Category: Interviews & Excerpts
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“Genuine and True”: An Interview with Melissa Fraterrigo by Erin Flanagan
Melissa Fraterrigo’s first novel in stories, Glory Days, captures the desperation and beauty of living in the hardscrabble Midwest. Populated by fathers and daughters, lovers and enemies, the living and the dead, these characters struggle to figure out what they want and how to get it, along with the complicated order of what they need…
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“You Never Know What You’ll See”: A Conversation with B.J. Hollars by Ashely Adams
“Once upon a time there lived a bird and then that bird stopped living.” The straight-forward narrative of the Ivory billed woodpecker is the first line B.J. Hollars’ Flock Together: A Love Affair with Extinct Birds, but this is more than a book about a bird. Hollars leads us through museum collections, Christmas Bird Counts,…
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“We’re Still Doing Things Within the Realm of What We’re Fit For”: An Interview with Keith Lesmeister by Linda Michel-Cassidy
Keith Lesmeister’s new collection of short stories, We Could’ve Been Happy Here, investigates the spectacle of the everyday. Set in the Midwest, his characters are relatable because of their wants, their bad choices, their ways of dealing with their lives. Lesmeister’s take is pragmatic, often humorous, and deeply felt. His attention to and honor for…
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Short Story Excerpt: “Mitzvah” from Pamela Ryder’s Paradise Field
Interconnected stories depicting the last years of a WWII bomber pilot, his relationship with his daughter as both child and adult, and his drift into infirmity and death. When life dwindles to its irrevocable conclusion, recollections are illuminated, even unto the grave. Such is the narrative of Paradise Field: A Novel in Stories, whose title is…
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Fiction: Excerpt of Jorge Armenteros’ Novel The Roar of the River
Following the musical structure of the 17th century fugue, the narrative voices succeed each other until coming together in a polyphonic search for light among the darkness of their origins. Set in a perched village of the French Alps, between a roaring river and the moonlight, a man dressed in a striped tunic seeks encounters…
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Poetry: Excerpts from Margo Berdeshevsky’s Before the Drought
Before the Drought is a lyric meditation on corporeal existence, suffused with atavistic spirit and set in historical as well as cosmic time, a work of radical suffering and human indifference but also sensual transport. The tutelary spirits of these poems are the feminine principle, and a flock of messengers that include blue heron, ibis, phoenix,…
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Exclusive Interview: Benefit Album for Chelsea Manning Organized Thanks to Trans/Genderqueer Activist Evan Greer
The journalist, singer/songwriter, and activist has called on some of the biggest names in the music industry to support the US Army soldier and whistleblower. By Bernadette Giacomazzo Image: Chelsea Manning Instagram The name “Chelsea Manning” invokes a wide variety of reactions—people think she’s either a patriot or a traitor, a freedom fighter or a terrorist,…
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“Your Tongue Will Berate You”: An Interview with Vi Khi Nao by Hillary Leichter
When you open the first pages of Fish in Exile, it is clear: you are conversing with a poet. Language is effortless and strange, glorious in its dexterity and rhythm. Each sentence has the capability to corner you, kiss you, crush you. This is story of Ethos and Catholic, a husband and wife who are…
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Excerpt: My Shadow Book by Maawaam (Edited by Jordan A. Rothacker)
Editor’s Preface: In the summer of 2011 I discovered Maawaam’s being in a box. The form his being took in that box was in journals, scraps of paper, scribbled on leaves, photographs, and drawings. The journals were the most significant abundance of being. For the last six years I have studied his being in the…
Heavy Feather Review 