I’m thrilled to announce the release of two new interviews for VIDA Voices & Views. The first interview features writer and activist, Cheryl Strayed, who reads from her celebrated memoir Wild and discusses topics ranging from her own feminist origins to the glimmers of beauty, art, and power contained within suffering.

Cheryl Strayed is the author of the #1 New York Times bestselling memoir Wild, the novel Torch, and two more New York Times bestsellers, Tiny Beautiful Things, which is comprised of advice from her “Dear Sugar” column, and Brave Enough, a collection of her most popular quotes. Celebrated for transforming suffering and loss into power and grace, Strayed’s books have been translated into forty languages. As well, Wild was made into an Oscar-nominated movie starring Reese Witherspoon and Laura Dern and was chosen by Oprah Winfrey as the first selection for Oprah’s Book Club 2.0. In addition to writing, Strayed is co-host of the WBUR podcast Dear Sugar Radio, which originated with her “Dear Sugar” advice column on The Rumpus, and she is a long-time feminist activist and one of the first members of VIDA’s board of directors. Critics have called Cheryl Strayed’s work “both a literary and human triumph.” To learn more about Cheryl Strayed, please visit: http://www.cherylstrayed.com

Here are some of my favorite Cheryl Strayed quotes from the episode:

 “When I was a kid of just six or seven years old, I learned the word ‘feminism,’ and I’ve been a feminist ever since.”

“Literature is my religion. Books have been the thing throughout my life that have offered the greatest consolation and enlightenment and illumination and all the things that we go to religion or spiritual practice for.”

“Writers get this bad rap, like we’re so competitive and at each other’s throats, and I would say, ‘Yeah, every once in awhile there is somebody who is like that.’ But mostly what I feel is that we go to the same church and we speak the same language and have the same values and beliefs in a deep sort of way. And I feel the presence of that. And I love the sense of community among writers.”

“Life and literature are not about ‘should.’ They’re about who you are really. And who you are really is so much more interesting and complex and beautiful than those artificial surfaces that we all want to show the world.”

“Every decision I make is informed by my feminism. There is no separating me from my feminism. It has informed me from the beginning. Same thing with my femaleness, my fill-in-the-blankness, my being a mom. Certain things enter you that are so central that you are always speaking from that place.”

“I was alone so much, and I was always surrounded with the living world. You know, when you actually decide to believe the truth—that every tree you encounter is a living thing—it changes your perspective on what alone means.”

“The big fear around writing memoir is, ‘Will people judge me?’ And, yeah, some people will. But some people will say ‘Thank you. Thank you for showing a version of yourself that feels true to me—because I am that way too.’ And nobody likes a braggart. Nobody likes someone who is like, ‘Oh no, not me. I’m perfect.’ We like the person at the edge of the party who says, ‘You know, I’ve had four miscarriages’ or ‘I’m divorced’ or ‘I’m in recovery because I used to be a drug addict.’”

“Out of our wounds, if we can get a sense of our power, that’s where our strength rises.”

“At the end of the day, what I realized is that the people who had transformed their lives the most powerfully were the people who came to the realization that that work could only be done by themselves.”

The second interview is the first of a two-part interview featuring poet and editor Don Share. In this segment, Share reads his poem “Food for Thought” from the collection Squandermania and discusses topics ranging the power of the imagination to effect change in the world to Poetry magazine’s open door policy to language’s complicity in the mania for squandering resources.

Beloved poet and Poetry magazine editor, Don Share, was a 2015 recipient of VIDA’s “VIDO” Award for his contributions to American literature and literary community. In addition to being the author and editor of over a dozen books, including Wishbone, Union, Bunting’s Persia, Seneca in English, Squandermania and The Open Door: 100 Poems, 100 Years of POETRY Magazine, which he co-edited with Christian Wiman, Share is an accomplished translator, whose renditions of Miguel Hernández were awarded the Times Literary Supplement Translation Prize and the Premio Valle Inclán. As well, Share’s work at Poetry has been recognized with three National Magazine Awards for editorial excellence from the American Society of Magazine Editors, and a CLMP “Firecracker” Award for Best Poetry Magazine. Share is celebrated in the literary community for his generosity, innovativeness, and warm wit.

Here are some of my favorite Don Share quotes from the episode:

“I don’t know of a poet who doesn’t write out of the impulse to say, ‘The world could be better.’ That’s sort of the plot of every decent poem.”

“What we all do when poetry is at its best is activate the imagination—because to solve problems, and to create a world in which any kind of justice obtains, the imagination has to work.”

“The open door doesn’t just mean everybody gets to walk through. What it means is that somebody greets you.”

“People talk about privilege and gatekeeping, but the way I look at it, it isn’t about anything more than my having a chance to put your work in front of a really big audience—and that’s all we exist to do.”

“I ask myself, ‘How can I keep thought going in a world where everything is being squandered relentlessly by all of us?’”

“If you look all over the world, at images from the most troubled places, you see women having to pay the price for the violence that occurs—whether it’s domestic violence or warfare or poverty, it’s women who have to convert all kinds of emotions and disadvantages into a world that makes it possible for somebody else to survive.”

“When people leave the room, and the best poets have spoken to them, they aren’t the same.”

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