Interviews Archive
A Joint Interview with Brenda Miller and Julie Marie Wade
The eleven essays that make up Miller and Wade’s new collection emerged through an email correspondence the two writers exchanged over the course of four years—an associative, improvisational game of call-and-response that played out in their inboxes.
“What drew me to Lange was her desire to make lives of the unseen seen”: An Interview with Jasmin Darznik
Jasmin Darznik’s second novel, which imagines the early adulthood of the famous photographer Dorothea Lange, tracks the revelation of Lange’s artistic ethos: photography, she comes to accept, is as much about the seer as it is about the seen.
“Ultimately, we Black women are singing from the same hymnal, whether we are talking about food, love, our mothers, or the church”: An Interview with Deesha Philyaw
Deesha Philyaw’s debut story collection skillfully blends inward reflection with outward mother-daughter battle, the narratives softened within the larger embrace of a nurturing, cross-generational women’s world that transcends particular times and places.
“I’ve always been drawn to writing about the body—our physical selves and how they reflect our inner lives”: An Interview with Kat Chow
Kat Chow’s debut memoir is very much about bodies. In it, Chow considers what could have been—not just in her life but in the generations before—particularly as what could have been relates to bodies and the ways in which they betray in life, as well as where they rest
“When you’re in the middle of it, you’re not necessarily doing the right thing or being the good character in a story”: An interview with Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Set in 1971, just three years after the Mexican government massacred student protestors at Tlatelolco, Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s seventh novel follows a bored secretary and a member of the anti-communist paramilitary organization the Hawks as they both find themselves looking for a missing young woman.
“Paris, in its own way, is a character in the book”: An Interview with David Hoon Kim
David Hoon Kim’s debut novel is as much about its protagonist and the characters around him as it is about the city itself, as much about the narrative momentum created through his wanderings as it is about the languages that carry and charge through him.
“Sometimes the poems know things that we don’t know ourselves”: An Interview with Jay Deshpande
Recognizing the ephemerality of their wisdoms, Deshpande allows his poems to exist as monuments to themselves, that we might return to them in the future and experience their lessons anew.
“We are both the colonized and the colonizers”: An Interview with Paisley Rekdal
In her recently published book, Paisley Rekdal argues that, in accepting our dual condition, the adventurous artist, regardless of race or other identity, must be willing to brave criticism; she insists that all creative writers, both fledgling and veteran, search within to find their own ethics of literary invention.
“Climate change is coming for us all”: An Interview with Matt Bell
Matt Bell’s Appleseed is a sci-fi novel. It is also a re-imagining of a western, a portrayal of a dystopia, and a techno-adventure. Above all, Appleseed is a novel of warning, an air-raid siren of impending environmental collapse.
“Nothing lasts, nothing is solid, as much as we think it will be”: An Interview with Matt W. Miller
Matt W. Miller’s fourth book chronicles in documentary poetics the history of the Merrimack River, braiding together its many voices from the perspective of the twenty-first century, when the insistence of memory resides everywhere and in everything: people, the river, the land, industry, relationships—in short, in one’s spirit.