be normal in polite society to ask these questions, or in some cases, other people wouldn’t think to ask these questions. (A perfect example of this is toward the end of this interview when you hear me pin Sam down about his sentences, and how he writes them. His sentences are legendary btw. You literally get to hear Sam crack the Sam Lipsyte Sentence Atom, it’s cool. And instructive.)

Sam Lipsyte’s newest novel, No One Left to Come Looking For You

I also really wanted to interview Sam about the time he spent studying with the iconic (and sometimes controversial) editor Gordon Lish. Sam recently wrote some about that experience in The New Yorker for their Summer Fiction Issue. For anyone who might not know, Gordon Lish was a famous editor in the 80’s and 90’s, he was an editor at Knopf, published a fantastic lit mag called The Quarterly, and he held these renowned private writing classes where he would orate for 5 hours at a clip, or something like that. (You hear Sam affectionately refer to Lish’s classes as a “cult” in his New Yorker piece.)

Lish was famous for editing with a heavy hand (being revolutionary in how he would cut stuff from manuscripts and move text around). Perhaps, most famously, Lish was known for having edited Raymond Carver’s first books rigorously and helping Carver find his huge success. But then later, apparently, Carver sought to free himself from Lish’s editorial acumen.

Legendary editor Gordon Lish / Photo: The Guardian

Anyway, Gordon Lish, as editor and teacher, has worked with many of your favorite writers, including: Amy Hempel, Barry Hannah, Diane Williams, Don DeLillo, Garielle Lutz, Joy Williams, Raymond Carver, Ben Marcus, Christine Schutt, Will Eno, Dawn Raffel, Brian Evenson, and of course, Sam Lipsyte.

Ben Marcus, my first writing teacher at UT-Austin, turned me onto Lish and The Quarterly and some of the writers that worked with Lish (in fairness to Ben, he also turned me onto a lot of great writers that semester that had nothing to do with Lish.)

So I’ve always been kind of obsessed with Lish and the writers who worked with him and have revered that fabled scene somewhat from afar. So I was keen to ask Sam a ton of questions about the Lish curriculum. I also wanted to talk to Sam about his most recent novel, No One Left To Come Looking For You.

Thanks as always to everyone for listening and for being a part of this experiment-in-progress.

Please enjoy!

Love, Gabe

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PS. Thank you to everyone who has signed up for a paid subscription. You are the wind in our sails that is making it possible for us to do this show. Kurt Vonnegut Radio is free and for the people. But each week me and the producer Jude happily spend a ton of time and effort crafting each episode with love. So if you’re in a position to contribute financial support, please know we’re super grateful.