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10 Questions for Jeannine Hall Gailey

January 4, 2022 - By Edward Clifford

Milkmen returned to their jobs.

Sales of private jets and air purifiers went through the roof.

There were shortages, but they were short-lived:coins, toilet paper, bleach.
—from "Things I Forgot to Tell You about the End of the World," Volume 62, Issue 4 (Winter 2021)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
One of the first poems I remember writing was when I was seven years old. We lived near the Oak Ridge National Labs (and my father consulted there) where some nuns just a few years ago were arrested for protesting building nuclear weapons, or the nuclear waste, or just trespassing on the grounds? Something. Anyway, to me it was a very sinister seeming place. I wrote a very clever (I thought) poem about...

10 Questions for Virginia Konchan

December 14, 2021 - By Edward Clifford

My first real job: barmaid.
I stood: I stared. I poured
cabernet: I dried expensive
wine glasses with a chamois cloth
—from "Psalm," Volume 61, Issue 3 (Fall 2021)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
I made my first chapbook when I was five, with colored construction paper and yarn: a short allegorical story called “A Magical Christmas” about a young girl who goes Christmas shopping with her grandmother and who manages to keep the gift she chooses for her a secret until Christmas Day. Then I gave the chapbook to my grandmother for Christmas, a nested narrative. There were many plot points that didn’t cohere, but she loved it. That experience enabled me to internalize a reader.

10 Questions for Carolyn Kuebler

December 9, 2021 - By Edward Clifford

Look, I'm alive. And this park, Wright Park it's called—a scrappy woodland just a half mile down the road from my home—is alive too, living and dying at once, whether I'm there to see it or not.
—from "Wildflower Season," Volume 62, Issue 3 (Fall 2021)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
I have boxes full of notebooks of various kinds—diaries with a tiny lock and key, black-and-white speckled Mead notebooks, plaid clothbound books with too-tight bindings, and sleek Moleskines. These are full of barely legible writing that has always felt like a lifeline to me, the only way to make any sense of the overwhelming chaos of just living and being and the relentless passage of time. They are...

10 Questions for Laura Bernstein-Machlay

December 7, 2021 - By Edward Clifford

Still it keeps encroaching, the prickly dread, waiting past midnight as sleep comes in stutters, until you quit trying. As branches scratch tree songs at your windows and shadows scurry like mice across the sills. Because time is ticking down. An inevtiable end approaching, the unmarked cars turning onto your street, their low rumble over asphalt.
—from "The Tender Soul's Guide to Midwestern Middle-Class Midlife Dread," Volume 62, Issue 3 (Fall 2021)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
First ever poem from second grade: Don’t bring grass to class. As this was during the 1970s, grass had another meaning I was wholly unaware of at the time, thinking instead that I shouldn’t rip up the...

10 Questions for Amy Shea

December 1, 2021 - By Edward Clifford

When someone is brought back from an overdose by Narcan, it can be a violent business: the body goes into immediate and intense withdrawal, and it can feel like you've had the shit kicked out of you. The person may be confused and terrified, and so it seems a reasonable repsonse to be angry. A lot like what it must feel like to be born: ripped from nonexistence and unconsciousness into the bright, noisy, messy business of living.
—from "Deaths of Disparity," Volume 62, Issue 3 (Fall 2021)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
The first pieces I really remember writing were in junior high, when I wrote lots of Goosebumps-inspired short stories. The first piece I ever had published titled,...