Sink Event in Bologna, Italy
Today I met the experimental musician Giovanni Succi for lunch at a restaurant in the countryside outside Bologna. Imagine your favorite eastern North Carolina barbecue house if it was homemade Italian food, or in Durham imagine Saltbox Seafood Joint with Italian food. No menu, you just discuss what they have for...
Excursion by Bill Morrison
The summer 2006 issue of Virginia Quarterly Review arrived at my house in Chatham County, North Carolina and I was knocked down by four paintings by film artist Bill Morrison reproduced in that issue along with an introduction by Lawrence Weschler. I was later coming to Morrison's seminal film work than...
Two Quotes of the Day from Susan Howe
From "Sorting Facts; or, Nineteen Ways of Looking at Marker" by Susan Howe. "The will to produce poetic film, and particularly poetic documentary, still runs up against a wall of perplexity and indifference." - Dziga Vertov. 1926. Not much has changed in 92 years. "I am an American poet writing...
Gene Smith’s Sink coming in Paperback
Paperback publication Date: August 14, 2018 | Farrar, Straus & Giroux
Sink Event at Big Ears 2018
I'm excited and grateful for a Gene Smith's Sink event at Big Ears Festival this Friday March 23, featuring brief readings by me special performances by Big Ears musicians Rachel Grimes, Jason Moran, and Aine O'Dwyer, plus Jem Cohen's short film, Chuck-will's-widow, based on a chapter in Sink. This event means more...
Sink Event at The Durham Hotel Feb. 28
THIS UPCOMING EVENT means a lot to me. I'll be back in town to speak to the MFA students at the Center for Documentary Studies, where I was based for fifteen years and where I did much of my Smith and Jazz Loft work. The event also features writer Allan...
Interview on Outspoken Podcast from Cal. St. Fullerton
Usually I'm on the interviewing side of oral history work. HERE I'm receiving questions from Ben Cawthra of Cal. St. Fullerton's Center for Oral and Public History, where I gave the annual Hansen Lecture in Fall 2017. In a good oral history interview, not intended for broadcast but for posterity,...
My Best of 2017
2017 was epochal and challenging for most, including me. It was the first time I've had an automobile license plate not issued in North Carolina. Our toddler started bilingual day care, which he (and we) loved for five months before it almost disappeared overnight, saved by my wife and her...
Jem Cohen’s film “Chuck-will’s-widow”
There's not much that could make me feel better about Gene Smith's Sink than Jem Cohen's short film based on it, "Chuck-will's-widow," and his words to introduce the film's online premiere last week at The Paris Review Daily. The film premiered on screen at National Sawdust in Brooklyn in October. Jem's work has...
Gene Smith’s Sink in December Harper’s
All involved in Gene Smith's Sink figured it would be a slow burn. 2017 isn't the ideal year for a spare, quiet, "strange" (Luc Sante) and "unorthodox" (Nate Chinen) book incommensurate in page numbers (206) with the years of work (20) that made it possible. So we're not surprised it took three...
Poet Ross Gay: Gene Smith’s Sink is “lyric research”
Ross Gay A few years ago a respected writer familiar with my work urged me to coin a phrase for what I do. I asked him for a suggestion. He said, "indirect narrative." I thought about it for a couple of years, modifying his idea and words to come...
The Paris Review and National Sawdust Celebrate Gene Smith’s Sink
Last week The Paris Review and National Sawdust threw an event for Gene Smith's Sink at the latter's sublime venue in Brooklyn. A better conjoining of institutions and artists (see photos below) couldn't be imagined for this book. A number of chapters of the book were steeped in The Paris...
Scene from Tuesday Night at NYPL
Sam reading from Gene Smith's Sink at NYPL Tues. 9-19-17. Celeste Auditorium. Stephen A. Schwarzman Building. Fifth Avenue & 42nd St. A funny thing happened in the green room before Eugene Richards and I went onstage. He told me a funny story about a recent radio interview in...
Writing Roundabout: An Interview with Sam Stephenson
Sam is interviewed by The Paris Review's managing editor, Nicole Rudick. The results offer an inside look at the making of Gene Smith's Sink. Sam's first page of notes from his first of two dozen trips to Smith's archive in Arizona in April 1997.