Brandon Taylor: “The story can’t be so loyal to one character that it betrays another”
Photo by Austin Goode / Unsplash On a snowy morning this March, I picked up Brandon Taylor from his apartment in Hell’s Kitchen, in New York City, and we drove up the Hudson Valley to Art Omi, an artist residency and cultural community where Guernica hosted “Back Draft Live,” a writing workshop on revision. Our conversation with the workshop’s fifteen writers focused on Brandon’s new book, The Late Americans, which is set in and around the MFA program in poetry at the University of Iowa. The book — a sectional, multi-character take on a campus novel — contains a spectacular examination of the challenges of making art. Our conversation turned toward when art-making demands saying no — to conventions, to manuscript feedback, to writing itself.
— Adam Dalva, Guernica senior fiction editor
Guernica: Your latest novel, The Late Americans, had an extreme process of revision. I know that it almost blew up your relationship with writing. Will you tell us about that?
: I finished the first draft in 2019, and it ruined my life for three years. I stopped writing in 2021 because the book was giving
