Category: Interviews & Excerpts

“Forsaken”: Gay Degani Interviews Jayne Martin

A stick of dynamite is about the size of a banana. It doesn’t necessarily look dangerous, but it carries with it a huge blast. This little book reminds me of TNT. I thumb open the The Daddy Chronicles and find the prologue is titled “Ode to the Lone Sperm” followed by this first sentence “Eager…
“A Brief Flash of Strangeness”: Adam McPhee in Conversation with Eric Williams

Eric Williams is a writer living on the lithified remains of a Cretaceous Seaway in Austin, TX. His fiction has appeared in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Protean, and Firmament, and he’s been nominated for a Pushcart and Best Small Fictions. His first book, Toadstones, is a collection of short stories firmly in the tradition of the weird…
“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…