Dan O'Brien [Host: Erin Slaughter]

On today's episode of The Lives of Writers, Erin Slaughter interviews Dan O'Brien.Dan O’Brien is a playwright, poet, and essayist whose books include the poetry collection Our Cancers and the nonfiction work A Story That Happens. His newest poetry collection, A Survivor’s Notebook, is out today from Acre Books. And both his lyrical memoir From Scarsdale: A Childhood and a new collection of plays, True Story: A Trilogy, are out next week from Dalkey Archive Press.Erin Slaughter is the author of the short story collection A Manual for How to Love Us and the poetry collections The Sorrow Festival, and I Will Tell This Story to the Sun Until You Realize That You Are the Sun. She is the managing editor of Autofocus  and was formerly the editor/co-founder of literary journal and chapbook press The Hunger. Her writing has appeared in Lit Hub, Electric Literature, CRAFT, The Rumpus, Prairie Schooner, Split Lip Magazine, and elsewhere____________PART ONE, topics include:-- arriving once again at Sewanee-- growing up in Scarsdale as a reader & writer-- formative trauma and OCD-- finding community in the theater-- writing recent plays in poetic style-- being disowned-- confessional poetry and the impulse to write-- the benefits of being a multi-genre writer-- a background in comedy____________PART TWO, topics include:-- a creative marriage with the actress Jessica St. Clair-- confession and ethics and deletion-- growing up in an abusive household-- Scarsdale as a psychological more than geographical place-- knowing or not knowing if family is reading your work-- ironically fulfilling a myth____________PART THREE, topics include:-- Dan's new poetry book A Survivor's Notebook-- Dan's previous poetry book Our Cancers-- loss of language and fragmentation-- poetry and spiritualism-- ghosts and the richness of belief-- turning toward a deeper interest in the here and now-- telling true stories____________Podcast theme music provided by Mike Nagel, author of Duplex. Here's more of his project: Yeah Yeah Cool Cool.The Lives of Writers is edited and produced by Michael Wheaton.