Interviews

On “Poetry Comics From the Book of Hours”: An Interview with Bianca Stone

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“The process of making a poetry comic is vital, since I don’t plan out in advance; don’t plot and storyboard. The process is where the piece determines itself. It’s a lot like composing a poem on a blank page: you have tools (language, memories, obsessions, sound) and you work with those in a sort of simultaneous process of improvisation and intent. So, even if the poem is already written, it’s going to become something totally different in the end.”

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On “Poor Your Soul”: An Interview with Mira Ptacin

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“As a writer, there’s always the whole self-induced pressure of whether you wanna market yourself, and build your brand and your buzz. But on social media, I never find myself drifting toward the yes-and-no debate of abortion, nor fighting for it. I’m pro-choice, but I think I make more of an impact when I’m writing about one individual at a time. Because I think abortion is a personal decision for everyone, and I don’t like to generalize it. As a writer I’m more concerned with individual stories, no matter what they’re about. You can’t lump people into one category.”

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Rock n’ Roll Time Travel: An Interview with Mo Daviau

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“I had the goal of writing a feminist novel with a first-person male narrator. Karl is not the most dudely of dudes, of course, but I liked the idea of a man casting a kind eye on someone like Lena, who stopped caring what everyone thought years ago and is just trying to make it through her day without crying. I liked the idea of having the male gaze on a woman most men would ignore or revile, with him actually admiring and loving her for her positive qualities, for who she is and her strength, which goes largely unnoticed in her life.”

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Between Reader and Writer: An Interview with Dubravka Ugrešić

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“The problem I have with contemporary culture is that today everything is treated as a product. Culture is a huge and shiny supermarket. As all products are announced as ‘brilliant,’ the risk inherent in buying those product falls entirely to me. In that respect, I often miss ‘my butcher’ and ‘my baker’ and ‘my vegetable lady,’ people I could rely on. These days, shopping and consuming—including consuming culture—have become more difficult. In such a context, I behave like any other cultural consumer: I buy books randomly, because I’ve heard of the author or the title, or I know the publisher’s taste, or a friend recommended something to me.”

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Affable Beasts: An Interview with Michael Thomas Taren on Tomaž Šalamun

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“This is to say that Tomaž’s exuberance was always off the handle. He always thought his legacy would be found in America. America grafted onto his encyclopedia of references. He loved to write in Starbucks, especially that of Union Square. He bought Starbucks every day when he was in America and brooked no criticism of that company. Tomaž liked America quite a lot. At either periphery of the Atlantic he’s viewed as something childlike and mystical. In his home country it’s a split between reverence and annoyance. He became both a trophy case and Modernity’s whipping boy.”

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On “After a While You Just Get Used to It”: An Interview with Gwendolyn Knapp

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“I do like that people read my writing as Southern and not just as that of a bland white person. But I feel like if you are a writer who’s Southern, your sensibilities should probably just be organic. I grew up poor in Florida—I have a very specific sort of family—and the characters in those stories are deeply embedded in my story, and in who I am. I feel like Southerners deal with different situations and circumstances than people in other parts of the world—we have such distinct issues with poverty and social issues that don’t get addressed because you’re dealing with crazy belief systems.”

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“The Only Woman in the Room”: An Interview with Eileen Pollack

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“When I teach nonfiction, we talk about writing to a question. If you write what you already know, it’s not going to be interesting for your readers. You need to be looking for some kind of a discovery, and so I went to Yale to see what and what hadn’t changed, because my story needed to be contextualized. After hearing from young women that their experiences were just as bad as mine, it floored me. That’s the moment I knew I had a book.”

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Inter-poetics: An Interview with Francesca Capone

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“There are often regulations of this sort for mechanical looms, as repeating yardage is an important economical component of the textile industry. But don’t those regulations sound like a writing prompt to you? It certainly did to me. The loom demands particular metrics, which one could also see applying to poetic form. Opportunities for the inter-poetics of writing and weaving have continued to reveal themselves so long as I’ve continued to seek them out.”

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Bent Beneath the Low Heavens: An Interview with Dan Rosenberg

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“Philosophers have worried over the mind-body problem for centuries, but poets have ignored that problem just as fruitfully for just as long: We know that thinking happens in the body, through the body—that invulnerable Achilles still needed an intricate shield to protect his body, to celebrate it and glorify it, fated for death though it was. We know that for things to truly exist in our poems (‘No ideas but in things!’) they must be embodied: the real toads in our imaginary gardens.”

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On “Home is Burning”: An Interview with Dan Marshall

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“I think I was writing the blog to make my friends laugh—the content was definitely frattier, more about the easy jokes—but I tried to make the book more widely accessible. The book-writing process was more about picking the most important moments, wrapping them around a theme, and framing the journey—not to sound like some pretentious little art dickhead. But, it was about giving the story shape. It took a few drafts to get there, but I finally started to realize, ‘Okay, this is really a story about somebody and his siblings going through an intense situation and being forced through it to grow up and take on a little more responsibility.'”

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