Interviews
-
Who Deserves Your Compassion? A Conversation with Megha Majumdar
“Kolkata is one of the cities in the world which is most severely affected by climate change. It has grown hotter. It is predicted to endure more storms, and more severe storms. How does it feel to read that this…
-
Trauma, Healing, Radiant Transformation: A Conversation with Karen Malpede
“I wished to take readers with me where we are all afraid to go, into deep love, and into dying. I don’t offer solutions. This is not a “how-to” book for dealing with whatever. The experiences I write about have…
-
On the Versatility, Physicality, and Morality of Verbs: A Conversation with Sarah L. Kaufman
“We can easily fall into more interiority—what a person’s thinking, how they’re feeling—but how revealing it can be to get them moving! Show us the character being a free spirit, or how they’re an introvert, how they’re observant, how they’re…
-
Redaction Driven by Revelation: A Conversation with Crystal Simone Smith
“As poets there’s the option to reach beyond our internal afflictions and we don’t need to go very far. Historical documents offer us more than what’s rendered. I think of them as a tool to disrupt domination.”
-
A Conversation between R.F. Kuang and Tochi Onyebuchi
“I’m a very mercenary reader. Everything is homework to me.”
-
Investigation Moves the Interior Life Forward: A Conversation with Patrick Cottrell
“ I actually had a much different ending when I did the first draft. For this novel, it needed to have a sense of something happening. It couldn’t just fizzle out or neatly resolve everything. I needed something decisive but…
-
Writing the Shit Out of Your Darlings: A Conversation with Ramona Ausubel
“Thinking about the way a river moves while thinking about plot is really helpful, for example. It’s not a straight line. The same way an early draft doesn’t go from page one effortlessly and straightforwardly to page two-hundred and fifty.…
-
The Grand Performance of Womanhood: A Conversation with Caro Claire Burke
“A lot of the experience of writing a novel was not unfamiliar to me. And I think, at least for me, so much of writing is just figuring out mental tricks to stick with it, because so much of it…
-
The First Book: Avery Curran
“For me, writing a first novel was defined by having to accept that I was learning how to do it as I went, and that is a very disagreeable experience if you, like me, are one of the world’s great…
-
To Insist on Loving and on Being Loved: A Conversation with Camille T. Dungy
“ I was writing poems all the while but writing poems and making a book are different matters altogether. The real question is what it took for me to organize these poems into a collection that held the energy I…
-
Poetry that Bears Tension: A Conversation with Jonah Mixon-Webster
“It often feels like if you’re not on tour or have a current project out that you are out of the conversation. It’s been 5 years since my last book and that’s starting to feel like a long time. I…
-
The Stereo Speakers of Fandom: A Conversation with Emma Straub
“I love building myself a box. I love giving myself a tight space because my plots are, let’s say, quiet and internal. American Fantasy has a bit more of the razzle dazzle, but the plot itself is always personal transformation…