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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,...

10 Questions for Bernard Capinpin

November 16, 2021 - By Edward Clifford

As soon as the lamp was lit at six every evening and the chickens fluttered down from the cacao and jackfruit trees, Father would leave/ He wore shabby military fatigues, boots as large as my legs, and an antique amulet on which was inscribed an Angelus that only Father could read and understand: Que cecop, deus meus, deus noter.
—from "Santiago's Cult" by Kristian Sendon Cordero, Translated by Bernard Capinpin, Volume 62, Issue 3 (Fall 2021)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you translated.
One of the first pieces I translated was Luna Sicat-Cleto’s “The Logic of the Soap Bubbles.” Sicat-Cleto was part of the Katha (lit. ‘Story’) collective who pushed back against the then-dominant...

10 Questions for Natasha Lvovich

November 9, 2021 - By Edward Clifford

First, in complete silence, the yellow wall in my room cracks, spreading its spiderweb threads as quickly and as slowly as is possible only in a dream. Chills are crawling down my spine; hot flashes throb into my head. This is panic, fear, terror—a preverbal, pre-Russian sensation that as yet has no name.
—from "Phone Home," Volume 62, Issue 3 (Fall 2021)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
This is a complicated question because in my several lives—Russian, French, and American, with some overlapping—there have been different chronologies. I wrote my first book in Russian at the age of seven; it was called Papa, Mama, Eight Children, and a Truck, and it doesn’t matter that this book...

10 Questions with Kelly R. Samuels

November 4, 2021 - By Emily Wojcik

I slept the sleep of the dead
once. Once, could not be woken
in time to do what it wasI had to do.
Did not hear the ring of. Did not hear
the rap of. Was called. Was shaken. Rose
groggy, stumblingdown the hall, my mother saying, Look
at who has finally graced us with her presence. ...

—from "Only Somewhat Sleeping," from Volume 62, Issue 2 (Summer 2021)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote....