Category: Interviews & Excerpts

“Electricity in this Dehydrated Landscape”: A Conversation with Vi Khi Nao by Mark Ari

Vi Khi Nao is a true original, a fabulously prolific artist whose curiosity, creative energy, and talent are apparently boundless. She writes poetry, fiction, drama, makes visual art, and juggles several developing manuscripts at once. She’s the sort of person who will learn a new language to collaborate on a book with someone from another…
“The Ratio of Books to Songs </= People to Cake": A Playlist by David James Keaton

Much like “Dave,” the protagonist in my new novel She Was Found in a Guitar Case, many people think I have terrible taste in music. And this is probably true. But an outsider (meaning someone without a reasonable grudge who just wants to hurt me by turning off my mixtapes mid-song) might also consider my…
“State of Decay”: A Georgia Poets’ Roundtable

Regionalisms abound in accounts of contemporary poetry, and the American South remains one of the most complex and productive of those literary regions. Yet, with the contemporary scene saturated with MFA and PhD degrees in creative writing, young poets often uproot and move cross-country to enroll in graduate programs. Add in the compounding factor that…
“Juggling a Hundred Objects, Some of Them on Fire”: An Interview with Lance Olsen, Author of Skin Elegies, by Marcus Pactor

Lance Olsen is one of America’s most formally inventive and intellectually stimulating novelists. Few writers have been as consistently excellent over the past thirty-plus years. In that time, he has evolved from a cutting-edge sci-fi writer into a wizard of form and narrative, infusing his singular works with poetically imaginative language as well as a…
“A Veiling and Unveiling and Veiling Again”: An Interview with Elisabeth Sheffield by Marcus Pactor

Elisabeth Sheffield is the sort of writer most writers only hope to become: a ventriloquist offering up voice after voice. Each of her voices expands and complicates her readers’ view of her fictional world. Together her voices suggest the impossibility of ever fully seeing either fictional or real world. But hers are not Beckettian voices…
“An Undercurrent of Darkness”: Bess Winter Interviews Jen Fawkes

Over the past several weeks I’ve been emailing back-and-forth with Jen Fawkes, author of Mannequin and Wife (LSU Press) and the recently released Tales the Devil Told Me (Press 53). Fawkes is a prolific writer whose work appears in One Story, Lit Hub, Crazyhorse, The Iowa Review, and elsewhere. She was also honored with the…
“The Sky Never Left the Sky”: Tiffany Troy Interviews Mai Der Vang

Mai Der Vang is the author of Yellow Rain (Graywolf Press, 2021), and Afterland (Graywolf Press, 2017), winner of the 2016 Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets, longlisted for the 2017 National Book Award in Poetry, and a finalist for the 2018 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. The recipient of a Lannan Literary…
“Spending Time with the Beast”: Maxwell Malone Interviews Darrin Doyle

Darrin Doyle is an author and English professor at Central Michigan University whose fiction has appeared in Puerto del Sol, The Long Story, Cottonwood, Alaska Quarterly Review, and other publications. He has written two novels, Revenge of the Teachers Pet: A Love Story and The Girl Who Ate Kalamazoo, and has published three short story…
“Defiance and Dilemmas”: An Interview with Michael J. Seidlinger by Hillary Leftwich

Is writing an act of defiance itself? Or do the dilemmas we face as writers push us into acts of defiance? Michael J. Seidlinger and I got comfy and chatted back and forth via email over a week’s timespan and sunk our literary teeth into the emotions involved with writing—more importantly, the defiance that often…