The Muse and the Marketplace kicks off on May 1st at the Park Plaza Hotel in Boston. In anticipation of the conference, we collected micro-interviews written by authors, agents and editors who will be attending the event.  

Micro-Interview with Maya Lang, author of The Sixteenth of June. 

1. What’s the best book you’ve read in the last year? 

Without question, Jonathan Dee’s The Privileges, a finalist for the Pulitzer. Dee’s sentences are gorgeous and elegant without being fussy; his prose feels effortless, masterful. His characters are vivid, his dialogue pitch-perfect, and he manages to make you laugh while also making you think. I admire how he connects micronarratives (a family, a character) with macronarratives of contemporary America. His should be a household name.

2. What’s one piece of advice you’d like to give to writers?

The title of this conference, “The Muse and the Marketplace,” sums up the writer’s dilemma. Everything rests on the conjunction, the “and,” how art and commerce come together. My advice would be to focus on what that intersection means for you, to think hard about what fulfills you as a writer. Maybe art matters more than commerce to you, but you’ve been trying in vain to write a page-turner. Or maybe you crave commercial success but you’ve been killing yourself trying to get a short story into a high-brow journal. Don’t write what you feel you “should”; write what fuels you. The worst thing is to seek out what you’re not. Gaining clarity on what drives you as a writer will help you define what success means to you.

3. Activism in literature: should a work of literature serve as a platform for changing the world, or is it better to not mix politics and literature?

We remake the world when we write it. We reshape it, however subtly, to put certain questions or ideas or aesthetics at the forefront, to create a universe where ‘x’ matters but ‘y’ doesn’t. In this way, literature is always political, but I think its power is in its subtlety, when we take up a character’s cares fully and without judgment, without even realizing we have. To that end, we shouldn’t feel an agenda nudging us when we read.

4. Do you prefer reading books or e-books?

Books, books, books, for reasons of smell alone. I was once given an e-reader as a gift. I used it briefly and found it convenient for travel, but I ended up feeling that my reading experience was rootless. I missed the sensory experience of books, the visual memory of a line being in a certain place on the page. I didn’t retain what I read in e-books quite the same way, and I missed the scraps of paper and receipts that get jammed into whatever novel I have on hand. Whatever book I bring with me to Boston in May, for example, will always remind me of the conference, and I like this, that objects take on a life of their own. The e-reader has since been donated. I don’t miss it.

Maya Lang is the author of The Sixteenth of June, long listed for the 2014 Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize. Awarded the 2012 Bread Loaf-Rona Jaffe Foundation Scholarship in Fiction, she was a finalist for the Glimmer Train Short Story Award for New Writers. Her work has appeared in VQR and Publishers Weekly, among others. She holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and was born in Queens.