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Intimate Enemies
What’s important isn’t that El Tricolor wins, but that they give us occasion to revel in the stands. Strictly speaking, the crowd is there to celebrate itself. In emblematic fashion, the chant we use to encourage our own is sí…
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The Train Keeps Moving: A Conversation with Jeff Boyd
“To me, there always has to be a sort of rhythm or pace to it, which is what I was keeping in mind as I was switching POVs in this novel. The train’s always moving, and it’s almost always moving…
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Waiting, Migration, and the Narrators Between: A Conversation with Bsrat Mezghebe
“I generally wrote as if the reader would know what I was talking about. I did not want to be bothered with incredibly long and detailed descriptions of culturally specific food, clothes, events et cetera. I thought it would slow…
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Casting a Wider Lens & Writing about Lived History: A Conversation with Sean Hill
“ I was interested in seeing what I could do with the sonnet and a voice much like my grandmother’s. Being urged to write about the women in my family moved me to write about the people and place I…
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Men in Black Coats
I probably should have lied and told him it got dangerous. I lived alone. No safety net of a brother or a boyfriend to fall back on if a murderer broke into the building and got past the doorman, past…
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Three Poems
over coffee. At least I’m good at nodding. Fishermen were paid to take the roles of morticians. Instead of shovels, a line and hook. There’s a bay into Manila that every president jones
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Bouquet of Memoirs: A Conversation with Beth Ann Fennelly
“I know sometimes people find titles by looking at the titles of individual pieces, and they look for the most significant or biggest piece. And in this case, it was actually one of the slightest pieces, but that also seemed…
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The Taxonomy of Girlhood: Review of Susan L. Leary’s “More Flowers”
More Flowers interrogates how patriarchal authority persists even in its absence, transmitted through maternal caretaking rather than overt dominance. While an authoritative male figure is not present, the mother still governs by his rule, passing down restrictive and traditional expectations…
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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…
