Victor Lodato is a playwright and poet. He is the recipient of Guggenheim and NEA fellowships, and has won numerous awards for his plays, including one from the Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays. His newly released debut novel is
Mathilda Savitch.
From his Q & A with Lauren Mechling at the
Wall Street Journal:
The Wall Street Journal: How did you capture the voice of a teenage girl?
Mr. Lodato: That's the voice that came to me. For a long time I felt more like a secretary than a writer, I just let her babble and I wrote everything down that I heard. It's almost musical; she's clearly a pretty idiosyncratic child. I knew parts of the story within a few months, but there were aspects that I didn't know till I'd made it halfway through. That was what kept it fun and that is why I set the book in present tense. There is an aspect to Mathilda that feels alive and nervous and dangerous.
What do you find is the biggest difference between writing plays and writing fiction?
When you write a play you have to draw the...[read on]
Watch
the video trailer for Mathilda Savitch and
learn more about the book at the Farrar, Straus and Giroux website.
The Page 69 Test: Mathilda Savitch.
--Marshal Zeringue
