I remember thinking that I had to grow up to be a writer. Her doctoral dissertation was on the works of Mavis Gallant (and her interviews with Mavis Gallant can be read in The Paris Review‘s Writers-At-Work series.) She is currently teaching at Princeton University’s Program in Creative Writing.ĭo you remember any of the notes you got back from those early high school submissions? Did you get any encouraging ones? Did you publish anything back then? She’s received fellowships from the Christopher Isherwood Foundation, the Bogliasco Foundation, MacDowell, and Yaddo. After graduating from Vassar College, Daphne attended Boston University’s Creative Writing Program, and then went on to complete a PhD in Modern & Contemporary Literature, also at Boston University.

and Blue Hours, out in the summer of 2019 from Triquarterly.

Sight Reading, winner of the 2014 New England Society Book Award and a Boston Globe bestseller.

Russian Winter,which won the 2011 Writers’ League of Texas Fiction Prize and has been published in over twenty foreign editions.

Calamity and Other Stories,which was short listed for the 2005 Story Prize.

Since then, Daphne has published four books: In high school, Daphne and I split the cost of a The International Directory of Little Magazines and Small Presses, and I distinctly remember hearing back from one of the journals that I should not send my handwritten drafts. We walked home from grade school together and, when we were older, sometimes walked aimlessly, flipping a coin to determine which way we’d turn. We’ve known each other since we were nine years old, when the neighbor whose yard stood between hers and mine in suburban New Jersey cut back his hedges so that we could commute back and forth without getting scratched. In addition to being a talented writer, Daphne is one of my oldest and closest friends.

But female literary friendships have been overlooked.” So, when I read Daphne Kalotay’s Blue Hours, which tells the story of a close relationship between two women, I felt compelled to ask her if she’d be willing to talk to me, not just about her book and writing life, but about female friendship. As Margaret Atwood writes in her foreword to A Secret Sisterhood, “In accounts of the lives of male writers, peer-to-peer friendships, not unmixed with rivalry, often loom large-Byron and Shelley, Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins, Hemingway and Fitzgerald. George Eliot and Harriet Beecher Stowe Jane Austen and Anne Sharp… Probably I shouldn’t be so surprised that these female friendships are not as well known or well documented as those of literary men. Eudora Welty tried to teach her friend and mentor, Katherine Anne Porter, how to drive. When Toni Morrison won the Nobel Prize in literature, Maya Angelou threw her a party. » Interview Daphne Kalotay on Female Friendships in Literature and Life

Russian Winter by Daphne Kalotay