Spring 2013
An Interview with Nikky Finney by Cara Dees
_____I want to save a moment. I want to save what a sunset looks like from seat 8A on a plane.
Fall 2012
An Interview with Alison Hawthorne Deming by Christopher Adamson
_____We’re bearing witness to the time we live in and how it’s different from any other time in history
An Interview with Dan Chaon by Claire Jimenez and Elizabeth Furlow
_____To me the suspense line is like the drum. That’s what holds everything together.
Summer 2012
An Interview with Alicia Ostriker by Melissa Cundieff
_____The writer, the poet, can experience himself/ herself as a vessel the wind of the spirit blows through.
Spring 2012
An Interview with Maile Meloy by Jenna Williams
_____Any way you can get some distance is good.
An Interview with Bonnie Jo Campbell by Jill Schepmann
_____I’m always trying to figure out how to look at physical and psychological disfigurement, and social disconnection.
Summer 2011
An Interview With Jean McGarry by Rebecca Bernard
____Given the deep interiority present in so many of the stories in the collection Ocean State would you ____share a little about your process?
An Interview With Kevin Wilson by Jake Karlsruher
____And once I saw all this amazing stuff that people were writing, and I realized that these people ____were not dead, I wanted to be a part of it.
An Interview With D.A. Powell by Andrew Rahal
____And I guess that I am post-confessional in the sense that the confessional poets are all dead. I am ____living post-them. I’ll concede that. But I don’t see myself as entertaining the same concerns.
An Interview With David Shields by Ethan Milner
____It came about rather indirectly, it’s not as if I decided that I wanted to write a book about ____plagiarism and a book that embodies plagiarism
Spring 2011
An Interview with Anders Nilsen by Matthew Baker
My parents had been in a commune in San Francisco, and before that in the Peace Corps in Ethiopia with some friends. One of them, in his travels, had discovered Tintin and Asterix, and then had his interest in comics bolstered by the underground scene in San Francisco. He had a copy of a cookbook that Crumb illustrated that I found at age six or seven. I remember being fascinated and slightly disturbed.
An Interview with Molly Peacock by Kendra DeColo
I grew up watching films almost exclusively through a male gaze, and I eventually realized that there’s a male gaze in poetry. When I wrote about my sexuality, it was deliberate and joyful, a way to get a female gaze on male bodies. It’s been fun for me to write about naked men, to make a man an art object from a woman’s point of view.
An Interview with Aimee Bender by Claire Burgess
The worry about genre fiction is that because it operates in a kind of formulaic way, the writer will sort of turn out something that is also a formula. But that can happen with literary, realistic fiction, too, and in fact when it does it’s even more dastardly, because it’s sort of like faking something that’s supposed to be elevated.
An Interview with Lydia Peelle by Rebecca Bernard
I think that our place—that is, the people and history, industry, altitude and architecture, flora and fauna, geology and sky of wherever we might happen to find ourselves on a particular morning—greatly influences what we do, the choices we make, the moods we fall in to—in both conscious and subconscious ways.
An Interview with Jericho Brown by Kendra DeColo
What might be different in this book is the question of how people of my own generation feel about me being both black and gay. And when I say ‘me,’ I don’t mean me, obviously. I’m really interested in this other thing you said earlier—what’s the real Jericho Brown?
Fall 2010
An Interview with Jesse Ball by Matthew Baker
Oh, the exercises are many and intricate. One mustn’t say too much about them, of course. Suffice it to say, they are practical exercises, dealing with conditions of truth and untruth in the relations between the student and his/her friends, relations and acquaintances.
An Interview with Edward Hirsch by Zachary Greenberg
When I started writing poetry, if you had told me I was going to write about sports, I would’ve told you that you were out of your mind. I was playing sports all the time, but I wanted to write about Paul Klee, about going to the Art Institute of Chicago and discovering Edward Hopper.
Summer 2010
An Interview with D. A. Powell by Andrew Rahal
But… I am all boy, though, you know? I like to set firecrackers off.
An Interview with Glenn Patterson by Claire Burgess
So everything about that story was predictable: getting picked up and put in the back of a police car—you can imagine what might have happened in there, what I was afraid would happen in there—and in the end the police asking me to read my poems. They found my notebook of poems, and they looked through it and asked me to read them, and they clapped and said they weren’t sure what they meant, but they sounded quite nice.
An Interview with Steep Canyon Rangers by Zachary Greenberg
It’s a windy day, and we’re on stage in front of the biggest crowd of our life. You can’t see the back of the audience—it seems to go on forever.
An Interview with Jaime Zollars by Matthew Baker
My final critique in environmental design was by far the worst I’ve ever experienced. The instructor and the guest critic hated everything I had done. I believe their exact words were, “I really hate this, and see no redeeming qualities in it.” Then they decided they would tell me all of the specific things they hated about it and why.
Spring 2010
An Interview with Salvador Plascencia by Matthew Baker
“I’ll be the first to admit that the level of discourse has at times resembled the type of smack you would hear in a junior high cafeteria. And I’m not beyond slumping to it here.”
An Interview with Maira Kalman by Matthew Baker
“There are procrastination rituals. Washing the dishes. Etc. But I think of those acts as clearing the mind while water is running. Like working near a stream.”
An Interview with Beth Bachmann by Kendra DeColo
“There is something to be said for imminent danger and the threat of dog-on-dog violence. Things wild, things bred.”