My First Time is an ongoing short web series, featuring authors discussing their first published book.
It is produced by The Paris Review and hosted on their website. It is made by filmmakers Tom Bean and Luke Poling, as well as Casey Brooks and Ryan Scafuro. Bean and Poling were the writers and directors of the documentary Plimpton! Starring George Plimpton as Himself . George Plimpton was the founding editor of The Paris Review .
The Paris Review is a quarterly English language literary magazine established in Paris in 1953 by Harold L. Humes, Peter Matthiessen, and George Plimpton. In its first five years, The Paris Review published works by Jack Kerouac, Philip Larkin, V. S. Naipaul, Philip Roth, Terry Southern, Adrienne Rich, Italo Calvino, Samuel Beckett, Nadine Gordimer, Jean Genet, and Robert Bly.
Plimpton! Starring George Plimpton as Himself is a 2013 American documentary film directed by Tom Bean and Luke Poling about the writer George Plimpton, who was a co-founder of The Paris Review and contributor to the participatory journalism genre.
George Ames Plimpton was an American journalist, writer, literary editor, actor and occasional amateur sportsman. He is widely known for his sports writing and for helping to found The Paris Review, as well as his patrician demeanor and accent. He was also famous for "participatory journalism" which included competing in professional sporting events, acting in a Western, performing a comedy act at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, and playing with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra and then recording the experience from the point of view of an amateur.
The series is inspired by the magazine's famous "The Art of Fiction" interviews. The LA Times book critic Carolyn Kellog said that the series builds "on that tradition without replicating it." [1] The films feature not only novelists, but also graphic novelists, poets, playwrights and short story writers. In the announcement of the creation series, it was described as, "a portrait of the artist as a beginner—and a look at the creative process, in all its joy, abjection, delusion, and euphoria." [2] The on-line magazine Quartz said of the series, "Buried between the self-deprecation and vague maxims (“just buckle down,” etc.) are some real gems of insight any aspiring writer, artist, creative-type, or modern human being can practically apply to their own work and lives." [3]
The film series debuted in May, 2015. Each film runs approximately 6 minutes.
The filmmakers have teased future films on Twitter and Instagram. Some of the writers interviewed, but whose film has not yet been released include George Saunders, Mary Karr, Victor LaValle, and Dana Spiotta.
George Saunders is an American writer of short stories, essays, novellas, children's books, and novels. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, McSweeney's, and GQ. He also contributed a weekly column, American Psyche, to the weekend magazine of The Guardian between 2006 and 2008.
Mary Karr is an American poet, essayist and memoirist from East Texas. She rose to fame in 1995 with the publication of her bestselling memoir The Liars' Club. She is the Jesse Truesdell Peck Professor of English Literature at Syracuse University.
Victor LaValle is an American author. He is the author of a short-story collection, Slapboxing with Jesus and four novels, The Ecstatic,Big Machine,The Devil in Silver, and The Changeling. LaValle writes fiction primarily, though he has also written essays and book reviews for GQ, Essence Magazine, The Fader, and The Washington Post, among others.
