Category: Interviews & Excerpts

“My Own Sad Little Kind of Prayer”: An Interview with Gregory Lawless by Jack Christian

The poems of Gregory Lawless’s Far Away (Red Mountain Press, 2015/Red Mountain Poetry Prize) all deal with various figurations of distance—distance as a bringer of insight, as a form of estrangement, and as a synonym of loss and uncertainty. As these poems rove over the ruined fields of northeastern Pennsylvania, we encounter a speaker who…
“Stealing Breath”: An Interview with Bryn Chancellor by Erin Flanagan

Bryn Chancellor’s collection When Are You Coming Home? won the 2014 Prairie Schooner Book Prize. Her stories have appeared in Gulf Coast, Colorado Review, Crazyhorse, and elsewhere. She has received the Poets & Writers Maureen Egen Writers Exchange Award in fiction, literary fellowships from the Alabama State Council on the Arts and the Arizona Commission…
“Moving Beyond Humanness”: An Interview with Carol Guess & Kelly Magee by Dana Diehl

A girl sheds jellyfish from her skin. A man grows a Joey in his artificial womb. One woman buzzes with locusts, while another carries a sparrow in her chest. A bank teller adopts a baby hippo he finds in a baby hatch. A man’s girlfriend gives birth to a live school of fish. In their…
“The Whole World Around You Is Sort of Decomposing”: An Interview with Stefan Kiesbye by Robyn Ringler

Stefan Kiesbye and I first met at the University of Tampa, where I was a student in the low-residency MFA program. Stefan was a faculty member. While he was not my direct mentor, he taught many classes and workshops, and generously shared his views on fiction with me and other students. I felt I knew…
“When You Look Away, What Do You Choose to See?”: Bayard Godsave in Interview with George McCormick

George McCormick is the author of two books of fiction. Both are marked by a strong sense of place, the American West specifically, and a poet’s ear for language. The opening story in his short story collection Salton Sea (Noemi Press, 2012), “The Mexican,” earned him a PEN/O. Henry prize in 2012. Inland Empire (Queen’s Ferry Press,…
“Prone to Marauding Poems”: An Interview with Lisa Gluskin-Stonestreet by Jane Huffman

Lisa Gluskin-Stonestreet is the author of The Greenhouse (Bull City Press, 2014), selected by David Baker for the Frost Place Poetry Chapbook Prize. Tulips, Water, Ash was selected by Jean Valentine for the Morse Poetry Prize and published by University Press of New England in 2009. Her poems have appeared in Cream City Review, At Length, Blackbird, The Iowa Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, 32 Poems, Quarterly…
“One Time I Met a Swaggering Expat in a Japanese Convenience Store Who Gave Me a Lecture on His Theory of Novels”: An Interview with Tote Hughes by David Rawson

In reading Tote Hughes’ novella Fountain (Miami University Press), I was taken by the quirky, beautiful timelessness of the prose and characters. As Amber Sparks, author of May We Shed These Human Bodies, has said, “Tote Hughes’ Fountain is one of the strangest books I’ve come across in years, and I mean that as an…
“None of Them Are Interested in Leaving a Cloud Unnamed”: An Interview with Mike Young of Magic Helicopter Press by Jane Wong

This past AWP, Magic Helicopter Press released its newest collection, Jordan Stempleman’s Wallop, on “a dirty Southwestern blanket that a spider fell out of.” MHP is a small press full of exploding spider energy that focuses on print books, eBooks, chapbooks, multimedia poetry, and reading tours (also check out NOO Journal). I had the pleasure of talking…
“Remote, Desolate, and Hard to Survive”: An Interview with Iver Arnegard by Linda Michel-Cassidy

In his collection Whip & Spur, Iver Arnegard writes wildness and isolation—the desert mesa, winter in Montana, the middle-of-nowhereness of North Dakota—places where making it to tomorrow is a daily occupation. For those who may be conjuring ideas of bucolic streams and lazy bunny-filled vistas—these are not those stories. Instead of romanticizing the rural, Arnegard…