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10 Questions for Valerie Sayers

October 12, 2023 - By Franchesca Viaud

"I tell Rudy that we really really need a new mattress and watch his mouth twist—he's never thrilled about buying anything, much less a mattress that might take as long to pay off as a new car. The old one was supposed to last twenty years, and Rudy's hell-bent on getting every last night. But honeybun, my aching back and the yellowing receipt agree: the twenty years are up."
—from "I Don't Need It, I Just Want It," Volume 64, Issue 3 (Fall 2023)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
Like most writers, I’ve been at it a lifetime, but the first consequential work I produced came when a high school teacher assigned Light in August and then asked us to write in a Faulknerian voice. I don...

September 2023 MR Contributor Publications

October 10, 2023 - By Staff

Ryler Dustin's poetry collection, Trailer Park Psalms,  is out now from University of Pittsburgh Press. His poem appeared in MR Vol. 61, Issue 3.

Jane Huffman, whose trio of poems appeared in our Fall 2021 issue, has her debut collection Public Abstract...

10 Questions for D.K. Lawhorn

October 5, 2023 - By Franchesca Viaud

"Caught between Sister Eustace’s fingers, my ear is close to ripping off as she drags me through the schoolhouse and toward the steps that lead to the Mother Superior’s room. This is the only part of the morning that hasn’t gone to plan. I focus on the comforting weight of the silver dinner knife tucked into the waistband of my skirt. Its cold length digs against my hip bone and reassures me. My trip upstairs won’t end like the others. All those girls who have gone before me. I will come back down. I will slay the monster waiting up there. I will kill the Mother Superior, ear or no ear."
—from "Mother Tongue" by D.K. Lawhorn, Volume 64, Issue 3 (Fall 2023)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote...

House Parties: A Review

October 4, 2023 - By Miriam N. Kotzin

A Review of House Parties by Lynn Levin (Spuyten Duyvil, 2023)

Lynn Levin’s debut collection of short fiction, House Parties, offers the wisdom and humor of a keen eye and a kind heart. An accomplished poet, Levin, author of five collections of her own poetry and one volume of translation, also writes beautiful prose so skilled that it seems unselfconscious and purely spontaneous while being replete with perfectly balanced sentences, brilliant metaphors, and similes. The figurative language always develops character or reveals...

(Almost) 10 Questions for Michael Bazzett

October 3, 2023 - By Edward Clifford

There is thought behind those eyes, said my head
when it saw itself in the Polaroid held in my hand.

My face was being eaten by the glow that dissolved
my forehead into a luminous window because I was

overexposed. This is no metaphor.
—From "Exposure," Volume 64, Issue 2 (Summer 2023)

What writer(s) or works have influenced the way you write now?
My poetic family tree would definitely have a Polish branch, where Wislawa Szymborska and Zbigniew Herbert would roost, with dark jackets and glinting eyes and the intelligence of crows. And there would be a dusty evergreen Portuguese branch where José Saramago & Fernando Pessoa would settle into the dusk. And I've always loved Borges and Simic, too.

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