In Conversation With … Dana Spiotta, novelist

Dana Spiotta is the author of five novels: Lightning Field (2002), Eat the Document (2006), Stone Arabia (2011), Innocents & Others (2016), and her most recent, Wayward (2021) that was called by the New York Times a “virtuosic, singular and very funny portrait of a woman seeking sanity and purpose in a world gone mad.” Dana has been a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Rome Prize, the St. Francis College Literary Prize, and the John Updike Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. For more about Dana, visit her website. In today’s conversation, we’ll discuss the impact of gender and age on writing—in terms of the types of topics covered, the depictions of female characters, and on creativity itself.