Features & Reviews
-
“Poetry’s Invitation to Spend Time in a Small Moment:” A Conversation with Rahul Mehta
I can make connections across different times in my life, connections between different selves, and somehow that makes everything feel more whole.
-
Frederick Douglass was a Complicated Human Being: A Conversation with Sidney Morrison
As a novelist, you have to decide, what doesn’t serve the drama at that particular point. Even biographers have had to make serious decisions about what to include.
-
Letting Go of What We Should Have Had: Adam Phillips’s On Giving Up
We first must recognize the path not taken as a burden that controlled us and will not surrender easily.
-
Feeling My Way Along a Metaphorical Ledge: A Conversation with Nancy Miller Gomez
There’s always so much happening around us—we can’t possibly take it all in—but certain things seem to be a beacon for my attention.
-
The First Book: Uche Okonkwo
Going out of one’s way to write what’s currently trendy, just because it’s trendy, can be counterproductive and take the pleasure out of writing.
-
“There has to be peril”: A Conversation with Andromeda Romano-Lax
Suspense, as a genre, can be a Trojan Horse. It’s a strong vehicle that you can hide things within [to] explore ideas about culture, gender, language, or place.
-
Unearthing the Past in The Safekeep
There is an elegant cadence to the prose, a slight twist in language to create a dynamic image of a simple nighttime scene. Two proud firs. The single star as the sky’s beauty mark.
-
“I’m not trying to break you”: A Conversation with Carvell Wallace
The events are doing the writing for me, and my job as a stylist is to simply get out of the way and let the story tell itself.
-
A Tight-Lipped Kind of Love: Jennifer Manthey’s The Fight
Through her terse yet piercing consideration of this school fight…Manthey asks us to look directly into the historically charged layers of the book’s eponymous fight.
-
Living in The In Between: A Conversation with Anna Mantzaris
When women are in partnerships—being a wife or a girlfriend of a partner—we take on all these different roles but they’re always changing. Our jobs are always changing and evolving.
-
Like A Mother: Joyelle McSweeney’s Death Styles
For the reader, it is the dedication before McSweeney’s first poem, “for my daughters,” that signals it is time to read.
-
“If You Give a Story Something, It Gives It Back:” A Conversation with Morgan Talty
A writer isn’t in control of what’s on the page, the story is. But if you give a story something, it gives it back.