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Interviews

10 Questions for Marguerite Sheffer

- 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...


Interviews

10 Questions for Yuemin He

- 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...


Interviews

10 Questions for Alan Grostephan

- 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 course in which my head exploded. I read Julio Cortázar, Silvina Ocampo, Gabriel García Márquez, María Luisa Bombal, Jorge Luis Borges, Alejo...


Interviews

10 Questions for Marie Goyette

- 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...


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Beete Huye Lamhon Ki Kasak

- By Mahendra Kapoor, translated by Tabish Khair

Don't say adieu yet, my friends, in pain;
We don't know where we might meet again.

Because. . .
The touch of shared moments we'll continue to share,
The touch of shared moments we'll continue to share,
We shall meet perhaps in dreams, not a nightmare.
The touch of shared moments we'll continue to share,
We shall meet perhaps in dreams, not a nightmare.
The touch of shared moments we'll continue to share.

This autumn drenched...


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