Krasny for You

As it turns out, a funny thing did happen on the way to Forum.

I was not keen on public radio,” writes Michael Krasny in Off Mike: A Memoir of Talk Radio and Literary Life (Stanford University Press). It may seem as if the host of KQED’s Forum is as much of a public-radio stalwart as Ira Glass or Terry Gross, but Krasny settled for the gig 14 years ago as a sideline to being both an English professor at SF State and a struggling novelist. Written in the broadcaster’s trademark scholarly tone and touching on everyone from Jane Fonda to Ian McEwan, the recently published memoir reveals that the “tortured writer” role is in fact the one that has shaped the others. 7x7 seized the opportunity to get a behind-the-scenes glimpse of the man Michael Chabon has called a “Bay Area cultural institution” in the Potrero studios of KQED.

Sitting behind a wooden lectern in headphones and obscured by a phalanx of microphones, the on-air intellectual wizard wrapped his daily live interview show and turned the microphone on us, beating us to the first question: “Did you find yourself put off by the first couple of chapters?”

No—just amazed at how candid you were about your insecurities as a writer.
Off Mike is me being “off mic.” I’m writing about personal stuff, and it goes down differently with different people, or at least that’s what I’ve noticed.

Let’s talk about your memoir.
At first, I thought I was writing a novel—one of these thinly disguised autobiographies. I always wanted to write a bildungsroman, like Saul Bellow’s Adventures of Augie March. But frankly, I couldn’t write the novel, so I wrote this.

How did you get started?
I started writing about my younger years [in Cleveland]. People assume I must have gone to Harvard or Stanford—in fact, I came from some pretty roughneck stuff and a working-class background.

Are there any anecdotes you wish you could have included?
I left [this] out because it sounded a little self-serving: Robert Redford called me one day when we...

email page | print page

1 | 2 | NEXT> | VIEW ALL