Blog / Interviews

10 Questions for Lena Khalaf Tuffaha

August 15, 2017 - By Katherine Keenan

“1936
The year your grandmother swallowed her gold coins

to hide them from the soldiers
This is how you keep yourself

safe, keep parts
of yourself in different boxes

Trust no one
with everything”
—from “In Case of Emergency” from our Summer issue

Tell us about one of the first pieces you’ve written.
I worked for several years on a poem about a friend of mine who survived incarceration and torture during the first Palestinian Intifada. The poem is in my book, Water & Salt.

What writer(s) or works have influenced the way you write now?
It's difficult to overstate the influence of the forms and vocabulary of Mahmoud Darwish's poems....

10 Questions for Carol Potter

August 7, 2017 - By Beth Derr

“We do not expect to be bludgeoned by laughter and/or by love
or other pleasantries, and neither do we expect music to be used
      on us. . .”

– From “Muzak” which appears in the Music issue (Volume 57, Issue 4).

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
In art class in junior high I wrote a fabulist piece in the voice of a person inside a sock that lifts off into the atmosphere. I remember the shape of it, hand-written on a long, narrow piece of paper.  Perhaps inspired by Dylan’s “Highway 61 Revisited,” or Ferlinghetti’s Coney Island of the Mind....

10 Questions for Seif Eldeine

August 3, 2017 - By Katherine Keenan

“. . .No one thinks this is enough to get the blood out.

No one sleeps to the sounds of bombs.[ . .]

No one shares the bed with his sisters and brothers.. . ."

— from “No One and Syria’s Struggle to Sleep” which  appears in the Summer 2017 issue (Volume 58, Issue 2)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you’ve written.
In my elementary school, I was lucky enough that they forced us to write a poetry anthology every year. The first work I wrote was a rhyming piece about a local radio station. I was so excited to turn it in, but when I got it back, that excitement didn’t last. I...

10 Questions for Kimberly White

July 31, 2017 - By Beth Derr

"There are queens and divas here, holding notes and holding sway and cloaking themselves in poisonous ways that march on no feet. They say to be careful here in the desert, that the uninitiated will pay like the gamblers they are,

amateurs welshing on a price they negotiated themselves." —From "Desert Suite #5: Cactus Music," which appears in the Music Issue (Volume 57, issue 4).

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
This is the first poem I ever wrote, somewhere in the 1980s, never before published, never shared with anyone:

two-line poem
if it exists, it can be discovered...

10 Questions for Margaret Carson

July 28, 2017 - By Katherine Keenan

“But it always happens, and at a certain point the torpor broke up as if the whole garden had completely awakened at the same moment; I believe it coincided with the appearance of Baroni. The oppressive fragrance turned into the air’s perfume, the trees and plants regained their habitual splendor, and even the dog felt the beneficient effects of the change as he gave up on sleep and headed over to his mistress.”
—from  “Baroni: A Journey” which appears in our Summer issue (Volume 58, Issue 2)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you translated.
I translated a story from the 1950s by the Spanish...