Blog / Interviews

10 Questions with Nora Hikari

August 16, 2023 - By Edward Clifford

Listen hard! Do you cheek
a windchuckle against a cold
year? I promise you,
in a place with everyone
there is patience, and a warmth
ready to give you full home. 
—from "My Heartful Songlikes," Vol. 64, Issue 2 (Summer 2023)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
I don’t really remember much of how the piece went - but I like to tell people that I started writing poetry to impress girls. It was some cheesy middle school love poem confession that I slipped into her locker. I never made any copies or anything. I wrote it down once on a piece of torn and folded notebook paper and dropped it at her locker between classes, and I haven’t seen it since. I haven’t the slightest...

10 Questions with Karen Mok

August 8, 2023 - By Edward Clifford

Mimi herself wasn't on great terms with the ancestors. Her altar was stuffed in the corner next to the laundry hamper, a sweat-stained sports bra thrown hastily over the incense sticks. She hadn't made a chicken thigh or alcohol offering since Po Po's diagnosis three years ago. And she certainly would never risk burning paper money in her circa-1900s apartment building—the smoke alarm had a vendetta against her. 
—from "The Ancestors," Vol. 64, Issue 2 (Summer 2023)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
This is actually the second short story I’ve ever written! This piece wouldn’t be where it is today without Morgan Talty, whose mentorship shaped how I understand the short story as a...

10 Questions for Tyler Kline

July 25, 2023 - By Lara Stecewycz

It helps to think of your mind
as a landscape. Picture the grooves
and valleys carved like a penknife
to bark from years of compulsions;
it’s so easy following where the flood
knows it must go.
—from “From the Porch, A Moth,” Vol. 64, Issue 2 (Summer 2023)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
One of the first poems I wrote was about cherry tomatoes. I was working on a vegetable farm and spent a lot of time harvesting tomatoes. I remember using the word “hubris” to describe the tomatoes (I guess I thought they were gloating because of how delicious they were?). In any case, it was a terrible poem, but when it becomes tomato season, I always think of it.

What writer(s...

(Almost) 10 Questions for Susie Meserve

July 20, 2023 - By Lara Stecewycz

I hate AJ, Sam says, he steals
my blocks and punches me. AJ
didn't go to preschool. Here in the kitchen
my son narrates his day: phonics, Play-Doh,
the device he calls sand timer whisking away
choice time.
—from "Bioluminescence," Volume 64, Issue 2 (Summer 2023)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
Fourth grade, a poem called “Breeze.” Everyone around me was in agony over the assignment—we had to write acrostics about some kind of weather, then illustrate them—but I finished mine in record time. I thought, what’s so hard about writing poetry? Little did I know.

In high school, I wanted terribly to write good poetry. I was reading...

10 Questions for Colin Bailes

July 11, 2023 - By Lara Stecewycz

Less his offense and more

the punishment, how Actaeon was pursued
by his own hounds,

devoured by that which he thought he had tamed—
is that what I mean when I say

I, too, watched hunger
consume me?
—from “Actaeon,” Vol. 64, Issue 2 (Summer 2023)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
This is a difficult question to answer because I started writing dreadfully embarrassing song lyrics when I was very young—throughout middle school—and transitioned to what you might call poetry my freshman or sophomore year of high school. Even then, though, I wasn’t writing anything noteworthy, although I certainly thought I was at the time. The same could be said of the poetry I wrote...