Short Stories, Interviews, Essays

“On Location,” a short story in the New England Review, Vol. 41, Spring, 2020

“Where’s the Love?” a talk given at the Rainier Writing Workshop (RWW) at Pacific Lutheran University about why readers and writers care about stories and poems. (a note: four years after this talk was given, Cates was fired from teaching at RWW for reading a short story in which a drunken character uses a racial slur.)

“What is the West?” a short, short essay…from High Desert Journal

Poethood-Fatherhood Podcast, short essay and poem, read by Christopher Locke

“An Opera in Prose,” a Beatrice.com short essay on the writing of TOM CONNOR’S GIFT, 2014

“The Black Helicopters Above Us: A Conversation with David Allan Cates,” Cutbank Interview

Reflections West, with David Allan Cates, a little radio program about literature and culture

1992 YouTube of Public Television Interview with David Allan Cates about HUNGER IN AMERICA, a novel

The Far Edge of the World, a short story in Hellbender (Cheat River Review

“You Are a Stupid, Naked Boy,” from Tell Us Something, live story-telling from The Wilma Theater, Missoula, Montana, Sept. 2016

“Stretches of Spain, Kayaking the Guadalquivir,” Outside Magazine

“Seville’s Siren Song,” New York Times Sophisticated Traveler: I confess my brain is sometimes clouded with scenes and characters from stories and history, or from things I have invented, so that even I as do something as uneventful as walk back to my Seville hotel from a flamenco bar at 1 a.m., wend my way through the narrow, cobbled, well-lighted streets, even as I turn a sharp corner and pass though a crowd of revelers spilling from an open bar, I might imagine the air thick with smoke not from cigarettes but from ninth-century Viking fires, or a more recent auto-da-fé.

“Granada, Nicaragua, It’s Fall and Rise,” New York Times Sophisticated Traveler: I’ll start with this disclaimer: I love Nicaragua. I love the poetry of its pace, ox carts slowing traffic, shoeless boys playing baseball in vacant lots, men riding their lovers double on bicycles and the silhouettes of women reposed in doorways. I love its rum and cigars, rice and beans and green volcanoes towering over red-tile roofs and blue lakes. I even like the smell of horse manure and diesel exhaust, an occasional waft from an open sewer and broken sidewalks that force me to watch my step.

“Schussing throughout a Summer’s Day,” New York Times Sophisticated Traveler

“Three Men in a Boat, Exploring Costa Rica’s Caribbean Coast,” New York Times Sophisticated Traveler

“Finding the Flow”, an essay in the Montanan: By the fall of 1989, ten years out of college and reading and writing like a madman for all of them, I had a novel manuscript that had been rejected by thirty-some publishers, just four published short stories, and a family farm I’d been slowly driving into the ground…

“Stories,” A craft essay for Glimmer Train