Author: Heavy Feather

Poetry: “God Responds [to the Proust Questionnaire]” by Jubi Arriola-Headley

The Proust Questionnaire has its origins in a parlor game popularized (though not devised) by Marcel Proust, the French essayist and novelist, who believed that, in answering these questions, an individual reveals [their] true nature. —Vanity Fair Where the typical journalistic interview tailors questions to the particular qualities of a subject, the Proust questionnaire’s unchanging…
Haunted Passages Flash Fiction: “That Year in the Valley” by Andrew Bertaina

I hated everything that year we lived in the valley. The small house with moss-covered shingles, the way the mice scurried beneath the floorboards at night, and the way the rain fell in sheets every time we put clothes on the line, such that my memories always include damp jeans. Mornings, I’d wake to the…
Nonfiction Review: Karin Falcone Krieger Reads Kristina Marie Darling’s Essay Collection Look to Your Left

Prolific author and champion of experiment Kristina Marie Darling reveals a thriving culture of feminist poetics in this recent collection of critical essays, as well as using the lyric essay to expose the dark side of sexism in academic circles. In a spare 140 pages, this collection has many characteristics of a conventional academic text.…
“Our Flaws Can Define Our Growth”: An Interview with Jay Halsey by Gina Tron

Jay Halsey’s poems and prose have been published in several online and print journals and nominated for Pushcart and Best of the Net. He was born and raised in Dayton, Ohio, and has lived on the Colorado Front Range for the past seventeen years. His photography has been used as cover art for poetry collections and…
Allison Wyss Interviews Farah Ali about Her Debut Novel The River, The Town

Farah Ali’s The River, The Town is a gorgeous first novel about a Pakistani family navigating poverty, drought, and generational trauma. Farah and I spoke on September 27 about climate disaster around the world, how desperate circumstances lead her characters to make unexpected choices, and the idea that it’s not just food and water that’s…
“But the Nightingale”: William Lessard Interviews Diane Seuss

Diane Seuss is the author of six books of poetry. frank: sonnets won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry and the PEN/Voelcker Prize. Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times…
Haunted Passages Nonfiction: “Ghost Beach” by Asha Dore

Every Friday after Grief Group, Jen took me on blind dates. The first two dates had been a boring bust, watching dudes light up bowls of bad weed in their parents’ basement. “Sophomores are so immature,” Jen said, passing me a joint. I sat in the passenger seat of her ancient 4Runner, parked in front…
New Short Comic for Side A: “Young Lions” by Hal Flower

Mini-interview with Hal Flower HFR: Can you share a moment that has shaped you as a writer (or continues to)? HF: While attending a series of screenings of Krzysztof Kieślowski’s The Decalogue, I came to understand that the writer’s aspiration ought to be clarity, not complexity. HFR: What are you reading? HF: Having recently finished…
Poetry Review: Nathan D. Metz Reads Marisa Lin’s Dream Elevator

Of all our wonderful and slightly un-universal definitions we have for poetry, perhaps the one most present and pressing to our twenty-first-century imaginations is that poetry, by its mere existence, is an attempt to reckon with movement—its nature, reasons, and consequences. In Marisa Lin’s first chapbook Dream Elevator,a title that invokes both physical and psychic…