Features & Reviews
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Poetics of Space: A Conversation with D.S. Waldman
“I was always, across these various modes of expression, chasing or trying to harness this underlying current of poetry—that thing in paintings or buildings or concertos or in (some) really good prose that makes me, even if temporarily, wholeheartedly invested…
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Rich Text and the Tunnel Vision of Love: An Interview with Seán Hewitt
“It’s not a book in which plot is the central driver. What I was most interested in is how falling in love spurs James into increasing levels of hope or longing, or agony in some cases. It was a very…
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Desire is the engine of magic: An Interview with Silvia Moreno-Garcia
I wanted to write something inspired by the witchcraft folklore I learned about from my family growing up back in Mexico. But I also lived in Massachusetts for a little while and wanted something related to that locale, which is…
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“Full Throttle from the First Sentence:” A Conversation with Ivonne Lamazares
“Many of us go through similar experiences, where the foundations of our lives and family dynamics collapse. These situations force us to come face to face with the instability of self-narratives, family structures, and personal identities. I’m enormously curious about…
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Clutching to Community Over Contemporary Culture
The ways in which the group will support one another …defines how friendship can stand in direct rebellion to societal status quo
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In the Land of Beauty and Illness: A Conversation with Eshani Surya
“One of the reasons that I’ve allowed my book to exist in so many genre containers is because I’ve often felt like my own life is simultaneously a coming-of-age story, along with a surreal fabulist story, along with a medical…
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Poems Are Really for People Who Don’t Read Them: on Patricia Smith’s “The Intentions of Thunder”
Ten chapters, if you will, demarcate a full life of writing, storytelling, and keeping history. Each section opens with a prelude—an interface with the interior of a poet reviewing the lens through which the work was made then and how…
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Moving Past Shame into An Expanding: A Conversation with Belle Burden
“I was setting flame to not so much the particulars of life, but just the appearance of it and the rules that I was supposed to live by. Staying quiet about what happened to coming out of that lane to…
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You Can’t Go Home Again: The Displacement and Grief in Aracelis Girmay’s “Green of All Heads”
Colonization is central in the web of elements that shape the book toward a mournful tone. Girmay sets us up knowing we are situated in an unstable reality. Point of view and even personhood are interchangeable. Identity is lost. Through…
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Enduring “The Long Walk”
Critics have also noted that several of the characters in the film are composites of characters from the book. They have pointed out that the filmmakers conflate two memorable characters from King’s novel—Scramm and Stebbins. In the book, Scramm is…
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Magic and Beauty and Wonder: a Conversation with Aaron Burch
“The real magic of a piece comes out when you let a work become what it needs to become, and when you let go of original intent. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately: a lot of short stories,…
