Category: Interviews & Excerpts

“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…
“The Power of Kayfabe”: An Interview with Box Brown by Dan Mancilla

The accolades continue to pile up for artist and graphic novelist Box Brown. Aside from his Ignaz Award, his publishing house, Retrofit Comics, continues to put out quality independent graphic art. And aside from all that, of course, Brown’s labor of love, Andre the Giant: Life and Legend (First Second Books, 2014), spent three weeks on…
“Virtuosic Metaphors, Verbing Nouns, and Kaleidoscoping Adjectives”: An Interview with Lee Ann Roripaugh by Jillian M. Phillips

When you come across a poetry collection with a word you’re not familiar with as the title, and a picture of some sort of cocooned humanoid on the sun-yellow cover, you’re bound to be intrigued. Buy that book. That book is Lee Ann Roripaugh’s fourth collection, Dandarians (Milkweed Editions, 2014), and is as mysterious and…
“Animals Appear out of Nowhere”: An Interview with David James Poissant by Dana Diehl

David James Poissant’s debut short story collection, The Heaven of Animals (Simon & Schuster) was released last year to great critical acclaim. Among its accolades, the collection was named one of Amazon’s Best Short Story Collections of 2014, One of Atlanta Journal Constitution’s 9 Best Books of 2014, Best Short Story Collection of the Year by Tweed’s Magazine, Winner of GLCA…
“To Escape to Something Beyond the World”: Matt Weinkam Interviews Joanna Ruocco

Joanna Ruocco has been busy. In the last five years, she has written five books, including A Compendium of Domestic Incidents, which won the 2009 Noemi Press Fiction Chapbook Contest, and Another Governess / The Least Blacksmith, which won the FC2 Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize judged by Ben Marcus. She published stories in Conjunctions,…