Articles and Interviews

Mark Spragg: The Useful Life by Susan Gray Gose, WyoFile, June, 2010

Bone Fire Author Q & A Knopf, 2010

Authors of a Friendship with Kent Haruf, 2004

Larger Than Life by Alden Mudge, Bookpage, September, 2004

An Interview with Mark Spragg Bookbrowse, 2004

An Unfinished Life Knopf, 2004

Bookselling This Week by Tom Nolan, August 2002

AUDIO

To The Best Of Our Knowledge Wisconsin Public Radio

The Write Question Montana Public Radio, May, 2010

Lectures

The Necessity of Beginner's Mind
The balance maintained between a writer's private and public selves, or to paraphrase Dorothy Parker, looking at the differences between "being a writer and wanting to have written." For most writers, it entails a shift in focus between the process and the product.

  • As a young writer I cared more for my own feelings than I did my writing, often imagining myself an undiscovered, or at least an under-appreciated genius, when what I most needed to discover was how ordinary my work remained. It took some time for me to understand that there would never be a chance of me becoming a master at my craft so long as I was unwilling to be a self-aware student. The writer's job is one of open, and honest, practice and, like the Zen student, humility is not simply a desirable personality trait, but requisite. When editing, it is infinitely more important to focus on what we do badly, and not on what we imagine we do well.

The Final Edit
The last several passes a writer makes through his or her manuscript—specifically, the choices made in scene progression, narrative tension, the elimination of exposition, and the reworking of sentences for rhythm and cadence.

  • I often think of the process of writing as a dichotomy between a child and parent. The child is allowed, in fact encouraged, to make any sort of creative mess it desires, and then the parent, the editor-self, that caring and judgmental and patient aspect of the writer examines the mess, deciding if there’s anything at all worth keeping. And in the final editing steps -- if I've found no drastic mistakes in character or narrative -- the child is shown the door, and the editor takes over completely.

    At this point it’s not about addition, it’s about subtraction. It’s about paring the manuscript even further, refining, distilling. It’s about looking at your work as a reader would, not the writer. And a devoted reader at that.

On Reading and Writing
Discusses the importance of reading books and most especially the people who act as a conduit to bring books into the lives of others.

  • I am a man who has come to believe in the cultural and spiritual efficacy of art with the same devotion that others lend a church. I truly believe that good dance, music, theater, the visual arts, literature, accumulatively provide for us in the industrialized world something akin to an Aboriginal dreamtime: that is, a blueprint of what it means to be human, and more importantly, a template of how we might yet evolve.

    Art is, by its nature, an endeavor that can’t help but examine our bravery and cowardice, our triumphs and ethical disasters. Art, as it should, prods, dissents, questions and celebrates the human condition.

    Perhaps it only exists at all so that we may have a means to express the intricacies of our souls, so that we may better illustrate for others our individual yearnings, the grief and passions and triumphs that define us, and link us together as one.