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Triage

On Reading, Writing, and the Interior Life

by Richard Russo

Narrator Richard Russo

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Length 50 minutes

Language English

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Summary
About the author
About the narrator

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Empire Falls

One of the most valuable spaces for an artist is the inner life—the sacred place where, outside of the constraints of time and space, meaning is extracted from raw experience and fashioned into art. In this timely new essay, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Russo discusses the work writers do as they sift through experience and work to cultivate rich interior lives. For authors, this often involves performing triage, a constant assessment of events that helps determine what’s useful for a story and potentially enduring.

But what is at stake when we perform triage? Is an artist’s interior life an act of generosity or selfishness?

Reflecting on a year of reading and meditations on the nature of interiority brought up by a global pandemic and orders to stay at-home, Triage is a candid and arresting look at the process that goes into creative work, by one of our most celebrated and bestselling novelists.

A Vintage Shorts Nonfiction Original

Language Essays Nonfiction Literary Criticism

Richard Russo is the author of nine novels, most recently Chances Are..., Everybody’s Fool and That Old Cape Magic; two collections of stories; and the memoir Elsewhere. In 2002 he received the Pulitzer Prize for Empire Falls, which like Nobody’s Fool was adapted to film, in a multiple-award-winning HBO miniseries; in 2016 he was given the Indie Champion Award by the American Booksellers Association; and in 2017 he received France’s Grand Prix de Littérature Américaine. He lives in Portland, Maine.