Category: Interviews & Excerpts
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“Strange Juxtapositions”: Marcus Pactor Interviews Babak Lakghomi
Babak Lakghomi’s disturbing fiction builds intensity and paranoia with its constant suggestion of growing but never-fully-seen darkness stalking beneath the muscular prose. His latest work, South, is a strangely seductive dystopian novel. In it, a journalist named B. is asked to report on labor strife in a distant region of his country. But his interviews…
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Matt L. Roar & Niina Pollari Discuss Their New Poetry Books, MY WAR and Path of Totality
I first read Niina Pollari’s Path of Totality on a plane and was immediately torn between giving into the book, allowing myself to weep my way from JFK to SFO, or to pull myself together and not thoroughly weird-out the passenger in the neighboring seat. Niina’s book is funny and smart and sad and intimate enough…
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“Secret Rewards” Craft Essay: Jolene McIlwain on Writing PTSD in Fiction
You don’t want to think it’s your heart. You want to think it’s a pulled muscle, pinched nerve, or bad posture because you’ve always forgotten and slouched. But you agree to the stress test because if it is your heart, this is an early find. You’re only forty-seven. There’s time to repair. It’s been happening…
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“Ashenfolk”: William Lessard Interviews Joseph Mosconi + 6 Exclusive Poems
Joseph Mosconi is a writer, editor, and curator based in Los Angeles. A former Google computational linguist, he is the executive director of the Poetic Research Bureau (PRB), a hybrid arts space that hosts weekly readings, performances, and films by today’s most progressive poets and artists. Mosconi is also a co-founder and programmer at 2220…
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“Hills, Valleys, Bluffs, Rivers, Streams, Steep Ravines”: An Interview with Keith Pilapil Lesmeister by Giano Cromely
When a friend sent me a copy of Keith Pilapil Lesmeister’s chapbook, Mississippi River Museum, along with the message that she thought it might be up my alley, I didn’t know what to expect. It’s hard to be aware of one’s own literary alleys, or at least what others perceive those alleys to be, so…
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“I Have No Master, Whilst I Have No Clue”: An Interview with Zak Ferguson by Patrick Parks
Zak Ferguson describes himself as “an autistic experimental author, living in Brighton, UK, and co-founder (along with fiancée Laura-Jane Marshall) of the innovative, boundary-pushing Sweat Drenched Press.” In addition to his editorial duties—which include everything from reading submissions to formatting the books to designing the covers—he spends his spare time reviewing books and films for…
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John Elizabeth Stintzi in Conversation with Cameron Finch about My Volcano
John Elizabeth Stintzi is a non-binary writer, artist, and editor who grew up on a cattle farm in northwestern Ontario. Their work has been awarded the 2019 RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers, The Malahat Review’s 2019 Long Poem Prize, the Sator New Works Award, and has been shortlisted for the Amazon Canada First…
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“This World We Are Constructing”: An Interview with Alyssa Quinn by Nina Shope
Alyssa Quinn’s debut novel, Habilis, takes place in a mysterious anthropology museum that converts into a disco club at night. When Lucy, a young woman with an uncertain past, finds herself thrust into this museum, she must confront her own origins—and, all the more difficult, the origins of the human species itself. Quinn is the author of…
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“To Not Get Crystallized into Habits and Things”: Jacob Smullyan in Conversation with Paolo Pergola
Paolo Pergola is the author of Passaggi—avventure di un autostoppista (Rides: The Adventures of a Hitchhiker) (Exorma, 2013) and Attraverso la finestra di Snell (Through Snell’s Window) (Italo Svevo Edizione, 2019). His work has appeared in several Italian literary magazines. He is a member of OPLEPO/Opificio di Letteratura Potenziale (Workshop of Potential Literature), Italy’s equivalent of France’s OULIPO. He…
Heavy Feather Review 