Blog / Interviews

(Not Quite) 10 Questions for Rebecca Kaiser Gibson

July 7, 2021 - By Marissa Perez

Cigarette smoke wove
into my curls, right through 100%
madras from India, breathed blue-tinged, dizzy blue
through every alveolus,
as my mother lurched the car
down Wisonsin Ave., jamming gas
and brake pedals, tilting—
—from “Osmosis,” Volume 62, Issue 2 (Summer 2021)

We asked Rebecca Kaiser Gibson the same 10 Questions we ask our other contributors. She responded with the following interview.

First Pieces:
I have no idea what impelled me to write a secret message poem to cinnamon (the scent) and roll it into a scroll I could fit inside the empty spice jar that had contained it. Now I can’t remember the poem at all, only the sudden clarity of intention that...

10 Questions for Chinua Ezenwa-Ohaeto

July 2, 2021 - By Marissa Perez

I am singing about the undone things cited on buried bones.
I am singing them because I like to imagine a valley with a library on it.
A library with catalogues that don’t always read, sorry for the losses.
I like to imagine a lot of things but death.
I am familiar with how each moment
outweighs the knowledge that appears close by.
—from “Monochrome Photo with Fragments in a Closet,” Volume 62, Issue 2 (Summer 2021)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
It’s years ago now, but I first began as a short story writer. And the first piece I wrote, I remember, was a story after Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan. I laugh anytime I remember it. This is because, then,...

10 Questions for Uma Menon

June 28, 2021 - By Edward Clifford

My first instinct is to translate
the word. Make it easier to understand
without saying the word itself.
I feel guikt for this mistake—
for changing languages instead
of describing. Isn't this an easy way out?
—from "We Play Charades," Volume 62, Issue 1 (Spring 2021)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
I imagined my first poems and stories at a very young age, before I actually knew how to write in English. I would narrate poems to my mother about all kinds of things—everything from a coin to the moon—and she would write them down in a small diary which, to this day, sits in her desk.

What writer(s) or works have influenced the way you write now?...

10 Questions for Andrew Hemmert

June 25, 2021 - By Marissa Perez

But this I aspire to—
how to do a job well
even if it fights you beak and wing.
How to carry the delicate,
difficult thing
wherever it needs to go.
—from “The Owl Catcher’s Son,” Vol 62, Issue 2 (Summer 2021)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
In Tampa, near where I went to college, there’s an older roadside attraction off I-4 called Dinosaur World. It’s a park, essentially, full of ferns and vine-covered oaks and anole lizards. The main features, of course, are the plaster, often life-size models of dinosaurs staged along the walking paths. The dinosaurs are majestically ugly, and many of them are anatomically incorrect according to current...

10 Questions for Paul Curtis Daw

June 21, 2021 - By Edward Clifford

A coal-colored bird, perhaps a blackbird. The frenzied fluttering of his wings contrasts with the amiability of his fellow creatures’ warbling. You’d think he was flailing. This has been going on so long that I want to shout to make him fly away and escape whatever is causing his struggle. Is there a predator nearby, a cat or a marten? No, they don’t climb that high
—from "Merlin" by Caroline Lamarche, Translated by Paul Curtis Daw, Volume 62, Issue 1 (Spring 2021)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you translated.
The very first was Evelyne Trouillot’s “In the Shade of the Almond Tree,” which I discovered in a 2006 issue of La Nouvelle Revue Française devoted to Haitian literature....