Despair is a Luxury, but Hope is a Discipline: A Conversation with Robert Macfarlane
Despair is a luxury, but hope is a discipline.
Posts by author
Janet Rodriguez
26 posts
Janet Rodriguez is an author, teacher, and editor living in Northern California. She is the author of Making an American Family: A Recipe in Five Generations (Prickly Pear Press, 2022), a family memoir. In the United States, her work has appeared in Hobart, Pangyrus, Eclectica, The Rumpus, Cloud Women’s Quarterly, American River Review, and Calaveras Station. She is the winner of the Bazanella Literary Award for Short Fiction and the Literary Insight for Work in Translation Award, both from CSUS Sacramento in 2017. Her short stories, essays, and poetry usually deal with themes involving morality in faith communities and the mixed-race experience in a culturally binary world. She holds an MFA from Antioch University, Los Angeles. She is currently Assistant Editor of Interviews at The Rumpus . Follow her on Twitter at @brazenprincess.
The Body Made Glorious in Awakening: A Conversation with Diane Gottlieb
These are writers who didn’t want to hide anymore. Instead, they knew how important it was to share their stories.
I See Something I Can’t Shake: A Conversation with Myronn Hardy
As a poet, I’m constantly trying to make connections and see between and among things.
Donut Dollies and Maven Matriarchs: A Conversation with Luis Alberto Urrea
If you’ve got that outline already lived, then you have to try to honor it.
The Poem is Second, Living is First: An Interview with Tim Z. Hernandez
Above everything else, people come first.
I Freed Myself from Needing to Make Sense: A Conversation with Leila Chatti
I’ve learned by now my mind is smarter than I am, than my conscious self—it’s doing all sorts of things in there, unbeknownst to me. I often tell my students that the poem knows better than I do, and so I shouldn’t be arrogant enough to think I’m in control.
Strength and Feeling in Motion: A conversation with Henri Cole about Gravity and Center
Horses are a nice metaphor for the sonnet’s strength and feeling in motion. Beauty and violent power come together in an animal form. When I write, I have the feeling of being a rider. As the poem gallops forward, I am knocked about.
When Craft Becomes an Act of Love: An Interview with Gayle Brandeis
I want to be fully present for whatever I'm doing, whether it's teaching, or writing, or being with people I love.
Knowledge alters things forever: A conversation with Anuradha Roy
. . . it was clear in my head that the dog in the book would not die, that he would bring people together, and also function as a kind of barometer for good and evil because, in my experience, that is how dogs are.
This Is What We Have Inherited: A Conversation with Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu
I think it is imperative to explore the limits of the colonial narrative and its dictates because, whether we like it or not, the world that we have inherited was created by that narrative. If we have any hope of moving past it, we have to understand it fully.
The Perfect Balance Between Momentum and Stillness: Chris Abani discusses Smoking the Bible
Masculinity isn’t a thing. It is an absence, an excavation. Men are raised in the erase of all that is tender and good and loving until for many of us, all that is left is an unfocused rage.
Bringing the Exterior into our Private Rooms: A Conversation with Victoria Chang
There’s no reason for cruelty; the joy is in the writing. I always try to remember why I started doing this thing: Because I had to. It’s not a choice for many of us writers to write, but we do have a choice about whether we’re going to be nice or not.