Interviews
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Drag as Storytelling: A Conversation with Hieu Minh Nguyen
One thing I love about drag is the opportunity to become someone else. I’ve never been especially good at pouring energy into myself. A lot of my writing comes from the position of a witness or observer. Poetry was my…
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Environmental Disaster, Erosion of Home: A Conversation with Stephanie Soileau
My favorite fiction asks questions and doesn’t necessarily provide answers. It gives the full equation and you can draw whatever conclusions you want from that equation. The calculus is often complicated.
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Queering Taxonomies: A Conversation with Alysia Li Ying Sawchyn
I think a lot about the often quoted (and sometimes misinterpreted) Joan Didion line: ‘We tell ourselves stories in order to live.’ We have to construct something to make sense of our experience of the world inside our heads, and…
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“Breaking the Line Until It Felt Right:” A Conversation with Kendra Allen
Fiction has been so surprising for me—especially whenever I have to speak about the book—because for the first time in my writing life, no one is looking at the ‘I’ as me. There’s recourse in assumption, whereas with memoir—with personal…
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Black Single Moms Create Wonderful Worlds for Their Kids: A Conversation with Jamilah Lemieux
We have always had very high expectations of Black women. We have always had to do more, be more, give more than most groups of people in this country. So if we can talk openly and honestly about that, I…
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Private Scaffolding, Public Stories: A Conversation with Julie Buntin
I liked the emotional effect of trying to grasp that feeling I think we all have sometimes that life and time have gotten away from us. Second person is a perspective that allows for a lot of telling really fast,…
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Collective Mourning and Community: A Conversation with Edwidge Danticat
I also like starting my stories in medias res, in the middle of things, because that’s how life is sometimes. Ordinary days can turn into extraordinary ones in a second. I also find it interesting to write about a character…
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Decentering the Human Narrative in Fables: A Conversation with Thomas Wharton
“Do I have a process for tackling tragic scenes? Just to be honest and direct about what’s happening, and to avoid overwriting—that’s what moves me in the sentimental writing that I admire. If my own story makes me cry, that’s…
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“This Fraught and Gorgeous World”: A Conversation with Anna Lena Phillips Bell
“I’ve always loved the phrase might could—it’s very much part of the vernacular I grew up speaking and hearing. There’s both a sense of hope and a sense of resignation in it. When I was writing what became the book’s…
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The First Book: Janan Alexandra
“There wasn’t a single defining moment when the idea for the book was conceived. I think of it more like clay: shaping and reshaping, or waves washing up on shore, bringing little bits of detritus and glass and seashell to…
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Seeing Past and Under the Page in Translation: A Conversation with Heather Cleary
What I love most about translation is that it really is both an art and a craft in the sense that it’s a tremendously creative process. Every day that I sit down to work, I feel that effervescence of creative…
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The “Art Cop” in the Black Imagination: A Conversation with Brandon Taylor
“It’s really insidious the ways Black, queer, and marginal writers get sequestered from reading list culture. Unfortunately, these lists get compounded year over year, and it makes it harder to find these books. We have to read these books, seek…