Will McGrath, author of Farewell Transmission: Notes from Hidden Spaces
Memoir & Creative Nonfiction Category, sponsored by Bradshaw Celebration of Life Centers
Each week leading up to the 35th annual Minnesota Book Awards, we are featuring exclusive interviews with our finalists. You can also watch the authors in conversation with their fellow category finalists here.
Would you tell us one or two things about your finalist book that you are particularly proud of, and why?
Farewell Transmission is important to me because it tells stories from the peripheries, from the hidden nooks and crannies of the world, and celebrates people forgotten in plain sight. For me, the heart of the book is the story of Cliff Jones, a man who was wrongfully imprisoned for thirty years. I was particularly nervous when, as the book was about to go into final production, I showed Cliff the finished version of his story. When he read it and told me I had represented his life well, I felt both proud of what the piece had accomplished and immensely grateful for the way Cliff had opened his life to me.
What advice would you give to an aspiring writer with an interest in your category?
As a nonfiction writer, I never leave the house without a pocket notebook and a pen. The most telling details always arrive when you’re least prepared. It’s important to capture those fragments and impressions in the moment, preserve them, and then make sense of them later. I’ve tried taking notes on my phone but the magic dissipates.
Beyond the physical tools of notebook and pen, I think it’s important to read as much as you can, at all times, and especially outside your preferred genre. Although I write exclusively nonfiction, I mostly read novels, and occasionally poetry collections. Take whatever your can from the other forms and genres and experiment with how that differentiates your writing from the field.
Tell us something about yourself that is not widely known.
I love doing hot yoga – the hotter and sweatier the better. Almost every time I practice, I learn something new about my own body, a contraption I have inhabited for more than forty years! It teaches me that even those things we know most intimately can be understood in different ways, can be seen with nuance, from a new perspective, that nothing stays still.
The Minnesota Book Awards is a celebration of writers, readers – and libraries. We’d love if you would share thoughts about the role and value of libraries.
I always find libraries to be a source of inspiration. Some of my happiest childhood memories are of my siblings and I being left to wander a sprawling local library – those early feelings of independence are inextricable from a sense of endless possibility, endless knowledge, endless worlds to explore. Libraries are freedom.
Will McGrath has worked as a reporter, homeless shelter caseworker, UPS truck loader, and public radio producer. He has won the Society of Midland Authors Award for Biography & Memoir, as well as the Dzanc/Disquiet Open Borders Book Prize.