Hope Edelman is a graduate of the University of Iowa Nonfiction Writing Program and a longtime instructor in the Iowa Summer Writing Program. This On the Fly interview was conducted while Edelman was in Iowa City to accept an Alumni Fellows Award.
Edelman talks about her process, including her tendency to “binge write” rather than writing every day. She also considers the difficulty of writing both as a process and as a result of her sometimes painful subject matter. She reveals an ability to write in a variety of circumstance, even in the face of potential distraction. “In fact,” she says, “I wrote part of Motherless Mothers in Chuck E. Cheese.”
She discusses the challenges of writing Along the Way, a book written with and about Martin Sheen and Emilio Estevez. “These are film guys, so we story boarded the book together, and that was really useful.”
Edelman is the author of the three-book Motherless Daughter series, the memoirs The Possibility of Everything and Boys Like That: Two Cautionary Tales of Love, and Mother of My Mother: The Intricate Bond Between Generations.
