Blog / 10 Questions

10 Questions for Marie Goyette

November 13, 2024 - By Franchesca Viaud

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
The first piece I remember writing was a short story I wrote for school when I was about seven or eight. It was about a little girl (definitely me) who went on tropical vacation with her family (definitely my family) and, while on a boat ride, fell into the ocean and was rescued by a friendly dolphin (probably Flipper). The reason I remember writing this story was because my dad, also a lover of words and to whom I’d given the handwritten assignment to read, typed it up, inserted some ocean-themed clipart, and printed it on heavy, cream-colored paper. I remember his pride in my work, and then, seeing the care and time he invested to allow me to share my words with others, pride in my own work began to develop...

10 Questions for Simone Muench & Jackie White

September 23, 2024 - By Franchesca Viaud

The last spring shall come, the last summer, too,
so no to politicians peddling impotence, no

to preachers stitching our lips into eclipse, we want
the misfits, the women unafraid of descent,
—from "Self-Portrait Lined By Sándor Csoóri," Volume 65, Issue 2 (Summer 2024)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
Jackie & Simone: For our new collection, The Under Hum, one of the first pieces we wrote was “Disclosure,” which developed into a sonnet, and one of our goals at the outset was to extend the feminist project of interrogating traditional (male) forms. Pointedly, then, we “turn” the argument of the poem at the end of the first quatrain with the...

10 Questions for Ifa Bayeza

September 9, 2024 - By Franchesca Viaud

In three interconnected plays, The Till Trilogy is an imagined, speculative exploration of the epic of Emmett Till and the birth the modern Civil Rights Movement, the events as seen from the perspective of the youth, himself, in his final days of life, as a specter during the trial of his killers and a shadowed presence in the aftermath.
—Excerpt from Ifa Bayeza's "The Till Trilogy," Volume 65, Issue 2 (Summer 2024)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
Not counting “Mahatma Gandhi, Man of Peace,” which I presented to my fourth grade class after discovering him in the World Book Encyclopedia and reading “What Negroes Can Learn from Gandhi” in LOOK magazine (I guess I might call that a...

10 Questions for Nathalie Harty

September 3, 2024 - By Franchesca Viaud

In the village we let the nail go deep into the foot until picking up tetanus like
a surprise. We watch each other live, we turn to see every car that passes: it’s
winter’s fierce dance as it wraps us in its cure for lethargy.

I don’t know what it will take to be strong enough, with bedroom wi-fi needed
half the time to know how to look at the earth’s stark naked body.
—from Marie-Andrée Gill's "In the Village," Volume 65, Issue 2 (Summer 2024)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you translated.
The first literary translation I did was an excerpt of La route du lilas by Quebec novelist Eric Dupont. This long novel follows seventy-year-old Maria Pia. With the help of Americans...

10 Questions for Sabina Murray

August 26, 2024 - By Brooke Chandler

No form of art can express a life quite like the novel. No art form charts the lives of individuals—encounters, challenges, and relationships—as successfully as the book-length work of fiction. Perhaps this is because of the amount of detail provided for characters and their situations, which allows us to truly experience as they do, but beyond this, the living quality of novels is best understood by considering time: the time we take to read, but also the manipulation of time upon the page. All readers casually understand this, but it is worth looking at a few scientific concepts, in particular some properties of time, to better comprehend how it works.
—from Sabina Murray's "The Order of the Novel,...