Sunday Listen: Late Night Library Interviews Kyle Minor on Breaking the "Rules"

Sunday Listen is an occasional feature in which we share inspiring sounds, readings, and conversations from Atelier26 and beyond. Today we direct your attention to this inspiring interview with Kyle Minor, author of Praying Drunk (Sarabande Books), from Portland's own lit-culture wellspring Late Night Library.


“I realized, the book’s getting metafictional, and that’s the thing that I was told was bad to do, and then everything I was ever told that’s bad to do, that’s what I wanted to do. One of my friends said, ‘I think what you did with this book is you just made a checklist of all the things you aren’t supposed to do, and then you just sort of ticked them off one after the other. … You know, I was frustrated with my first book, that it was flatter than what I really like, and I wanted to start blowing some stuff up in this book. So I took some risks like that. It’s interesting, some of the reviews that have been critical of the book, that’s what they’ve been critical of. But I think, also, it’s one of the reasons people are reading the book. And when I think about the books that I really love and that have lasting resonance, they’re almost always books that are doing something singular like that. And that’s what I’m going to do from now on. I’m going to do what I want.”

Listen to the full 40-minute interview HERE.