Category: Interviews & Excerpts
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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…
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“If There’s a Window—a New Possibility”: Allison Wyss Talks to Mary Lynn Reed
Mary Lynn Reed is a fiction writer and mathematician—but I’ve learned she’s also a photographer, shark-level pool player, and ace bowler. Her debut collection Phantom Advances has a bit of all that. It’s a deep exploration of questions of identity, sexuality, and gender—with a sharp focus and a lot of heart. She and I talked…
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“I Cherish the Act of Sentencing”: Marcus Pactor Interviews Lance Olsen
Lance Olsen is one of America’s most formally inventive and intellectually stimulating novelists. Few writers have been as consistently excellent over the past thirty-plus years. In that time, he has evolved from a cutting-edge sci-fi writer into a wizard of form and narrative, infusing his singular works with poetically imaginative language as well as a…
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“A Hallucinatory Clarity”: Marcus Pactor in Conversation with Angela Woodward
Angela Woodward works both unlikely and widely known history into her slim fictions. In her new novel, Ink, she weaves together (among other things) the origin of PDFs, the transcripts of Abu Ghraib detainee testimonies, the life and work of Francis Ponge, and the strangely moving lives of typists. The result offers a brief, memorable…
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“Car-X”: An Excerpt from Angela Woodward’s New Novel Ink
“We have extensive accounts, typed out neatly: ‘They took me into a dark room and started hitting me on the head and stomach and legs. I stayed in this room for 5 days, naked, with no clothes.’” Angela Woodward’s novel Ink tells the story of the two women who spend their days doing that neat typing. Sylvia…
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“That Poetry Could Be Something Not So Insular”: An Interview with Luke Stromberg by John Wall Berger
Luke Stromberg has lived in Upper Darby, just outside of Philadelphia, his whole life. His poetry has been published in many prestigious journals, and he is finally, at forty years old, releasing his much-anticipated debut collection, The Elephant’s Mouth (Kelsay Books, 2022). Stromberg is well known as a long-time organizer of the West Chester University…
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“Masks” for Haunted Passages: Short Story Excerpt from How to See Ghosts & Other Figments, a new collection by Orrin Grey
When it comes to short fiction, Orrin Grey is a magician, a practitioner of an arcane art inspired by the likes of Méliès, Welles, and Bradbury. Through literary legerdemain and stylistic sleight-of-hand, he takes the well-told weird tale into a realm of the supernatural, the uncanny, the theatrical, and, most importantly, the entertaining. And entertainment…
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Review & Interview: Kristina T. Saccone on Sue Mell’s Giving Care
“I need more pills.” My mom’s texts arrive throughout my day—during back-to-back work meetings, while I’m driving to pick up my seven-year old son from school, and at all hours. “I need more pills.” “Can you get me more meds. I’ve run out.” But she isn’t out of pills; my mom has dementia. The texts…
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“Believe with Me”: An Interview with Zach VandeZande by Dana Diehl
When I learned Zach VandeZande had a new short story collection coming out, I jumped at the opportunity to read it early. I already knew I loved his work from encountering it in journals and in his first collection, Liminal Domestic. VandeZande’s stories are both melancholic and hopeful. He approaches his characters with tenderness, but also…
Heavy Feather Review 