Blog / Interviews

(Almost) 10 Questions for Nicole Gonzalez

August 24, 2020 - By By Edward Clifford

Maggie fans her hand out on the windowpane. She brings her mouth close to the glass and huffs hot breath, leaving behind the web of her handprint ringed by fog. "Mom," she says peering through the stencil, "I think there's someone outside."

Maggie's mother, Magalys, shoves her feet into slippers, grabs her flashlight, and shoulders the back door one, two, three times before it gives. If the pound and scrape of wood startles the man in her backyard, Maggie can't tell from the window.
— from "Mass of the Mute," Volume 61, Issue 2 (Summer 2020)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
There weren’t a lot of books in my house when I was young, but I did watch a lot of TV. The first...

10 Questions for Emmalie Dropkin

August 17, 2020 - By Edward Clifford

When does a cemetery become a field again?

I stood before the shared gravestone of my great-great-grandparents and knew about them only what I'd learned that day. He was a minister and farmer, she a midwife who delivered babies around the turn of the last century for five dollars per live birth. I imagined not the strangers buried in front of me but their granddaughter Emma, who would have been about eight when Nathaniel died and twenty when Susan passed. Emma must have come here, mourning with the rest of her family, right where I was standing in the high but not unkempt June grass.
—from "The Unraveling of Absence," from Volume 61, Issue 2 (Summer 2020)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
When I was in...

10 Questions for Patty Crane

August 14, 2020 - By Edward Clifford

In a burst of concentration, I succeeded in catching the hen and stood with
it in my hands. Strangely, it didn't really feel alive:stiff, dry, an old white
feather-riddled woman's hat that shrieked out truths from 1912. Thunder
hung in the air. A scent rose up from the fence boards, like when you open
a photo album so dated you no longer know who the people are.
—from "Upright" by Tomas Tranströmer, Translated by Patty Crane, Volume 61, Issue 2 (Summer 2020)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you translated.
The first poem I translated was Tranströmer’s The Station from his collection THE WILD MARKET SQUARE (1983). This was during my three-year period living in Sweden, when I’d...

10 Questions for Julia Sanches

August 10, 2020 - By Edward Clifford

Mrs. Ebelmayer had not seen the world. She had spent her childhood and youth in a pleasant, roomy house in the suburbs of a large city and , once married, had outgrown the early stages of her life in a house very similar to her first, in another suburb of the same city. After being unanimously advised to move to a warm, dry country, due to Mr.Ebelmayer's illness and following mandatory consulatations with several doctors, Mrs. Ebelmayer kept all her usual routines. She transferred her cold and damp city life to a town that baked daily under the sun and nothing, and no one, could convince her that adaotability was a positive trait. Five years after their move, this preservation was practically intact.
—from "A Foreign Country" by Soledad Puértolas,...

10 Questions for Russell Scott Valentino

August 7, 2020 - By Edward Clifford

My grandfather Franjo Rejc lived his life in Bosnia. As a high-ranking railroad official, he moved from station to station until, several months before the outbreak of World War II, he arrived in Sarajevo to work at the main headquarters with the title of chief railway inspector. When I first wrote about my grandfather's working as a chief inspector, the critics interpreted it as a postmodern inscription for Danilo Kiš, whose novelistic and actual father had the same job. This, however, was not something I was thinking about the time. I did not compare the life of my grandfather with that of heroes in books.
—from "Kakania" by Miljenko Jergović, Translated by Russell Scott Valentino, Volume...