Blog / Interviews

10 Questions for Stephanie MacLean

July 1, 2019 - By Christin Howard

“I wouldn’t be in this cult if it weren’t for Bob Dylan. It was forbidden to call The Tribes a cult, but occasionally, hovering over tired feet and yanking at the seat of her pantaloons, my mother would mutter the words under her breath while folding laundry or stirring a large pot of cabbage soup.” —From "The Tribes," Summer 2019 (Vol. 60, Issue 2)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
My first published short story, “Blue,” has sentimental value since it was based on my husband’s very lovely, but quite decrepit Shar Pei of the same name. It was written in second person, which is usually frowned upon, but an East Hampton newspaper published it and I was...

10 Questions for Tabish Khair

June 25, 2019 - By Emma Kemp

“Despite the superficial tinkering [of the revisions in the Norton English], which, as suggested, is justified by a marketing rationale rather than a literary one, what lingers on is the general incapacity of the Norton English to really step out of mainstream Anglo-American critical paradigms.” – From “The Nortoning of Nagra,” Summer 2019 (Vol. 60, Issue 2)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
I think it was a poem, roughly metered and rhymed of course, about plane-crash survivors drifting out in sea. And similar poems, heavy on empathy, influenced by the British Romantics and Victorian poets read in school, because they were written in secondary school. These poems my doctor-father...

10 Questions for James Smethurst

June 14, 2019 - By Abby MacGregor

“If Amiri Baraka had never published anything but Blues People, he would still be an important cultural critic. The appearance of the book in 1963 is a plausible beginning for when and where cul­tural studies began in the United States, a starting point that, in fact, antedates the founding of the Centre for Cultural Studies by Richard Hoggart in Birmingham, England.” —from “‘Formal Renditions’: Revisiting the Baraka-Ellison Debate”, Spring 2019 (Vol. 60, Issue 1)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you’ve written.
Though I am sometimes thought of as a scholar of literature, one of the first shorter pieces I published was "How I Got to Memphis: The Blues and the...

10 Questions for Geoffrey Brock

June 6, 2019 - By Emily Wojcik

Having risen from a branch of the Ni River
during a lull in the Battle of Spotsylvania,
she settled on the blue upper lip of a dead
Confederate corporal, weary. . . .
—from “The Mayfly: May 12, 1864,” Volume 60, Issue 1 (Spring 2019)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
The first “serious” poem I ever wrote...

10(ish) Questions for David Roderick

June 3, 2019 - By Emily Wojcik

Begone deadpan
mother into stones

arranged like a skeleton,
begone fatherly blades

that scotch my greening. . . —from "Ballad of the Wild," Volume 60, Issue 1 (Spring 2019)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
Most of my first successful (sort of) poems I wrote in the MFA program at UMass and published in my first book, Blue Colonial. They focused on my hometown, Plymouth, Massachusetts...