The Paris Review
Subscribe Current Issue Back Issues Interviews Books Print Series Audio Foundation Events Store About

The Paris Review Interviews

Return to Interview Archive Index

JESSAMYN WEST
The Art of Fiction No. 67
Interviewed by Carolyn Doty
Issue 71, Fall 1977
Purchase this issue
View a manuscript page

From the Interview
INTERVIEWER
When did you first feel you were a writer?

WEST
I’m not pounding my knee because of that question. I am pounding my knee because of the discrepancy between the desire when I was very young and of which I have proof, and that I was so late in getting at it. I have just come upon a large scrapbook given to me by my father and mother when I was fourteen years old. I think they expected me to paste pictures in it, or keep programs. I have it here. In it, you can see, I have written thirty plots. Across about half of them, I have written, “NUTS.” That is actually very compassionate editing. Here is plot nine . . . labeled “decent.”
Read Listen Look



SEARCH     Full Search
E-mail this page | Print | View Cart | Check Out
Selections From the Current Issue
Winter 2009
INTERVIEW
Ha Jin, Mary Karr
FICTION
Aimee Bender, Patricio Pron
MEMOIR
Benjamin Percy
POETRY
Marianne Boruch, Robert Hass, Dorothea Tanning
PHOTOGRAPHS
Massimo Vitali
Authors Mentioned
Jorge Luis Borges, Truman Capote, Graham Greene, Ernest Hemingway, Wallace Stegner, Lord Byron, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Zelda Fitzgerald, Gertrude Schweitzer, Virginia Woolf
DNA logo
©2010, The Paris Review
Terms and Conditions Privacy Policy Contact Site Map