Interview with Anthony Doerr
Faculty member Anthony Doerr speaks with r.kv.r.y Quarterly about history as memory and his short story “Oranges.”
…I was beginning to understand that I was only going to exist on Earth for an appallingly brief time: that I was hopelessly mortal. This knowledge is what made me want to communicate some sense of the larger scales of time in my own work. For years I couldn’t figure out how to do it. But when I came across Munro, and saw how she used time (and then later Andrea Barrett, and Italo Calvino), that she didn’t believe short stories had to take place in one evening, or in one room, or in one day, I found my permission.
Incidentally, this knowledge, that life is short, is what made me decide, at a ridiculously early age, that I wanted to be a writer: I wanted to do what I loved to do before I ran out of time...[Keep Reading]…
Anthony is the author of the short story collections Memory Wall and The Shell Collector
