Sustaining our Creative Practice: An Interview with May-lee Chai
Writing is what sustains me and gets me through. It’s the one place where we have control, and even if terrible things happen, it's not someone else making the terrible things happen.
Interviews
883 posts
A void that migrates to the surface: An Interview with Juliet Patterson
That was my singular personal motivation for doing any of this work: to prevent the threat that this might happen to me. I naïvely believed that my parents would not die by their own hand because they had suffered as children of parents who had already died that way.
To Write the Way We Live: A Conversation with Jonathan Escoffery
I see myself as a story writer, and that's just the best thing ever.
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.
The Dream Does What It Wants: Talking with David Santos Donaldson
. . . I advise any fiction writer who can afford it, to an get a Jungian analyst . . .
We Should Be Embarrassed by Most Things: An Interview with Leyna Krow
I think that is the dream—to have such a strong voice that people know your work as your work.
I Am No One’s Graveyard: An Interview With No‘u Revilla
Sometimes a poem is a rock, and sometimes rocks turn into flowers. And no matter how many poems I write about aloha and decolonial futures, they may still try to kill me
You Don’t See the Whole Young Man until the Very End: An Interview with Douglas Stuart
The amount of pressure on young men still to get on with it and to bottle it up and to be strong and be certain is overwhelming. And it shows in the UK. The suicide rates for men are so high. It’s a mental health issue. We don’t allow men to express themselves or talk about their vulnerability, and we blame them for a lot; we get to that phrase “toxic masculinity” really quickly. I don’t believe masculinity is always toxic, I just think sometimes it’s very unhealthy and we need to examine it and open it up.
Feeling Comfortable Enough to Be Funny Is What Makes Me Want to Write Fiction: A Conversation with Megan Giddings
There was a long stretch where I tried actively not to make things I wrote funny because of a disastrous undergrad fiction workshop where I spent thirty minutes just listening to people complain that a story had jokes. And wouldn’t it have been so much better if the author had let us pay attention to the emotions? Lol.
A Hypnotic Transitory Beauty Quest: A Conversation with Jackson Bliss
While many Californians are obsessed with “living in the moment,” most Asian Americans I know live in a complex cultural space where “the moment” is the superstructure and history is the base.
When Silences Need to Be Broken: Talking with Ingrid Rojas Contreras
Language is inexact, and will always be an approximation. In my own experience of amnesia, there was a period of time where things didn't have names, and it was in that nameless, getting-to-know-something that I felt I knew it better.
If You Eat It, It Becomes Authentic: A Conversation About Red Sauce with Ian MacAllen
There is this moment where you must first cut yourself off from doing more research because that rabbit trail goes on forever in some cases . . . You have to ask yourself, “Do I have enough?”