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10 Questions for Vanessa Place

February 9, 2022 - By Edward Clifford

August besieged California with a heat
unseen in generations.
I watched as towering plumes of smoke
billowed from distant hills in all directions
and air tankers crisscrossed the skies.
—from "The Fire Sermon," Volume 62, Issue 4 (Winter 2021)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
Stendiamo un velo pietoso.

What writer(s) or works have influenced the way you write now?
Influence is a conceit, best left to the conceited. There are writers and works I admire, that did and do inspire, but I don’t know if they left thumbprints so much as the scent of possibility. Possibility is better than genealogy, don’t you think?

What other professions...

Black Ram Today

February 3, 2022 - By Rick Bass

Dear all,

I’m writing to give y’all an update on the efforts to stop the hideous Black Ram proposed timber sale on the Canadian border in Northwest Montana’s Yaak Valley, where only three adult female grizzlies with cubs remain. This ancient forest, a survivor from the last period of global warming, 800 to 1000 years ago, is a scientific trove of mysteries waiting to become knowledge. Of course the Trump administration sought (seeks still) to erase it. Please join, if you can, a webinar today, February 3, where artists from around the country combine to champion and celebrate the science of this amazing forest in Montana’s...

10 Questions for Alex Kuo

February 2, 2022 - By Edward Clifford

Pyne’s count could be extrapolated further: a hundred cloud-to-ground lightning strikes per second. Such strikes account for about 10 percent of the annual wildfires in the United States, and since 1982, there has been an alarming rise in the total number, directly linked to the increasing temperatures due to climate change.
—from "That First Wildfire," Volume 62, Issue 4 (Winter 2021)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
It was probably during an early summer weekend morning in 1959 at a US Forest Service blister rust work camp, BRC 253 on Meadow Creek, near Clarkia, Idaho, more than sixty years ago after my sophomore year in college in central Illinois. It was after breakfast, and my three tent mates were...

"Chocolat" Soldiering and the White Myth of Recovery

January 27, 2022 - By Michael Thurston

A Review of David Diop, At Night All Blood Is Black. Trans. Anna Moschovakis. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020.

Lyricism is, strangely, no stranger to the trenches of the First World War. Whether to contain or to inflame the horrors, writers like Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, David Jones and Erich Maria Remarque, Dalton Trumbo and Ford Madox Ford brought rhythm, repetition, and figurative language all to bear on the disquieting experience of the Western Front. Typically, the lyricism counters the horrors: poppies, butterflies, farm fields, or the camaraderie of brothers in arms bear ornament that sets them apart from and (unsuccessfully) shields them from the poisoned...

10 Questions for Alexis Orgera

January 26, 2022 - By Edward Clifford

A tanker
capsized off
the Georgia coast,

4,000 Hyundais
slipping
to their murky

deaths
—From "The Book of Other," Volume 62, Issue 4 (Winter 2021)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
I can do more than tell you about it. Here it is:

Kiwi

Fuzzy football
in the sand.
Shave the beard
and bite the chin.

In the ninth grade, my English class included a semester of poetry, and that was the beginning for me. We read widely from Xeroxed pages, wrote our own poems, and made handmade poetry anthologies. I’d tried to write some stories before then, but I was more a reader. My favorite...