Get Interviewed by David Shields

Saturday, October 19, 2024
10:00am – 2:00pm, Rain Taxi Table

As a writer and filmmaker, David Shields is renowned for his deployment of dialogue, collage/remix techniques, and autofictional strategies in the creation of what some call “nonfiction.” This year at the #TCBF, Shields would like to talk to YOU—to interview literary citizens in Minnesota using some of the same questions that gave rise to his latest film and book, How We Got Here (“How do you know what you believe? Is there such thing as ‘truth’? What is ‘nonfiction,’ and is it ‘true’?”). Don’t miss this chance to visit one-on-one with one of the most boundary-breaking writers of our time—and then come to his 3:30 conversation with author Patrick Nathan later today, in which we may learn some answers!

“I love language with all my heart and soul. . . . The beautiful difficulty, or the difficult beauty, of human communication and miscommunication: that’s pretty much all I ever write about.” – David Shields

About the Author

David Shields is the internationally bestselling author of twenty-five books, including Reality Hunger, The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead, Black Planet: Facing Race During an NBA Season, and The Very Last Interview. He has received numerous awards and fellowships for his work, and has published essays and stories in the New York Times, Harper’s, Esquire, Salon, McSweeney’s, The Believer, and the Huffington Post, among many others. The film adaptation of I Think You’re Totally Wrong: A Quarrel, which Shields co-wrote and co-stars in, was released in 2017; since then Shields wrote, produced, and directed Lynch: A History, a 2019 documentary about Marshawn Lynch’s use of silence, echo, and mimicry as tools of resistance; co-wrote I’ll Show You Mine, a feature film produced by Mark and Jay Duplass an released in 2023; and wrote and directed How We Got Here, which argues that Melville plus Nietzsche divided by the square root of (Allan) Bloom times Žižek (squared) equals Bannon. Visit him at davidshields.com.