Leila Philip sat down for this On the Fly interview when she came to Iowa City for the 2010 Bedell Nonfiction Now Conference. She reflects on the distractions and busyness that fight against the work of writing, her “bank account of thoughts and feelings and ideas,” and her fascination with “people and the things they do.”
Philip is the author of A Family Place: A Hudson Valley Farm, Three Centuries, Five Wars, One Family, which won the Victorian Society Publication Prize as well as the Annual Book Award for Documentation of American Life from the Colonial Dames of America.
Her first book, The Road Through Miyama, won the PEN 1990 Martha Albrand Citation for Nonfiction. She has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Guggenheim Foundation. She is a faculty member in the creative writing program at the College of Holy Cross.
