Or as self-medicator,or two-tongued song-singer, or undersecretary of pre-dawn walks,or any manner of otheroffices. They’re justconjectures. I still scrawlmy appointments on the backof my hand, tendto keep them.—from “Poem for Self as Single Mother”, Spring 2019 (Vol. 60, Issue 1) Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.Sometime in high . . .
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“I have an idea hanging from my head. It’s been out there for ages. Everything suggests it’s a bad idea.”—from “Animal Stomach” by Rui Cardoso Martins, translated from Portuguese by Maria João Medeiros, Spring 2019 (Vol. 60, Issue 1) Tell us about one of the first pieces you translated.My very first translation . . .
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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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Corine Tachtiris interviews Alice Guthrie, winner of the 8th Annual Jules Chametzky Prize for Translation for her translation of Atef Abu Saif’s “The Lottery“. Corine Tachtiris: I thought we could start by talking about “The Lottery.” One of the things I noticed is that there’s a balance between this really intimate voice, where you . . .
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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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