Because You Asked

Professor Katrina Roberts' most recent anthology Because You Asked was reviewed in the June issue of The Boston Review.

Here's an excerpt: 

Questioning Creativity
Sean Singer
June 23, 2016

Because You Asked draws from fifteen years of Q&As after literary readings at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington. A varied collection of essays, lists, letters, and interviews in which writers address and respond to their audiences about the writing life and craft, the volume presents post-reading patter blown open. It gathers pieces from eighty-five writers, including major figures such as Mark Strand, Lydia Davis, Charles Simic, and Galway Kinnell, as well as a variety of younger writers, among them Carmen Giménez Smith, Sarah Vap, Oliver de la Paz, and Camille Dungy.

Q&As can be revelatory or awkward; they are always unpredictable and often dreaded. A writer must try, as Mark Doty says, to "be spontaneously articulate, reasonably insightful, funny, and perhaps entertainingly quirky as well." Taking into account that many writers have an impulse to retreat from Q&As, to flee without the blanket of pre-scripted language, Katrina Roberts's introduction argues that the compilation gathers their remarks "not to suggest a writer necessarily will have much desire to decipher 'meaning' beyond what she's already said," but that the Q&A can "become a dramatic postscript to our readings, a rousing confrontation, a symbiotic celebration."

You can read more at The Boston Review.