Our June guest was Victor Lodato, a novelist, playwright, and poet. His first novel, Mathilda Savitch, was called “a Salingeresque wonder” by The New York Times and was on the “Best Book” lists of The Christian Science Monitor, Booklist, and The Globe and Mail. Mathilda Savitch won the PEN USA Award for Fiction and the Barnes & Noble Discover Prize.
Victor’s second novel, Edgar and Lucy, was published in March by (St. Martin’s Press). Lena Dunham calls Edgar and Lucy “profoundly spiritual and hilariously specific,” and Sophie McManus lauds the “tender, funny, living immediacy of its characters.”
Victor is a Guggenheim Fellow and the recipient of fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts, The Princess Grace Foundation, The Camargo Foundation in France, and The Bogliasco Foundation in Italy. His work has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Granta, and Best American Short Stories. A recent essay was published in the “Modern Love” column of The New York Times.
Our May guest on Literary Ashland was Amy Blossom. Amy recently retired from her position as Public Service Librarian for the Jackson County Libraries and head of the Ashland Library.
For National Poetry Month, Ed and I interviewed Ashland poet Amy MacLennan. Her first full-length collection The Body, A Tree was published earlier this year by MoonPath Press. Her work has been published in Cimarron Review, Cloudbank, Connotation Press, Folio, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Linebreak, Painted Bride Quarterly, Pirene’s Fountain, Poet’s Market, Rattle, River Styx, South Dakota Review, Spillway, The Pedestal Magazine, Windfall, and Wisconsin Review.
