Blog / Interviews

10 Questions for Munib Khan

April 26, 2021 - By Edward Clifford

On Main Boulevard, the Ramzan traffic comes to a halt. The car heater makes a whirring noise. A thin layer of fog hovers in front of our Honda City.

On the radio, the singer Junaid Jamshed recites a naat. In an interview, he has said that Pakistani women should stay at home. Now Mama says, If more women worked, the economy might be better. Then I say, The field hands in the countryside are mostly women. Mama makes a face.
—from "Charity," Volume 62, Issue 1 (Spring 2021)

We asked writer Munib Khan the same ten questions we ask our other contributors. He responded with a few of his own.

When did you first get acquainted with fiction?  When did you start to learn English, and how did it manage to become your preferred...

10 Questions for Jamaica Baldwin

April 19, 2021 - By Edward Clifford

Begin with a plant
then an animal. Move
your way up the chain of need
till you’ve learned enough
about sacrifice and scooping poop
to join the ranks of mother.
—from "Naturally," Volume 62, Issue 1 (Spring 2021)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
Let’s see. There is one that has always stuck with me. It was about a woman driving to Canada. It was about the threat of violence that women endure and about the weight of beauty ideals, I think. It was a delightfully strange poem. One line went something like, “If my ear was closer to the ground, perhaps I could hear the conversations between the ants. . . But I have killed many of them in my lifetime and nothing is scarier than...

10 Questions for D.M. Gordon

April 12, 2021 - By Edward Clifford

Write to me—do not text—in your unpracticed hand.
A postcard with a stamp. Write until you run out of room—
up the sides in smaller and smaller letters, dear little e's,
outrageous y's and confusing s's; send a photograph
—from "Mosses and Ivies," Volume 62, Issue 1 (Spring 2021)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
I wrote poems and short stories on my own in high school, then stopped abruptly in the second week of college when, in my first critique experience ever, the professor used my sonnet to prove that the sonnet was dead, and said of my short story that the writer was psychotic and needed...

10 Questions for CJ Evans

April 9, 2021 - By Edward Clifford

Shattered silverfish bodies in the vanity globes,
they know me. How I hate my body, how it's been

abandoning me. How I look up to the light to not
see mirrored back the emptying cup of my jaw,
—from "To a Wild Place," Volume 62, Issue 1 (Spring 2021)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
When I was a senior in high school I was a bit of a mess—getting into all sorts of things I shouldn’t have, not showing up, and was very close to getting kicked out. I was just beginning to read contemporary poetry and listening to spoken word, and there was a teacher that let me do a final project in English class that was, essentially, a groaningly privileged teenager ripoff of Gil Scott-Heron’s...

10 Questions for Donna Lee Miele

April 5, 2021 - By Edward Clifford

Above the pitted black coast, at the house that looks accidentally built, the floodlights have been left on. The owner is not there. He only comes during the winter, when the waves rise and he can pick his way down the cliff to ride the surf off the reef, some two hundred yards offshore. Now, in summertime, the ocean is sleepy under round, slow swells that gently slap the cliff.
—from “A Breath of Plankton Soup,” Volume 62, Issue 1 (Spring 2021)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
The very first story I wrote, of which I was really proud, was about a Thanksgiving dinner involving woodland animals of the Hudson Valley (illustrated, of course). But if you want to fast-forward past that one, through the 8^th...