Blog / Interviews

10 Questions for Nancy Miller Gomez

March 31, 2020 - By Edward Clifford

The dress bound my body
like a bandage staunching a wound.
Lace choked my throat.
My arms were cinched in tourniquets of tuelle.

I was a hand grenade of a girl
vacuum packed into a costume,
my fingers poised in the fuselage of my lap.
I'd chopped my hair short.
—from "My First Grade Picture," Volume 61, Issue 1 (Spring 2020)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
I published my first collection of poems when I was ten. It was written in cursive on multi-colored construction paper held together with brass brads and filled with bad drawings of peace signs and flowers. The opening poem in that “collection” was called “Freedom.”

What writer(s)...

10 Questions for Keith Leonard

March 27, 2020 - By Edward Clifford

There must have been a world
before the slender architecture
in the palm flexed the pistons
in the wrist and the chisel
shaped the hips of this;
there must have been a single tree
plucked and carved hollow
which drew from some of us
a wilderness; [...]
—from "Guitar," Volume 61 Issue 1 (Spring 2020)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
I actually still have them. I found them a few years ago in my parents attic, and they are unspeakably awful. Here are some sample titles: “Need for Speed”, “Staring at the White Wall”. I read them to my high school students at the beginning of each poetry course I teach. We all agree that nothing they write could be as...

(Not Quite)10 Questions for Laura Glen Louis

March 24, 2020 - By Edward Clifford

My brother, Victor, said that Mr. B was the only interesting teacher at our school, and that I might finally learn a thing or two. Because this brother never said anything more urgent to me than Get out of my room, I saw in his comments something akin to the hot and savory. For once Victor was right, but interesting didn't begin to portray the man. One needed a more complex word, something involute. Labyrinthine. One needed a ball of string and a torch.
—from "The Empirical Mr.B," Volume 61, Issue 1 (Spring 2020)

We asked Laura Glen Louis the same 10 Questions we ask our other contributors. She responded with following interview.

Why “The Empirical Mr. B”?
Each piece begins with a haunting. All...

10 Questions for Patricia P. Chu

March 20, 2020 - By Edward Clifford

Photo: Lee B. Ewing

Professor and psychoanalyst Dori Laub, creator of the Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale, has drawn upon his own experiences in interviewing Holocaust survivors to construct a model for the interactive work of the interviewer. According to Laub, the interviewer in this delicate and unique situation must act as an analyst and create a steady , safe, and supportive environment, one in which Holocaust survivors can face their often vivid but fragmented memories and draw them into narrative form.
—from "Truth as Accessible as Looking Out a Window," Volume 60, Issue 4 (Winter 2019)

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10 Questions for Brian Chikwava

March 17, 2020 - By Edward Clifford

I had to take off, because I did not trust myself not to change my mind. I was fat and out of shape. Even at the best of times I had never been one for running, because I considered it an undignifying exercise. But this was not the time for preserving dignity.

The squatter camp—like the rest of the squalid rebirth of Zimbabwe in the roar of history at the turn of the century—was a disorderly site forever sprawling downhill. It seemed impossible to escape. With each stride the township that I was trying to reach seemed to float farther away.
—from “Heroes of Our Time,” Volume 61, Issue 1 (Spring 2020)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote...