If you want to write about the Arctic, must you visit the Arctic? The splendid writers Jim Shepard and Joshua Ferris think not. Are they asserting: write about what you don’t know? It’s complicated. And delightfully so. A conversation about actual landscapes and landscapes of the imagination, at the Center for Fiction, with music from Hubby Jenkins of the actual Carolina Chocolate Drops.

•  PERSON: John Hawkes
•  PLACE: the poles
•  THING: the poem
•  RANDY’S THING: this shirt