Valerie Stivers Interviews Garth Greenwell

Garth Greenwell’s Small Rain, the story of an unnamed narrator undergoing a rare, sudden and life-threatening medical crisis, was one of the more polarizing novels of 2024. The story is told in mighty, stream-of-consciousness gulps that readers and reviewers found either wonderful, or boring and pretentious. Greenwell trained as an opera singer, received an MA in English Literature from Harvard, and attended the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. He has one of the broadest and most fluid minds I’ve encountered, and his intellect is a private museum of the art that matters. My print-only opinion is that if you don’t like his work, you aren’t smart enough for it. Small Rain is worth reading for the discussion of early music and English poetry alone, and is the type of book that exists as a sculptural shape of form and theme, and riffs both outward and in upon itself the more you think about it. Our talk approached its beauty and mystery from a few new angles.