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10 Questions for Alex Kuo

February 2, 2022 - By Edward Clifford

Pyne’s count could be extrapolated further: a hundred cloud-to-ground lightning strikes per second. Such strikes account for about 10 percent of the annual wildfires in the United States, and since 1982, there has been an alarming rise in the total number, directly linked to the increasing temperatures due to climate change.
—from "That First Wildfire," Volume 62, Issue 4 (Winter 2021)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
It was probably during an early summer weekend morning in 1959 at a US Forest Service blister rust work camp, BRC 253 on Meadow Creek, near Clarkia, Idaho, more than sixty years ago after my sophomore year in college in central Illinois. It was after breakfast, and my three tent mates were...

10 Questions for Alexis Orgera

January 26, 2022 - By Edward Clifford

A tanker
capsized off
the Georgia coast,

4,000 Hyundais
slipping
to their murky

deaths
—From "The Book of Other," Volume 62, Issue 4 (Winter 2021)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
I can do more than tell you about it. Here it is:

Kiwi

Fuzzy football
in the sand.
Shave the beard
and bite the chin.

In the ninth grade, my English class included a semester of poetry, and that was the beginning for me. We read widely from Xeroxed pages, wrote our own poems, and made handmade poetry anthologies. I’d tried to write some stories before then, but I was more a reader. My favorite...

10 Questions for Salar Abdoh

January 21, 2022 - By Edward Clifford

My mother does not know a lot of things, and yet she remembers many things. When I tell her over the phone that I am thinking of learning how to sail a boat, she does not ask how it is that I could do something like this in Tehran, a city far from the sea [...]
—from "Hoor-Al-Azim," by Maryam Haidari, Translated by Salar Abdoh

Tell us about one of the first pieces you translated.
I seriously got into translation after Akashic Books asked me to edit and translate Tehran Noir, a volume in their remarkable series of noir collection from major cities around the world.

What writer(s) or works have influenced the way you write now?
Looking back, probably the writer who had the most consistent...

10 Questions for Maryam Haidari

January 19, 2022 - By Salar Abdoh and Edward Clifford

My mother does not know a lot of things, and yet she remembers many things. When I tell her over the phone that I am thinking of learning how to sail a boat, she does not ask how it is that I could do something like this in Tehran, a city far from the sea [...]
—from "Hoor-Al-Azim," by Maryam Haidari, Translated by Salar Abdoh

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
In 2012 I was traveling north from Beirut to Tripoli. It was the first time I was in Lebanon and I was determined to see my friend up in Tripoli. But ISIS had already crossed over from the Syrian border into the north of Lebanon. My Lebanese friends forbade me to go, saying that if ISIS found out I was Iranian they would surely kill me. I went nevertheless....

10 Questions for CAConrad

January 14, 2022 - By Edward Clifford

My last (Soma)tic poetry ritual, “Resurrect Extinct Vibration,” used audio field recordings of animals who have become extinct in my lifetime. The ritual momentarily returned the music of the disappeared back to the air, the body, and the land.
—from Ignition Chronicles, Volume 62, Issue 4 (Winter 2022)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
My first poem is from 1975. My mother began making me sell bouquets of flowers along the highway, and it turned me into a reader. Think about that year 1975; absolutely nothing digital in our hands to distract us. Friday, Saturday, and Sunday became many hours of forced isolation for me, and reading was the solution.

One Thursday, when I was at the library getting...