Anne Rice Interview with Don Swaim

Audio Interviews with Anne Rice

Anne Rice reinvented vampire fiction, writing from the point of view of the immortal in her novels Interview with the Vampire and The Vampire Lestat. In her conversation with Don Swaim on Halloween Eve, 1985, she recalls her early life in the "splendid gloom" of New Orleans.

She tells where her ideas come from and discusses the joys of writing on a computer, a concept taken for granted by many writers today. Rice also talks about her attempts to step away from books dealing with supernatural elements but to continue to write about outcasts. She does this in her historical novels, The Feast of All Saints and Cry to Heaven.

In The Feast of All Saints, Rice tells the story of multtos, quadroons, and octoroons, the products of illicit relationships between blacks and whites before the Civil War in New Orleans. Cry to Heaven is about the castrato opera singers of 18th Century Italy. These singers started as boys of 6 or 7 who were castrated to preserve the soprano sound. Both novels deal with the inequality that was common in the lives of these two social groups.

Listen to the Anne Rice interview with Don Swaim, 1985, RealAudio
(23 min. 16 sec.)

MP3 File

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In a second interview in 1988, Rice talks about her novel Queen of the Damned, and differentiates her vampires: appreciative of human life, and struggling with their evil acts, and the average vampire: doomed, and evil. She describes her interest in vampires not as an obsession, but as a way to discuss the conflict between good and evil.

Rice also mentions her erotica novels, which she writes under pseudonyms A. N. Roquelaure or Anne Rampling. She uses these pen names to protect her family, but she is proud of her work that are "a fine piece of pornography ...not sexist pornography."

Listen to the Anne Rice Interview with Don Swaim, 1988. RealAudio
(19 min. 40 sec.)

MP3 File

These files are for your personal use only.
Classroom use is permitted.
Redistribution is not permitted.

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For over a decade, many of the best writers of the English language found their way onto Don Swaim's daily two-minute CBS Radio show, Book Beat. His New York-based program was derived from longer interviews, sometimes 40-minutes in length. Found exclusively here, Wired for Books proudly webcasts these conversations in their entirety using RealAudio.

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