Sam
Stephenson

My copies of Lucinda Williams' new memoir arrived at our house in College Station, TX two days ago.  I was the ghost writer for her book.  I'm pleased with how it turned out, and grateful to have been involved.  Lucinda's acknowledgments, clipped below, describe well how we originally met and...

I've written here before about my invaluabe, longterm collaborative work with writer and editor, Nicole Rudick.  Today I'm honored and thrilled and grateful to have an interview I conducted with Nicole about her brilliant, unusual new book on the life and work of artist Niki de Saint Phalle published by...

In the Winter 2020-21 issue of Oxford American magazine, the great musician, Brittany Howard (check out her 2019 album Jaime which sounds like something only Lauryn Hill, Prince or D'Angelo would or could do), has chosen my 2007 piece on Thelonious Monk's 1970 return to his birthplace of North Carolina,...

Jane's Addiction playing a private show in Mt. Baldy, CA. July 7, 1990. Photograph by Tod Goldberg. Last week the first result from my 15 months of research on the LA band Jane's Addiction and late 1980s and early 1990's culture at large was published by Affidavit.  This piece mostly...

Word arrived this month that I won a 2019 Guggenheim Fellowship for my project on the rock band Jane's Addiction's original years 1985-1991 in LA and beyond.  I'm surprised and elated and grateful.  I've applied for that fellowship a half dozen times over twenty years.  I guess seventh time is...

A remarkable new essay about, in part, Gene Smith's Sink was published this week by Affidavit magazine.  In "What Wasn't There" London-based writer Emily LaBarge considers Sink alongside writers I revere including novelists Nathalie Léger, Lydia Davis, and Fleur Jaeggy.  In particular, Léger's Suite for Barbara Loden is one of my favorite books of recent...

2018 was the year I dug deep into work of Susan Howe, spurred by this great piece by Emily LaBarge in BookForum.  I'm now using a line by Howe as an Epigraph for my new manuscript, Which Direction Home.  That line is: “I am an American poet writing in the English...

Darcie Schoenman (L) and Jason Molina. We moved to Bloomington, Indiana two years ago and one of the things I've done living here is research Jason Molina, whose label, Secretly Canadian, is four blocks from our house on the west side of downtown.  Some results of my research so far...

Here's the first paragraph of Tracy K. Smith's introduction to American Journal, an extraordinary new collection of 50 poems by 50 living poets selected by her.  I think hers is the best explanation for this kind of work that I've ever read.  And I believe it applies to all sorts of...

The paperback edition of Gene Smith's Sink came out last week.  The cover, I just learned today when I opened a box of them, is the one we (me, my editor, the designer) strongly preferred for the hardback, with no images.  It's a literary book, we argued, not a photography...

This photograph just in from longtime collaborator Kate Joyce in Santa Fe.  She made it just after the Gene Smith's Sink event at Big Ears.  Jason Moran and Rachel Grimes played piano tunes intermixed with my readings and Jem Cohen's short film based on a chapter in my book.  I'm lucky to...

Nicole Rudick introducing Gene Smith's Sink launch event hosted by The Paris Review and National Sawdust in Brooklyn in October 2017. Today is Nicole Rudick's last day as managing editor of The Paris Review, a job she's held for eight years. She's moving on to her own writing including finishing...