By Chelsea Reil

Michael Cunningham, Pulitzer-prize winning author of “The Hours,” spoke to an audience of about 45 students at Blackman Auditorium Wednesday night.

Writers Rambling, a group of student writers on campus, and Spectrum, Northeastern’s literary magazine, sponsored the event.

The film version of “The Hours” was shown in Blackman Tuesday night as a pre-cursor to Cunningham’s talk.

Gary Goshgarian, a professor in the English department and advisor of Writers Rambling, introduced Cunningham, citing his many accomplishments, including a master of fine arts from the University of Iowa, five works of fiction, one work of nonfiction and two screenplays.

After a short reading from “The Hours,” Kyle Kerr, a senior at Northeastern and president of Writers Rambling, asked Cunningham questions about his work, his inspiration and Oprah Winfrey.

“I had set out to be a musician,” Cunningham said when Kerr asked how he got into writing. “I had no talent at all. Then I tried to be a painter, for which I had some talent, but not enough. I turned to writing because I was running out of art forms.”

While he spoke confidently of his start in the literary world, he said his start was not so easy. He described his fear of turning 30 years old as his motivation for churning out his first novel, “Golden States,” in 45 minutes. And while he said he “never felt good about it,” he said it was “the best possible novel I was able to create at that time in my life.”

“One of the things I love about writing fiction is that if you work very hard and you’re lucky, you may have success,” he said. “You can never write the definitive book and move on to the next career. I could never imagine losing interest in writing my next book.”

Kerr also asked some questions that were submitted by students online. One question included a quote from a review of his novel “Specimen Days” by Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times, asking how he deals with criticism.

“I don’t read that shit. Any of it. The good reviews or the bad,” he said. “The bad ones feel like they’re true and the good ones feel like you just fooled that one reviewer.”

Kerr also asked if he had any advice for the aspiring writers in the audience.

“The thing that I think is the most important for those who want to write