Interviews Archive
“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.
“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.
“I’m not sure we ever arrive at wholeness”: An Interview with Ethel Rohan
Ethel Rohan’s stories are expertly laced with opposition and convergence, a curled fist and an open palm. Her most recent collection—out this week—features relationships rife with both dissonance and confluence, characters in pairs and triads stretching away and snapping back together.
“All memoirists are the narrator and the character at once”: An Interview with Lilly Dancyger
Lilly Dancyger’s just-released mixed media memoir is a story of two artists, forever separated, and the history and symbols that provide an artistic shorthand able to move past the boundaries of shared experiences and meet again.
“A lot of the novel is about stories—the ones we tell ourselves about ourselves, the ones we don’t know but that shape us in some way”: An Interview with Gabriela Garcia
Gabriela Garcia’s non-chronological debut novel, built on glimpses of memory and history, digs into issues of cultural identity, social and political unrest, and the complexities of lives informed by migration, oppression, and racial inequality.
“These two books, taken together, offer a nice survey of my anxieties and preoccupations over the past decade”: An Interview with J. Robert Lennon
J. Robert Lennon’s new novel and short story collection, both released last week, offer up an aesthetic of the uncompromising, the surprising, and the fantastic, either cloaked in the everyday or surreally spread.
“What are the conditions of contemplation to exist in an alien planet?”: An Interview with Mauro Javier Cárdenas
Reading Cárdenas’s second novel, with its intricately patterned sentences circling obsessively around an absent center, it’s hard to shake the feeling that the author has done something remarkable, inventing an entirely original language for representing the fractured sensation of being conscious in the twenty-first century.
“I really try to let the characters speak for themselves”: An Interview with Brandon Hobson
Hobson’s latest novel is a brilliant, artfully crafted story of Native heritage, family dynamics, and ancestral hope.
“Editing is the great joy of writing”: An Interview with Michael Bible
Bible is a careful craftsman, cutting his new novel down to its core without losing a diverse cast of characters, a clearly rendered town, and wholly realized emotional resonance. He doesn’t overexplain, doesn’t excessively detail, and doesn’t deviate from the novel’s heart.
“We shouldn’t just turn inward when we walk”: An Interview with Kent Russell
Russell’s most recent book, chronicling a walk from the panhandle of Florida to the celestial city of Miami, comes to the conclusion that a walking journey should not only be a journey about the self, but also about how the self exists in a built environment.