Clips from Our Interview
with Alan
An Audio Interview
Alan talked with Narrative’s senior editor Lacy Crawford and the entire interview can be found in our Archive. In the audio clips here, Alan talks about starting out his own writing career as a lyricist and journalist. He shares his insights on teaching and talent, the opportunities created by the Internet, and how writers and readers find a work’s meaning.
AUDIO
Alan Ziegler was born in 1947 in Brooklyn and began his writing career working on his high school newspaper. After graduating from Union College in Schenectady in 1969, he worked as a journalist and a machine operator before pursuing an MA in poetry at CUNY. In 1974 he accepted an offer to teach in a public school, and so began a career that led to fourteen years of teaching grade-school children with the Teachers & Writers Collaborative and twenty-three years working with undergraduates and graduate students at Columbia University, where he was chair of the Writing Division in the School of the Arts from 2001 to 2006. Ziegler is the author of two books on teaching writing, The Writer’s Workshop, volumes 1 and 2; two collections of poetry, Planning Escape and So Much to Do; a collection of short stories, The Green Grass of Flatbush; and a collection of prose poems, The Swan Song of Vaudeville. He is at work on a book about writing—which will be published in 2008—as well as a memoir, 99 Stories, an excerpt of which appears in our Archive. Ziegler lives in Manhattan with his wife, Erin Langston.
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