Blog / 10 Questions

(Almost) 10 Questions for Susie Meserve

July 20, 2023 - By Lara Stecewycz

I hate AJ, Sam says, he steals
my blocks and punches me. AJ
didn't go to preschool. Here in the kitchen
my son narrates his day: phonics, Play-Doh,
the device he calls sand timer whisking away
choice time.
—from "Bioluminescence," Volume 64, Issue 2 (Summer 2023)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
Fourth grade, a poem called “Breeze.” Everyone around me was in agony over the assignment—we had to write acrostics about some kind of weather, then illustrate them—but I finished mine in record time. I thought, what’s so hard about writing poetry? Little did I know.

In high school, I wanted terribly to write good poetry. I was reading...

10 Questions for Colin Bailes

July 11, 2023 - By Lara Stecewycz

Less his offense and more

the punishment, how Actaeon was pursued
by his own hounds,

devoured by that which he thought he had tamed—
is that what I mean when I say

I, too, watched hunger
consume me?
—from “Actaeon,” Vol. 64, Issue 2 (Summer 2023)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
This is a difficult question to answer because I started writing dreadfully embarrassing song lyrics when I was very young—throughout middle school—and transitioned to what you might call poetry my freshman or sophomore year of high school. Even then, though, I wasn’t writing anything noteworthy, although I certainly thought I was at the time. The same could be said of the poetry I wrote...

10 Questions with Emily Flouton

July 3, 2023 - By Franchesca Viaud

Al had not been blessed with charm. Or pleasing aspect. Or verve. Or intellect, that I could discern, though she must have had some scrap of it to have gained acceptance in the first instance. She was a lumpen thing, all fuzzy hair, pigeon toes, and befuddled grin, her broad back humping round under that filthy yellow backpack, flouting our lofty ideals with her very existence. This was unforgivable to me.
—from "Invasive Species," Vol. 64, Issue 2 (Summer 2023)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
In second grade, I wrote a story about my teacher called “Why Are You So Crazy?” I gave it to my teacher as a gift. In my memory, she thought I was a genius and acknowledged that she was indeed crazy, but my mother...

10 Questions with Jane Zwart

June 27, 2023 - By Franchesca Viaud

After I persuade
my students there is
a name for everything,

for days I mull on what
to call the kind of kind
dissembling I've done.
—from "Dustsceawung," Vol. 64, Issue 2 (Summer 2023)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
Once I read an interview where Shane McCrae talked about reading some of his earliest published poems. Years had passed, and McCrae’s style and voice had changed, and he noted that, of course. But what I loved was how he regarded those early pieces without embarrassment. It felt like, in fact, he looked on them as sweet, bemusing reminders of the way he used to write. I would like to have that relationship with my oldest poems.

Instead, I am a little...

10 Questions for Lauren Camp

June 22, 2023 - By Edward Clifford

Right when the dissector picks up the eye, I notice the sun
has already found a place to bruise with light.

With slight pressure, she shifts the pink flesh and muscle.
That eye can't see to ask its paths. Or fact its ransom.
—from "Blind Spot," Volume 64, Issue 1 (Spring 2023)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
The one that comes to mind is my poem, “Slow.” It’s four quatrains and perhaps the only one of my poems I have fully memorized. The poem circles around the beauty of New Mexico, but also the dangers. A bark beetle blight had devastated a massive number of piñon trees here in the high desert. The trees were vulnerable to the infestation because of drought. Ironically, I...