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10 Questions for Hanna Leliv

February 3, 2025 - By Franchesca Viaud

     The woman who was once caught by the air raid siren while she was taking a bath was most afraid of dying like that—without her panties, naked, with wet hair and hairy legs; 
     afraid that the first responders who would pull her from the rubble would see her white body with cellulite prominent on her thighs and a soft, sagging belly she had learned to pull in with corrective underwear and think, "Who prepares for death like that? She could've at least lost a few pounds and worked out for a few months";
—from...

10 Questions for Chelsea Dingman

January 27, 2025 - By Franchesca Viaud

Cut yourself on the refrigerator
light in the kitchen, & tell no one that you meant to
                       unsheath the rain.

Cure your thirst by swallowing the bath
-water inside the baby. 
—from Chelsea Dingman's "Protocols for Assessing Depression" Volume 65, Issue 3 (Fall 2024)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
My father died in a car accident in a blizzard when I was nine. The...

10 Questions for Marissa Davis

January 13, 2025 - By Franchesca Viaud

This morning, something in my doubt dissolves.
The footprint or the transparency of floors.
The wells open up. Sometimes, the wells close again.
The added materials haven’t allowed the decision anything.
Footsteps must swell, take up bone. The wells must rise.
—from Marissa Davis' translation of Stéphanie Ferrat's "Skyside" Volume 65, Issue 3 (Fall 2024)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you translated.
Technically, one of the first pieces I translated was my own! Before I began translating others’ work, I would sometimes translate my own poems into French and back into English as a combined revision (of the poem) and vocabulary-building (of my French) exercise. I first began...

10 Questions for Michael Lee

January 6, 2025 - By Franchesca Viaud

There is an old joke I heard one winter,
one popular among the farmers
from Trøndelag to Nord-Norge:

two deer run along the railroad.
One says to the other, we have to get off
these tracks and into the forest.
—from Michael Lee's "Norway's Iron Road," Volume 65, Issue 2 (Summer 2024)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
The first piece of any significance (we’ll leave the middle school poems about elves and such out of this) was a poem called The Taking of Lead, (it would become my first published poem in 2013). I was living in Bergen Norway in 2012 and was very sick with Mono. I couldn’t leave the house and spent every day just reading and writing poems...

10 Questions for Marguerite Sheffer

December 9, 2024 - By Franchesca Viaud

Russ Brings all the wrong books to my hospital room, which is tucked into a corner of the birthing center. How was he to know I’d already finished that novel? Back at our house, all my books flounder in inscrutable piles. I hadn’t arranged them to be legible to anyone else. Of course, no one predicts a car accident; we didn’t expect to be T-boned on the way home from Costco, trunk full of perishables.
—from "Wire Nanosecond" Volume 65, Issue 3 (Fall 2024)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
Ever?! One of the very first pieces I wrote, in 5th grade, was a historical fiction story about a girl in, I think, vaguely the 1500s. She was a peasant who worked in a winery and I remember I made her walk...