Category: Interviews & Excerpts

“Finding the Ghost in Hoarded Objects”: William Lessard Interviews Kate Durbin

Kate Durbin’s art and writing have been featured in The New York Times, Art in America, Artforum, The Believer, BOMB, poets.org, American Poetry Review, and elsewhere. Her books of poetry include Hoarders, E! Entertainment, The Ravenous Audience, and ABRA, which won the 2017 international Turn On Literature Prize. In the following interview, Durbin discusses how…
“Towards Love”: Cameron Finch Interviews Erin Stalcup

Erin Stalcup is a big-hearted human who writes novels with her blood. What I mean is that when Erin cares about somethings, someones—she goes all in. She is radical and boundary-pushing in all aspects of her life: writing, parenting, teaching. She naturally surges towards narratives that decolonize and invigorate readers to consider the many possibilities…
This Is Symbiosis, a video performance for the 2021 Friends in Letters Memorial Fellowship

This Is Symbiosis is a deeply personal project they undertook to reflect on—and celebrate—their evolving friendship over time, through slice-of-life vignettes written by Brenna and accompanying illustrations designed by Ansel. The video incorporates a soundtrack for the piece, with keyboard accompaniment composed and performed by Brenna and audio recordings integrated by Ansel. In biology, the…
“Numbering, Headings, Weird Animal Facts”: Gay Degani Interviews Lynn Mundell, author of Let Our Bodies Be Returned to Us

Lynn Mundell’s writing has been published in literary journals including Tin House, The Sun, Booth, and Five Points, and in the W. W. Norton anthology New Micro: Exceptionally Short Fiction. Her work has placed in the Wigleaf Top 50 Very Short Fictions, short and long listed between 2017 and 2020, and won the 2019 Lascaux…
“My Dog Is That One”: Angelo Maneage Interviewed by Zach Savich

“It felt right to be coughing on the ground,” Angelo Maneage tells us in The Improper Use of Plates, his remarkable chapbook of poems. His work is rich with that kind of off-kilter “rightness.” They get “horny in a different way,” slide on their stomachs, crawl around, cough up transmissions that flicker like a “blue bubble…
“The Land of All Time”: William Lessard Interviews Clark Coolidge + Six Exclusive Poems

For six decades, Clark Coolidge has been presenting language awash in information, with jarring and frequently hilarious syntax. Although frequently associated the Language School and the New York School, his work reflects his life-long dedication to jazz drumming and an improvisational poetics that takes in the entire world. In the following interview, Coolidge talks about…
“Forsaken”: Gay Degani Interviews Jayne Martin

A stick of dynamite is about the size of a banana. It doesn’t necessarily look dangerous, but it carries with it a huge blast. This little book reminds me of TNT. I thumb open the The Daddy Chronicles and find the prologue is titled “Ode to the Lone Sperm” followed by this first sentence “Eager…
“A Brief Flash of Strangeness”: Adam McPhee in Conversation with Eric Williams

Eric Williams is a writer living on the lithified remains of a Cretaceous Seaway in Austin, TX. His fiction has appeared in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Protean, and Firmament, and he’s been nominated for a Pushcart and Best Small Fictions. His first book, Toadstones, is a collection of short stories firmly in the tradition of the weird…
“Electricity in this Dehydrated Landscape”: A Conversation with Vi Khi Nao by Mark Ari

Vi Khi Nao is a true original, a fabulously prolific artist whose curiosity, creative energy, and talent are apparently boundless. She writes poetry, fiction, drama, makes visual art, and juggles several developing manuscripts at once. She’s the sort of person who will learn a new language to collaborate on a book with someone from another…