Features & Reviews
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Going into the Wreckage and Unearthing James Baldwin’s Great Loves: A Conversation with Nicholas Boggs
“ I wrote it as a kind of narrative so that people feel that they are in the room with Baldwin. I want them to feel that they are down by the waterfront. I want them to feel that they…
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“One Consolidated Gasp:” A Conversation with Rickey Laurentiis
“I remember there was a moment, where I would write a poem, and I would put it immediately on Instagram. And it was just that gesture of extending a hand, and it wasn’t about the poem, it wasn’t for people…
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Getting the Clay of a First Draft on the Table to Pull It All Apart: A Conversation with Adam Roberts
“Writing that first draft gives me all the information that I need to make a really strong second draft. It’s a rehearsal, in a way. It was almost like doing improv in that world so that I could write the…
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In Praise of Confessional Poetry and Being Known: A Conversation with Sasha Debevec-McKenney
“You can go ahead and read what you want into whatever you want. That’s on you. Someone reads it and they think it’s about a particular thing, or they think it’s all true or all fake. I’m totally fine with…
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Distance from Trauma by Writing the Memoir Self as a Character in a Novel: A Conversation with Karen Palmer
“The thing about writing a memoir is, if you write yourself into a corner, you can only get out by telling the truth. Making something up to bridge a problem area is not available to you. With a novel, you…
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Engineering in Reverse: A Conversation with Natalie Shapero
“I did a lot of research about Monet, in the course of writing this book, and he was known in his time for having many paintings in progress simultaneously, working outdoors on a landscape canvas with a bunch of partially…
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Inquiry, Lineage, & Archive: A Review of Remica Bingham-Risher’s Room Swept Home
Each line urges its own set of questions. How to reconcile being an “unplanned letter” — is this future-telling, or regret, or hope? [T]heir stone-clad letters juxtaposed against familial flesh and blood bring to mind stone’s durability across time, a…
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Something Haunted and Repeating: A Conversation with Issa Quincy
“For me, a central question of the novel as well is language and the failure of language. I think many of these people are imprisoned by language and their inability to say what they want to say or remember what…
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And the Now: on “Things in Nature Merely Grow” by Yiyun Li
“The problem: What if the tragedy has no end point? In Yiyun Li’s latest memoir Things in Nature Merely Grow, the author spurns the term “grief” and its attachment to endings. For Li, the definition of grief is tied to…
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Taking Back Time: A Conversation with Quiara Alegría Hudes
“It is very hard to dramatize something tiny onstage. But on the page something microscopic can contain magnitudes of consequence—not to mention time. The playwright’s basic unit is time. You’ll have two hours of the audience’s time. You are forcing…
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Shredding the Crazy Cat Lady Stereotype: A Mini Interview with Rebecca van Laer
“I think fiction feels safer. If I’m writing a short story, I don’t usually call up my friend and say, “Hey, I’m thinking about putting this line you said in there.” There was initially a scene from my life that…
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Hospitality Training and Taking Care of the Reader: A Conversation with Gabrielle Hamilton
“ I don’t like reading books where you can feel the writer fiddling with you and admiring themselves as they manipulate the words on the page. I don’t love a self-congratulatory writer—you can sniff it on the page immediately—more than…