February Writer’s Night – The Paris Review Writers at Work with Dr. Lou Villaire

The Paris Review Writers at Work: What 75 Years of Interviews with the World’s Greatest Writers Can Teach Us About Writing

Since 1953, The Paris Review has asked the world’s greatest living writers one deceptively simple question: how do you write? Nearly 450 interviews later, the result is perhaps the richest collection of writing wisdom ever assembled – not literary criticism, not biography, not a writing manual, but writers speaking honestly about inspiration, discipline, doubt, and failure.

In this workshop, we mine those conversations for the habits of successful working writers: Ernest Hemingway rewriting one page thirty-nine times to get the words right, Haruki Murakami’s unglamorous daily routine, Joan Didion’s lifelong notebook of overlooked details, and Ralph Ellison’s immersion across music, folklore, and philosophy as the true source of voice.

Whether you write poetry, fiction, memoir, or essays, you will leave with a practical manifesto: pay attention, read deeply across centuries, protect your solitude, revise without mercy, keep collecting what others overlook, and treat every failure as data, not verdict.

Speaker Bio

Dr. Lou Villaire is a Grand Junction writer and business owner. Lou is a former instructor at Colorado Mesa University and a local speaker at venues including GJ Chamber events.

Villaire is the author of In Good Faith: The Strong Negotiation of President Eisenhower, Anchor Book Press, 2022. He has prose and poetry published in periodicals such as ‘Bombay Gin,’ ‘The International Review,’ ‘The Lemon Groove,’ ‘Lament,’ and the ‘Grand Rapids College Review.’ He is at work editing an anthology of poems to be published in 2027.

Dr. Villaire has earned undergraduate degrees in English, Energy Engineering, and Environmental Science, and graduate degrees in Environmental Policy and Political Science/American Studies. Lou enjoys trail running in the region as well as taking trips with his family.