Columns
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No Quick Fixes and Owning Your Own Existence: A Conversation with Kelly Yang
“[W]we want to believe that women will want to help other women. We want that so badly, that a lot of stories and experiences get swept under the rug, because they don’t fit neatly with the narrative.”
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Imagining Irmgard
I see her on the sidewalk, voyaging through town. Even in modest-sized Quickborn, she is out of place, a doddering oldster around whom the rest of the world speeds like a time-lapse film. But her progress is steady, and an…
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Intimate Enemies
What’s important isn’t that El Tricolor wins, but that they give us occasion to revel in the stands. Strictly speaking, the crowd is there to celebrate itself. In emblematic fashion, the chant we use to encourage our own is sí…
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The Train Keeps Moving: A Conversation with Jeff Boyd
“To me, there always has to be a sort of rhythm or pace to it, which is what I was keeping in mind as I was switching POVs in this novel. The train’s always moving, and it’s almost always moving…
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O’ Frankenstein: A Resurrection of Manman and Tifi in Catherine-Esther Cowie’s “Heirloom
We begin to wonder how this past might become vivified in our hands. An heirloom might serve this purpose. Or it should. Is an heirloom not typically an item of great value, cherished and preserved to be passed on to…
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Waiting, Migration, and the Narrators Between: A Conversation with Bsrat Mezghebe
“I generally wrote as if the reader would know what I was talking about. I did not want to be bothered with incredibly long and detailed descriptions of culturally specific food, clothes, events et cetera. I thought it would slow…
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Casting a Wider Lens & Writing about Lived History: A Conversation with Sean Hill
“ I was interested in seeing what I could do with the sonnet and a voice much like my grandmother’s. Being urged to write about the women in my family moved me to write about the people and place I…
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Men in Black Coats
I probably should have lied and told him it got dangerous. I lived alone. No safety net of a brother or a boyfriend to fall back on if a murderer broke into the building and got past the doorman, past…
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Three Poems
over coffee. At least I’m good at nodding. Fishermen were paid to take the roles of morticians. Instead of shovels, a line and hook. There’s a bay into Manila that every president jones
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Bouquet of Memoirs: A Conversation with Beth Ann Fennelly
“I know sometimes people find titles by looking at the titles of individual pieces, and they look for the most significant or biggest piece. And in this case, it was actually one of the slightest pieces, but that also seemed…
