Category: Interviews & Excerpts

“Human Tetris”: A Collaborative Exposé from Vi Khi Nao & Ali Raz

Ryan Bollenbach here. Heavy Feather Review is publishing short pieces on the blog from writers who have collaborated on previous projects in order to give potential collaborators ideas and stoke excitement for The Zachary Doss Friends in Letters Memorial Fellowship (collaboration itself being the biggest takeaway I hope to create from all this). Please read…
“Making SMUT”: A Google Docs Chat between Mike Corrao and Inside the Castle Publisher John Trefry

Ryan Bollenbach here. Starting today, Heavy Feather Review is publishing short pieces on the blog from writers who have collaborated on previous projects in order to give potential collaborators ideas and stoke excitement for The Zachary Doss Friends in Letters Memorial Fellowship (collaboration itself being the biggest takeaway I hope to create from all this).…
“Sixty-Four Opportunities in the Snap of a Finger”: Davis Schneiderman & Ruth Ozeki Discuss Her Novel A Tale for the Time Being

“A time being is someone who lives in time, and that means you, and me, and every one of us who is, or was, or ever will be.”—Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being Lake Forest Reads: Ragdale is a community reads program in partnership with the Ragdale Foundation, Lake Forest College, and the Friends…
“Midwest Antique Mall, Financial Troubles, Kidnapping, Etc.”: Alex Higley Talks to Luke Geddes, Author of Heart of Junk

Luke Geddes and I first bonded on Twitter over our shared admiration for the little-loved novelist Wright Morris. Like much of Morris’s work, Geddes’s novel Heart of Junk, published by Simon & Schuster in January, follows an idiosyncratic assortment of distinctly Midwestern characters whose chief—or perhaps only—commonality is the place they live: Wichita, Kansas, or to…
“A Cadaver Is Filled with Plenty of Material Activity”: Mike Corrao Talks to B.R. Yeager, Author of the Horror Novel Negative Space

I recently had the chance to sit down with B.R. Yeager and discuss his upcoming book Negative Space, which will be coming out from Apocalypse Party in March 2020. Negative Space is an unsettling novel exploring the occult experiences of teenagers as they navigate their lives in a rural town. B.R. Yeager reps Western Massachusetts.…
“Resonance Is a Very Personal Thing”: Hillary Leftwich Chats with Teague von Bohlen, author of the flash fiction collection Flatland

Teague von Bohlen is a Midwestern man at heart, and his latest collection, Flatland, represents, both verbally as well as visually, the heartbreak, trauma, and desolation that embody the Midwest region where von Bohlen was born and raised. A Colorado Book Award winner, professor, and editor, von Bohlen and I had a week-long email conversation…
“Ten Songs, the Sound of Ambient Noise, and the Clanking of Chains”: A Playlist by Andrew Rihn

My book Revelation: An Apocalypse in Fifty-Eight Fights has the honor of being the first book released through Press 53’s new Immersion Poetry Series. The series aims to highlight writing that immerses its readers in the unfamiliar, providing entrance to subcultures, niches, and other unconventional spaces. The series editor, Christopher Forrest, likens the Series to…
“Leave Them Wanting More”: Gay Degani Interviews Tender Cuts Author Jayne Martin

Jayne Martin, author of the collection of tiny stories, Tender Cuts (Vine Leaves Press, 2019), is hailed as “A badass writer if ever there was one,” by no less than the Grand Dame of flash fiction, Kathy Fish. This is terrific praise and well earned. The book itself is beautifully rendered from its heart-in-hand cover…
“mother, child : art doesn’t help,” an excerpt from Lance Olsen’s novel My Red Heaven

Set on a single day in 1927, My Red Heaven imagines a host of characters—some historic, some invented—crossing paths on the streets of Berlin. The subjects include Robert Musil, Otto Dix, Werner Heisenberg, Anita Berber, Vladimir Nabokov, Käthe Kollwitz, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Rosa Luxemburg—as well as others history has forgotten: a sommelier, a murderer,…