Category: Interviews & Excerpts

“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…
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…
“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…
“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…
“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…
“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…
“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…
“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…
“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…