Blog / Interviews

10 Questions for Panteha Abareshi

June 18, 2018 - By Edward Clifford

LEFT: A new piece, which is a bit of a "redraw" on the "intimacy is hell" piece (featured in Summer 2018, Volume 59, Issue 2). Every year Abareshi chooses a piece from the previous year to reimagine, "just to sort of see my own changes."

Tell us about one of the first pieces you created.
It’s interesting looking back on my early work because I become weary of distinguishing my amateurish drawings from my artistic pieces. The earliest “piece” I can firmly recall is a small, 40-page sketchbook that I filled completely. I consider the entire book one piece because it is more meaningful as an accumulation of my early works when I was still figuring out the basics of drawing faces. It’s an archive of my...

10 Questions for Peter LaBerge

June 12, 2018 - By Edward Clifford

Des Plaines, Illinois: Acre of river. River
              of silver un-grief. River
                             who alibied out. Who is
             not talking. Of methodical defrost.
—from “Bruise Music,” Spring 2018 (Vol.59, Issue 1)

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

10 Questions for DeWitt Henry

June 5, 2018 - By Edward Clifford

“Curses are different from cusses or swears, though they often merge. A curse calls down evil on someone, circumstance, or thing: “God damn you/it!” A swear is an insult, comparing someone or thing to an ani­mal in regard to stupidity, loveless sex, and lack of spirit or reason, or to a body part or product (usually from the reproductive or excretory systems); or to a socially despised, feared, or “different” group (in race, nationality, class, gender, hygiene, and/or sexual preferences and acts).”—from “On Cursing,” Spring 2018 (Vol. 59, Issue1)

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

10 Questions for Susannah Mandel

May 28, 2018 - By Abby MacGregor

The goddess Bensaiten appeared to me in a tree. I was in the city park, eating meat on a stick, and then there was a noise like doves and when I looked up to see what was touching my head she was there.

She looked down at me from among the white and pink blossoms and said, “You don’t belong here.”
—from “Kenning Season,” published in Spring 2018 (Volume 59, Issue 1)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
My earliest pieces are all unfinished—or, at least, they don’t have satisfying linear movement, in terms of beginnings and ends. When I was young I yearned to put stories together out of fragments of images and resonant symbols, but what I wound up with was chunks of prose poetry...

(Not Quite) 10 Questions for Ilya Kaminsky

May 21, 2018 - By Edward Clifford

Yes, I bought you a wedding dress big enough for the two of us
And in the taxi home
we kiss a coin from your mouth to mine.
—from “Of Weddings,” Spring 2018 (Vol. 59, Issue 1)

We asked poet Ilya Kaminsky the same ten questions we ask our other contributors. He responded with nine of his own.

How do you begin writing a poem?
I write in lines. So the lines find their way on paper whether I overhear two boys insulting each other at the gas station, or see a gull cleaning her feet, or two old men playing dominoes on a hood of a car, or two young women kissing at the fish market. They become lines on receipts, on my hands, on a water...