New Voices panelist Nell Freudenberger was recently featured on Off The Page with host Carole Burns. Freudenberger names some of her favorite contemporary writers, and also talks about the differences she sees between writing short stories and writing novels:

"A short story usually starts for me with a story that somebody tells me, often someone I don't know very well. I think we remember particular stories because they have some kind of analog in our experience, and so sometimes you hear a fragment of a story from somebody you sit next to on an airplane, and you remember it, and I think you remember it because you have the emotional material to fill it in in your own way.

A novel for me is a completely different kind of idea. It's more like coming up with person's voice and you start writing in that voice and you have no idea where it's going to go and a lot of times it goes nowhere. But sometimes you find someone with whom you think you could stay for hundreds of pages, and that's how a novel starts."

The entire interview is available here.