10 Questions for Terese Svoboda

- By Amal Zaman

"What little that's rooted must arise.
Like, who plants in cups except kids?

Enter the forest. The forest will eat you,
men in balaclavas who haven't read Marx.

And so on, including the starry skies.
You've seen a sieve? Explosions unto mesh..."
--from "Vegetables" which appears in the Fall 2016 issue (Volume 57, Issue 3).

What writer(s) or works have influenced the way you write now?

I feel in dialogue with quite a number of contemporaries – Maureen Seaton, Stephanie Strickland, Brenda Hillman, Mac Wellman, Thylias Moss.

What other professions have you worked in?

I've sold pretzels on the street and I've produced a documentary series for PBS.

What did you want to be when you were young?

At my interview for Radcliffe, I said I wanted to be a nurse. Needless to say, I didn't get in.

What inspired you to write this piece?

Animatronic vegetables sang in a Menlo Park grocery store at the height of the dotcom era. The second poem derives from family strife.

Is there a city or place, real or imagined, that influences your writing?

New York's openness to possibility.

Do you have any rituals or traditions that you do in order to write?

I write as often as possible.

Who typically gets the first read of your work?

Husband. I wave it at him, saying only if he's very very good...

If you could work in another art form what would it be?

I have worked extensively in video art.

What are you working on currently?

I've just finished a new novel, Harpies, about two social workers with wings.

What are you reading right now?

Caroline Knox' To Drink Boiled Snow and Lydia Millet's novel Sweet Lamb of Heaven and I just finished Paul Beatty's The Sellout.

Terese Svoboda's Professor Harriman's Steam Air-Ship was published in September 2016. When the Next Big War Blows Down the Valley: Selected and New Poems appeared in 2015. Live Sacrifice (stories) will be published in 2017.