Jake says: “first time I recall wanting to die I was eight.When I tried and nearly did I really wanted to live.”—from “South Belknap”, Spring 2019 (Vol. 60, Issue 1) Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.If I go “deep background,” I remember trying to write a sci-fi story . . .
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“It was raining, raining, raining, and I was going into the rain to meet him, no umbrella or anything, I was always losing them in bars. I was holding just a bottle of cheap cognac tight against my chest, hard to believe it said this way, but this was how I was . . .
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“The old man yells stories at Cooper. ‘My buddy was deep in before he came face to face with a beaver.’ The old man says his buddy’s hands were too far into the catfish’s mouth—maybe a forty-pound fish—to protect himself, and the beaver tore his face off. Neither his buddy nor the . . .
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At the Saturday market, enormous eye-bulge of skinned rabbits. My son, nine,bulges back, looking, but not.—from “Natural Selection”, Spring 2019 (Vol. 60, Issue 1) Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.I’ll tell you about the first two pieces I got published, in the same issue of my high school . . .
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With grapefruits & apricots. Without a cat or a dog.With my father who wanted a son. With my mother who wantednothing but closed lips, nothing but nothing. With my father’s headshaking slightly. With photographs sealed in boxes in the closet.—from “Self Portrait With & Without”, Spring 2019 (Vol. 60, Issue 1) Tell . . .
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Something in the river’s vexed beyond the torqueof tide returning to the sea, wherefromthis thing must too have come, thrashing like all’sapt to meet a fate of tatters in its teeth.—from “Great White”, Spring 2019 (Vol. 60, Issue 1) Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.Actually, it was recently . . .
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“‘If this country ever needed a Mussolini, it needs one now,’ said Senator David A. Reed of Pennsylvania, during a 1932 address to the U.S. Congress. Yet what did Reed mean when he emphasized the need for ‘a Mussolini,’ and what, in 1932, did ‘now’ mean?” —from “Mussolini Speaks: History Reviewed,” in Volume 60, . . .
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You fa ox fa, you fa ox gasea ahhh, how proof you?In catch I jump slap like a rack,my dradda hours, all sticks and pikes,& never once did you zoo-hoo.—from “In Which I Try to Leave My Husband, But Cannot Find the Words”, Spring 2019 (Vol. 60, Issue 1) Tell us about . . .
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Meena bazaar looked like someone had swept up all the portside towns that ran from the Persian Gulf through the Hormuz past Karachi, Gujarat, and Bombay down to the Malabar Coast, scrunched all these crusty places into a fist and daubed the remains onto the mouth of the Dubai Creek, installed thousands . . .
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Tell us about one of the first pieces you created.As a child I loved making drawings of foxes and animals. We had this series of nonfiction books for kids, Eyewitness Books, and I would sit down and copy the art in them. What artist(s) or works have influenced the way you work now?Some . . .
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