A Quick History
Who Writers Read was a project born during the Covid related quarantine of 2020. Yes, we were lonely and suddenly had time to do things like cobble together a website, but more than that we were horrified by the run up to the presidential election, by all that unfolded during and after that election, and by all that remains painful and unresolved in this nation. We trace our own development primarily through our reading lives, and it felt important to discuss and encourage reading as one means of becoming a kinder, more discerning human being.
This was a volunteer effort of two. We figured out the interview thing as we went, our social media presence was spotty at best, and we didn’t spend much time editing the videos for the archives. But the writers in these interviews shine brilliantly regardless. We’re grateful to them for speaking with us, and we know their wisdom will continue to matter. Please enjoy our archives.
Your Hosts
Jody A. Forrester
Ginger Eager
“As a lifetime reader, writing came organically to me. I wanted to write a book that a reader like me would be entranced by. There are many authors I consider mentors, in particular Alice Munro and W.G. Sebald. I envy Munro’s ability to make a tiny image translate into an entire landscape and I am in awe of the way Sebald perches readers on his shoulder so that his and our experiences happen simultaneously.”
“I’m curious about the reading lives of the writers I favor. I read Henry James because of Flannery O’Connor, and while I haven’t returned to him in decades, he made an impact. Zora Neale Hurston’s novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, I first read in a high school English class; I return to it every few years. But without the work of Alice Walker in the 1970s, I wouldn’t have read Hurston in the 1990s. Writers’ lineages can be traced through their reading lives, and lineages matter.”
Jody A. Forrester was born and raised in Los Angeles during the uneasy Fifties and tumultuous Sixties. She graduated from high school in 1969 when the Vietnam War was raging and the country increasingly divided along racial and class lines. At seventeen, a freshman at San Jose State University, she joined a communist organization that advocated armed uprising against the ruling class. In her recently published memoir, Guns Under the Bed: Memories of a Young Revolutionary, Jody reaches into her past to understand how she came to embrace such a violent culture. She lives in Venice, California with her husband, musician John Schneider.
Ginger’s essays, reviews, and short fiction have been published in Necessary Fiction, West Branch, Bellevue Literary Review, The Georgia Review, and elsewhere. Her debut novel, The Nature of Remains, won the AWP Award for Fiction, was selected as a Books All Georgians Should Read, 2021, and won the 2021 debut novel category for Georgia Author of the Year. Ginger has a BSEd in Secondary English Education from the University of Georgia, an MFA in Writing and Literature from the Bennington Writing Seminars, and a Certificate in Acute Homeotherapeutics from the Caduceus Institute of Classical Homeopathy. She lives in Decatur, Georgia, with her partner and two spoiled housecats.