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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...

10 Questions for Yuemin He

December 2, 2024 - By Staff

Your mouth feels bitter if you haven’t spoken for long
Not speaking for a long time, this bitterness
occurs, like a gallbladder
full of darkness and in darkness trembling
—from "Bitterness in the Mouth" by Zhang Zhihao, Translated by Yuemin He

What writer(s) or works have influenced the way you write now?
Valdmir Nabokov for his penetrating thinking, erudition, and beautiful language command from reading Lolita, Pale Fire, etc.

Murasaki Shikibu’s The Tale of Genji for its simplicity

Works by Li Bai, Du Fu, Bai Juyi, Wang Wei, and other traditional Chinese poets for their sheer beauty

Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and T. S. Eliot for helping me dwelling in the...

10 Questions for Alan Grostephan

November 18, 2024 - By Franchesca Viaud

Tell us about one of the first pieces you translated.
My first translation project was poems and short stories by young Colombian writers for Historias de vida y muerte/ Stories of Life and Death. That writing came from workshops I taught in Cazucá, a slum south of Bogotá where many of the writers had been displaced by violence and rural poverty. The poems are raw, intimate, fearless, and some are by writers so young they had not even learned how to use a cliché yet.

What writer(s) or works have influenced the way you write now?
As an undergraduate, I took a Latin American literature...