'(It's) the tool of our tradition'

 

"Our task as fiction writers isn't just to report something that didn't really happen.  We have to give what we write a sense of reality.  The tool of our tradition is language." - Alice McDermott

 

Born in New York City in 1953, McDermott is the author of 9 novels including Charming Billy, winner of both the American Book Award and the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction.  Her novel Someone was a National Book Award finalist, and three of her other books were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize.  Her most recent novel, Absolution, won the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award in 2024, the same year she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters and honored with the Eugene O’Neil Lifetime Achievement Award.   

 

McDermott, who now resides just outside Washington, DC, has been a writer-in-residence at several colleges and universities and was a longtime Professor at Johns Hopkins University.  She also was on the faculty of the renowned Sewanee Writers Conference for 20 years.  Her dozens of short stories and essays have been published in journals, magazines and newspapers across the country, and she is the author of the essay collection, What About the Baby?   

 

“I'm not writing fiction to convince anybody of anything,” she said.  “I've always believed that you go to literature to find the shared human experience."