Joel Minor is the curator of Modern Literature and Manuscripts at Washington University Libraries in St. Louis, where he has worked since 2012. Previously an archivist at the Southwestern Writers Collection at Texas State University and at Oglala Lakota College on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, Minor has built his career around preserving and illuminating the lives behind significant works of literature. At Washington University, he oversees a remarkable collection of books, manuscripts, correspondence, and archival materials connected to writers including William H. Gass, James Merrill, William Gaddis, Samuel Beckett, May Swenson, Eugene O’Neill, Joy Williams, and others. His work has contributed to exhibitions, conferences, digital humanities projects, and scholarship that make these collections available not only to researchers, but to writers and readers interested in the complicated, often deeply personal process by which literature comes into being.

This week on Authors Unbound, we sit down with Joel Minor to explore what it means to preserve a writer’s creative life, not simply the finished books that reach readers. Minor traces the history of Washington University’s Modern Literature Collection from its beginnings in 1964, when the library and writing program began reaching out to emerging writers whose work had not yet found its permanent archival home. From there, the conversation moves into the intimacy of manuscripts themselves: Joy Williams cutting and taping together typewritten drafts, James Merrill’s doodles and surviving Ouija board transcripts, and the correspondence, revisions, false starts, and collaborations that reveal literature as a process rather than a polished object. Minor reflects on the challenge of preserving an increasingly digital writing life, the responsibility of handling materials never necessarily intended for public view, and the strange balance between personal legacy, scholarly value, and the commercial market for writers’ papers. He also discusses the relationships that allow literary collections to grow organically, including William Gass’s influence on the archive and the continuing effort to bring Robert Coover’s papers into a community of writers with whom his work and life were deeply connected. Throughout, Minor offers a generous view of the archive as a living exchange among writers, curators, scholars, students, and readers, each capable of discovering something the others may have missed.

Join us for a rich conversation about literary memory, creative process, and the human work of keeping a writer’s life available to future readers.

This is Joel Minor Unbound.

For more from Unbound Edition Press, visit us at

https:/unboundedition.com.

Tomas Unger is a poet, teacher, and critic whose writing moves between poetry, visual art, and the spaces where the two meet. His essays and poems have appeared in The Threepenny Review, The Paris Review, The New York Review of Books, and The Yale Review. In his writing, Unger is drawn to the ordinary object, the unexpected encounter, and the quiet mystery contained within moments of attention. His poems are marked by a remarkable spareness and precision, allowing familiar things—a piano, a moon, a hotel hallway, a boat—to gather presence and significance without forcing them into explanation. His critical work similarly reflects a wide-ranging curiosity about art and the ways different forms can illuminate one another.

This week on Authors Unbound, we talk with Tomas Unger about his debut collection, Odd Hour, a book concerned with memory, silence, encounters, and the strange moments when the familiar world seems briefly unfamiliar. Unger reads several poems from the collection, including “Piano,” “Once,” “Still,” and “Went Away,” and speaks about the experiences and works of art that helped shape them. He recalls the childhood experience of sleepwalking through a hotel hallway in Rio that became the starting point for “Once,” and considers how poetry can transform such an experience without explaining it away. We talk about the influence of poets including A.R. Ammons, Seamus Heaney, Robert Frost, and Wallace Stevens, as well as the relationship between poetry and photography. For Unger, poetry has a particular ability to give us the human voice: something spare, vulnerable, and capable of carrying us toward a depth that does not require obscurity. The conversation also turns toward visual artists, translation, reading, and the importance of getting outside the habits of one's own art in order to return to it with renewed curiosity.

Join us for a rich conversation about silence, attention, memory, and the mysterious ways poetry makes the world newly present.

This is Tomas Unger Unbound.

Purchase your copy of Odd Hour directly from Unbound Edition Press.

For more from Unbound Edition Press, visit us at unboundedition.com.

Willard Spiegelman is the Hughes Professor of English, Emeritus, at Southern Methodist University in Dallas and the longtime former editor-in-chief of the Southwest Review. The author of numerous books on English and American poetry, as well as two volumes of personal essays, Spiegelman has spent a career writing about literature, art, music, and the ways culture shapes our understanding of ourselves. His most recent work before My Lucky Stars was Nothing Stays Put: The Life and Poetry of Amy Clampitt, published by Alfred A. Knopf. He is also a longtime contributor to the arts and books pages of The Wall Street Journal. A lifelong reader, writer, and teacher, Spiegelman brings to his work a particular attentiveness to language, voice, and the pleasures of cultural life.

This week on Authors Unbound, we talk with Willard Spiegelman about My Lucky Stars, his forthcoming collection of essays and unconventional memoir of taste. The book grew from individual essays on figures such as Mabel Mercer, Ruth Draper, Al Jolson, Jack Benny, and Patsy Cline, which gradually revealed themselves as a way of telling Spiegelman’s own story through the people, performances, music, and entertainments that have shaped his life. He reflects on his early love of Gilbert and Sullivan, his discovery of country-western music after moving to Texas, and his enduring fascination with the Great American Songbook and the power of a singer to honor the words of a song. Along the way, he considers the middlebrow—not as something to be dismissed, but as a cultural space capable of offering pleasure, community, generosity, and relief from hardship. He also explores the relationship between listening and writing, the importance of articulation and repartee, and what moments of theater and performance can still offer an audience willing to sit quietly and pay attention.Don't miss this rich conversation about taste, memory, language, performance, and the enduring pleasures of the cultural middle.

This is Willard Spiegelman Unbound.

Purchase your copy of My (Lucky) Stars directly from Unbound Edition Press.

For more from Unbound Edition Press, visit us at unboundedition.com.