"Finding Interviews with Creators," recorded September 2020, 4 minutes. 

Finding primary materials--like interviews, correspondence, essays about process, etc.--can be tricky. It will almost always involve scanning through search results to identify this material and distinguish it from secondary criticism or writing by others about the author and their work.  

Some tricks for finding primary resources:

• Search the author's name in quotes along with an additional term like
  • interview
  • correspondence
  • authorship
  • "writing process"
  • (Example: "Julia Alvarez" interview)
• Look closely at the CONTENTS or details for books that come up. Very often, this kind of material about an author appears within a book about numerous authors. Example: A search for "Julia Alvarez" "writing process" finds the book Toxic Feedback: Helping Authors Survive and Thrive edited by Joni Cole. Only by scanning carefully the "details" or "Contents" of the book, found in the catalog record, did I find that the book included content by Julia Alvarez. 
• Do not overlook ebook chapters that may sometimes show up in search results. These are sometimes where interviews and essays on process may show up.
• Remember that biographical (including but not necessarily autobiographical) books and essays will often include quotes from the author, a chronology of their career, and other useful content.

Connecting to the Columbia Library Catalog. Recorded April 2021, 3 minutes.

CRWR 129 Craft & Process: Autobiographical Fiction Writers Course Guide by Columbia College Chicago Library is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.