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10 Questions for Hilary Plum

October 18, 2022 - By Edward Clifford

At the university where I worked part-time the most it would cost $700 per month for just my health insurance, much more for my family. This university owned like a quarter of the city. Maybe you could get your BA in landlording. Trump is one of their best-known alums. In those years the university paid Joe Biden about $900,000 to show up about twelve times. In the west of the city sometimes you'd spot a new outcrop of condos, gated in, little private bus waiting with the clean logo of the hospital that belonged to the university, don't worry, it said, to be in the city you don't have to be in the city.
—from "Philly," Volume 63, Issue 3 (Fall 2022)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
In my twenties I...

10 Questions for Tommye Blount

October 12, 2022 - By Edward Clifford

Garnet like the edges of Bible pages—
no, not that dark, think brighter, more 

sacred, less symbol of hatred, more
of the revered called to repair this

land's flag bothered ragged by those 
cured with the devil's mark
—from "Hydra," Volume 63, Issue 3 (Fall 2022)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
Not one of the first poems, but definitely a pivotal one. This was the early ‘00s when I worked with the poet, and my dear friend, Vievee Francis. Kevin Young’s Black Maria, an amazing lyrical take on film noir that is still one of my favorite books of poems, had just come out. Clueless about the amount of skill it took Young to make it look so easy,...

10 Questions for Rebecca Lehmann

October 5, 2022 - By Edward Clifford

In the whale's spout, a rainbow.
In my daughter's hair, a rainbow hairtie.
In the holy, holy. Holy, holy.
In a diamond's carbon-shape angles.
In each eye, a stone reflected,
a sore.
—from "In Morning," Volume 63, Issue 3 (Fall 2022)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
When I was in third grade, my teacher had us do an ekphrastic writing exercise based on postcards of paintings in the Chicago Art Institute. Mine was the painting “The Coast of Labrador” by William Bradford, and I wrote a story about a girl with really big feet who gets stranded on an island and is discovered by a fisherman. I was the tallest kid in my class that year and really self-conscious about it....

10 Questions for Mee Ok Icaro

September 30, 2022 - By Edward Clifford

When I was small like
a selfish idea
I would pick pieces of his hair
off my smooth girl-body
swollen
in the dark places
where he had become light
—from "Triptych," Volume 63, Issue 3 (Fall 2022)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
After a long hiatus from writing after high school, I took it up again when I was 33. The first piece I wrote was an excerpt in what will soon be my memoir, although I didn’t know it at the time because I was about to die. My illness got me into writing again though, and writing in part saved my life.

What writer(s) or works have influenced the way you write now?
I have been a longtime admirer of Donna Tartt’s The...

10 Questions for Carol Moldaw

September 29, 2022 - By Edward Clifford

For years, Sue and I would collapse into hysterics
if one of us said "Stuttgart." We didn't have to say
"Mercedes factory" or "bedroom" or "Mom."
Just "Stuttgart" was enough to set us off,
—from "Stuttgart Revisited," Volume 63, Issue 2 (Summer 2022)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
If I skip over earnest grammar school doggerel, high school self-conscious (and earnest) attempts, college (still earnest, still (more)-self-conscious) glimmerings, then the poem I mark as my first is “64 Panoramic Way,” the first poem (but not the oldest) in my first book, Taken from the River.  I wrote it in graduate school and the title...