Vale Edmund White
Over the weekend, I had a gig at the Central Goldfields Words in Winter Writers Festival, two and a half hours away by car. On the way back my friend and fellow writer Lee Kofman spoke about the work of Edmund White, and I said I had interviewed him a few times. We found the audio and listened to him in the dark of an almost wintry night. It was a really great conversation (even if I do say so myself) full of fun and outrageous details about his book Rimbaud: The Double Life of a Rebel, wherein we meet the brilliant and troubled Arthur Rimbaud, for many the father of modern poetry, who with his lover Paul Verlaine forged a new way of writing and an anarchistic way of living. Edmund White describes Verlaine as a homicidal alcoholic and Rimbaud as a long-haired, sneering, shabbily dressed brute. You might say the joy of gay sex it wasn't. I heard this morning that Edmund White died this week at the age of eighty-five. The transcript and audio of our conversation can be found in the Interviews 2 section on this website. Enjoy!