Features & Reviews
-
“Beloved Son Felix”: Coming of Age in the Renaissance
And yet for all this death, life went on, and what makes the journal truly fascinating are the everyday details of the mid-16th century. On a day trip to Villeneuve, Felix notes that rosemary is so abundant that it’s collected…
-
“The Personal is Always Political:” A Conversation with Kate Schatz
“By expanding beyond her story, I was able to broaden the scope and incorporate the experiences of other young women whose stories I encountered during my research. And finally: by creating a fictional world, I could give my protagonist experiences…
-
Estrangement as a Chorus: A Conversation with Jenny Bartoy
“It helps, when editing, to think about the writer, the reader, and the self. When something is triggering and traumatic, I always think about the writer. Are they okay writing this? Are they okay sharing this? Editorially, I’ll say this…
-
Who You Would Be at the End of the World: a Conversation with Dave Housley
“[T]his process of building and connecting stories together into a larger work… You can start off with one version that you send out to lit mags, and then you can design another version that connects to a larger world. You…
-
The Place That Keeps Calling You Back: A Conversation with Douglas Stuart
“All my work has been about the cost of belonging, because I find that the price of belonging is conformity. Especially as someone from a working-class background who was raised to always think of the “we” and never the “I,”…
-
A Conversation between Rachel Khong and Emma Copley Eisenberg
“A story can change your day; it can give a different texture to it, like music can. I love precision and brevity in writing, and the best stories come in the smallest packages. I think of stories more like songs–more…
-
Someone Else Will Save Us: A Conversation with Kim Fu
“ It is difficult and overwhelming to think about what’s happening to the whole world at scale and the forces that are at play. But telling the story of one person and the points at which they are interacting with…
-
Parasocial Connection & Dinner As Organizing Principle: A Conversation with Krys Malcolm Belc
“There was the loneliness of losing in-person socializing at work [during the early days of the pandemic]. And then when I was sent home–because I was not an “essential worker” at my job… there was a screen now, between me…
-
The Sisters of Song, Myth, Poetry, Prayer: A Conversation with Maya Salameh
“I think the places in this book (especially Damascus and San Diego) are reconstituted in that they are mangled in my recitation of them, and I allow them their mangledness. By insisting on the presence of Arabic on the page,…
-
A Reclaiming and a Reckoning: A Conversation with Diana Whitney
“So what do we do with the rage? We can make meaning from it. We can shape it into some form where it’s manageable, whether that’s a form on the page in a poem, whether it’s a story we can…
-
On Natalie Shapero’s “Stay Dead”
In Shapero’s words, “everyone is a worker.” If many of life’s actions are performances done for payment, so that even oxygenation is “a service / the woods provide,” then art forms like acting, painting, and writing are also determined by…
-
The First Book: J Brooke
“The book was always meant as political in its simple existence— the adding my voice to the annals of Trans/Nonbinary collective is an act of anti-erasure. While writing this, though, the incoming administration became even more vile in its attempt…