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10 Questions for Wakaya Wells

February 23, 2023 - By Edward Clifford

Our old ones are dying. Their parents restrained every syllable. the children floated away from their homes to boarding schools. graveyards, and war zones. It is my fifth day in the hospital. Outside for the first time. I hold my medicine bag in my pocket, and I think about Granny Marie. A dandelion stands out amidst a patch of grass.
—From "Snake Dance," Volume 63, Issue 4 (Winter 2022)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
The first piece that I ever got published was a poem called "The Falling." I wrote it as an underclassmen in college, and was thinking a lot about drought and leaving the church. The opening line was one that had stuck in my mind for awhile and I don't remember the original reason it...

10 Questions for Christine Barkley

February 21, 2023 - By Edward Clifford

"I am a writer," and I hate this part. I am a writer, so I am grateful for the requisite third-person: she is a writer and she hates writing about herself.

This is her name. This is where she lives, and how. Here are a few facts that are true but safe, carefully chosen for mass appeal. This is how she wants to be seen.
—from "Third-Person Bio," Volume 63, Issue 4 (Winter 2022)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
My elementary school had an artist-in-residence program, and when I was in second grade my class worked with a local poet. One of our assignments was to write about a day of the week, so I wrote a poem about how Tuesdays are blue. At the time, I felt that I was being completely literal—...

10 Questions for Zefyr Lisowski

February 14, 2023 - By Edward Clifford

The process of becoming sick may be familiar to you,
or it may not. First, I had unexpected pain. This is not
to be confused with previous unexpected pains.
Actually, the unexpected pains had continued back for
as long as I can remember.
—from "Untitled (from Ghostdaughter)," Volume 63, Issue 4 (Winter 2022)

What writer(s) or works have influenced the way you write now?
I’m most interested in poetry as a language of directness, and affinity as well. My father, who wrote, inoculated me in a poetry I no longer have affinity for. Eliot, Stevens, the other names you’d expect. After my disenchantment, I spent several years actively not writing until I discovered other poets whose truths were more...

10 Questions for Maureen Seaton

February 9, 2023 - By Edward Clifford

Stand on a bridge
There, in the center, facing north.
Feel the whole bridge
Collapse beneath you: Goodbye, bridge.
—from "Rondelet for the Terminally Ill," Volume 63, Issue 4 (Winter 2022)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
The first thing I wrote as an adult was a short story I intended to send to a favorite magazine (REDBOOK, I believe, a long time ago). But the story kept getting shorter and shorter. And shorter. Then one day I showed it to a writer friend and he said: Sorry, Maureen, but that’s a poem. And I knew I was in trouble.

What writer(s) or works have influenced the way you write now?
Ntozake Shange, Robert Hass, Marilyn Hacker, Ginsberg, O’Hara,...

10 Questions for Andy Jackson and Gaele Sobott

February 7, 2023 - By Edward Clifford

a sloth-slow strength stretches like lines of longitude / sighing
    through my lingering life and other lives before / oh above
    and parallel to mine   gently curving  /  a fierce kink in
     meridians of knowledge  /  systems fixated on fixes
—from "how do we protect the mutant from annihilation by the 'normal'," Volume 64, Issue 4 (Winter 2022)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
Andy Jackson: It's hard to remember what my earliest pieces of writing were. But I will always remember the first time I explicitly spoke about my bodily difference in a poem...