From the Blog

10 Questions for Robert Evory

September 16, 2019 - By Catherine Fox

“My dream awakens after sleep. I cannot swear
these are my hands. The night is probing the air
for bodies asking a little grace from the watery moon.”
—from “Trying to Pray,” Volume 60, Issue 2 (Summer 2019)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
As an undergraduate I took a class with Mary Ruefle. On the first day of class she asked a similar question and requested we bring in that early poem. I brought one in that used an image of a fly as an extended metaphor for love or being jaded about relationships or something. The point of the exercise was to note how our vocabulary and subject matter has changed from the time of our first poem. Many years later, when I got married, I realized...

9 Questions for Adam J. Sorkin

September 13, 2019 - By Christin Howard

“When I shook hands with him
his hand remained in my hand
that’s how he is, generous, I told myself
 as I tried to get rid of his warm hand
that grasped my own ever more tightly” —From "Two Snails Stuck to My Cheeks," by Matei Visniec, translated by Adam J. Sorkin and Lidia Vianu, Summer 2019 (Vol. 60, Issue 2)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you translated.
I never imagined myself a translator...

Don’t Call African-American Theatre Black Theatre: It’s Like Calling a Dog a Cat

September 12, 2019 - By Dominic Taylor

(Wadsworth Jarrell, Heritage (1973), The Cleveland Museum of Art. With kind permission of the artist.)
 

I’ve been trying to find a way to frame an idea, and I believe my somewhat pithy title above basically catches it.

When social upheavals occur, people do many things to find solace, including looking to pets for comfort. What is true of pets will also help us understand certain recent cultural phenomena. In short, what I have in mind is not just an assessment involving nomenclature or semantics; I’m thinking about what a work of art or entertainment fundamentally is. Dogs and cats are both contemporary domestic animals, yet anyone who has had either can attest to the fact that they are very different life forms.

With the election of the...

10 Questions for Lidia Vianu

September 10, 2019 - By Christin Howard

“it’s true that we’d been very close
but never did I imagine that
I’d see him flayed right before my eyes
with his heart tumbling down to my feet
just because we were going to say goodbye” —From "Two Snails Stuck to My Cheek," by Matei Visniec, translated by Adam J. Sorkin and Lidia Vianu, Summer 2019 (Vol. 60, Issue 2)

 Tell us about one of the first pieces you translated.
It was Joyce Carol Oates, followed by Joseph Conrad, Mirror of the Sea.

The former was—miraculously, for communist times in Romania—published in our then best world literature magazine. It was my one-time publication before 1990.  The latter took some twenty years to go to print...

(Not Quite) 10 Questions for Susanna Brougham

September 6, 2019 - By Christin Howard

 The lake moves, blue to blue. Runnels, droplets,
oar-lifted slap dull chimes against gunwales.

The blue dress and white kerchief are a young woman
crossing what she can’t escape. She forces
a calm, makes 
a quiet pool of herself. —from "A Finnish Lake," Summer 2019 (Vol. 60, Issue 2)

Is there a city or place, real or imagined, that influences your writing?
Finland, for sure. It is a real place, of course, yet also an imagined place, for me. All my grandparents were born there, and it has fascinated me from an early age. For...