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10 Questions for Mirinae Lee

September 29, 2021 - By Edward Clifford

This is a story of a mole.

It was about the size of a pea, light aubergine in color. He still remembers how it felt under his fingers: how it stood, pert and taut, when pressed down; yet how pliantly it leaned over when caressed sideways. A little oddity he would always remember her by.
—from "Me, Myself, and Mole," Volume 62, Issue 3 (Fall 2021)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
“Virgin Ghost on North Korean Border” is the second short story I wrote a few years ago. The story now has become the opening chapter of my novel “8 Lives of a Century-Old Trickster. (Forthcoming from Harper, 2023 spring.) The short story was inspired by my father’s childhood. His hometown was very close to...

10 Questions for David Ricchiute

September 24, 2021 - By Marissa Perez

Near a creek where his mother said don't dare go, a young boy spots a garter snake, jaws surrounding a half-swallowed worm, compelling the boy to bend at the knees, starting the descent toward the lumbering snake. It's then that he buckles from weakness in his legs, ignored for days as a nuisance that passes. . .
—from "Indifferent Limbs," Volume 62, Issue 3 (Fall 2021)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
A first story, drafted in beginner’s haste, saw many iterations and an avalanche of richly-deserved rejections. But in the early 1990s, the poet and editor A. Wilbur Stevens plucked a version from the slush pile at Interim, a semi-annual he’d resurrected from years of dormancy. Truth is...

10 Questions for Annette Oxindine

September 22, 2021 - By Marissa Perez

Tell me, what does dusk do
to Sydney Street, spent of all
our afternoons, and I'll teach you
how to say November
until it's rent of moth and flame,
its every last leaf a rhetorician,
asking what is tether without float?
—from "Leaving Chelsea", Volume 62, Issue 2 (Summer 2021)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
As a child, I wrote a story about a sister and brother befriending a Martian. It was my first and last foray into science fiction. But the desire to explore various kinds of connectedness has remained constant—although it took me years to figure out I was the Martian.

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

10 Questions for Matthew Tuckner

September 20, 2021 - By Marissa Perez

Sitting next to me on the airplane is a man with a tattoo of a swastika.
He is digging his thumbnail into an orange, dropping bits of skin onto
the carpet between our legs. Below the tattoo of the swastika is a tattoo
of a window with a view looking out onto a field with a few grazing heifers.
—from "Being There," Volume 62, Issue 2 (Summer 2021)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
I came to poetry first and foremost as a reader, and as is often the case for early readers of poetry, I didn’t always know what it was I was reading, what it meant, what I was supposed to gather from it, etc. I often just basked in the beauty of it, the delightful confusion of it. Considering this, a lot of my early...

10 Questions for April Goldman

September 17, 2021 - By Marissa Perez

Happiness: a wind through a blight of poppies.

It takes a long time to unlatch something like that. To open up a parenthesis
that looks like a burning
red poppy.
—from "[Longing]," Volume 62, No. 2 (Summer 2021)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
The first poem I wrote in what felt like my own voice was when I was in my early thirties. Long, long after I completed my MFA. I'm really susceptible to other people's opinions, so it took me a long time to be brave enough to write in the way I liked. This particular poem was about pumping gas and looking at the weeds and flowers and bees around the gas station.

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