Blog / Interviews

10 Questions with Jen Jabaily-Blackburn

April 13, 2017 - By Amal Zaman

“On a recent list of top ten composers, my moody Chopin
didn’t make the cut—the critic said he’d never truly loved
the Romantic mode. It’s too personal, a biometric lock. Too magician
swallowing the handcuff key. The mystery of a list like this is less
of content than of order—I could tell you dark-horse Verdi here,
hipster Schubert there, a sheepish what up to damaged-goods Wagner--"
--from "The Romantic Mode" which appears in the Winter 2016 issue (Volume 57, Issue 4).

Tell us about one of the first pieces you’ve written.

When I was eight,...

10 Questions with Edie Meidav

April 6, 2017 - By Amal Zaman

"That morning, I had not exactly been spying on the Christian girl taking her bath outside in the strange area my father had rigged up for her, because though it had been permissible for him to get by the women of the house the idea of this young girl who lived with us and who ate with the children, who helped us for some vulnerable reason everyone protected which I didn’t understand, no one let her bathe where other women did or use the same small chamberpot since both her bathwater and waste were to be poured out elsewhere and so avoid any mixing with ours. In this way we stayed apart: otherwise her muslin dresses and water-harshed hands were ours as were her...

10 Questions for Jane Gillette

April 4, 2017 - By Amal Zaman

"What will survive of us is love, or so Philip Larkin famously asserted — and believed no doubt since he’d never been to Boonville and, of course, never made the acquaintance of Rose and Edwin. Everybody in Boonville knew they hated each other, but there’s always a chance love conquered in the end. Who knows? Of course Faith Dawn, who was only ten at the time of her visit, knew very little about hate in general and none at all about hate in Boonville. Her mother had effectively left town when she was twenty — a decade before Faith Dawn’s birth — so Faith Dawn was able to ignore all sorts of facts because she’d never...

10 Questions for Jane Gillette

April 4, 2017 - By Amal Zaman

"What will survive of us is love, or so Philip Larkin famously asserted — and believed no doubt since he’d never been to Boonville and, of course, never made the acquaintance of Rose and Edwin. Everybody in Boonville knew they hated each other, but there’s always a chance love conquered in the end. Who knows? Of course Faith Dawn, who was only ten at the time of her visit, knew very little about hate in general and none at all about hate in Boonville. Her mother had effectively left town when she was twenty — a decade before Faith Dawn’s birth — so Faith Dawn was able to ignore all sorts of facts because she’d never...

10 Questions with David Zellnik

March 28, 2017 - By Amal Zaman

"NINE YEARS AFTER my mother died, I saw her in Berlin. She was Turkish this time, religious too from the look of it so there was a headscarf. Her skin was slightly darker but it was her, no doubt. The same shocking blue eyes, almond at the edges, and the same huge belly she'd had in the final, dandelion-puff phase of her life: round and fragile, apt to blow away. Luckily, I knew a bit of Turkish from two trips to Istanbul..."
--from "Oranges" which appears in the Spring 2017 issue (Volume 58, Issue 1).

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