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10 Questions for Steven Cramer

April 26, 2019 - By Abby Macgregor

 Jake says: “first time I recall wanting to die I was eight.
When I tried and nearly did I really wanted to live.”
—from “South Belknap”, Spring 2019 (Vol. 60, Issue 1)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
If I go “deep background,” I remember trying to write a sci-fi story when I was nine or ten. I made all the characters say the opposite of what they meant (the Queen of Mars tells her guards to “release” the interloping Earthlings when she wants them arrested.) The story remains unfinished. As a college freshman, I started writing miserable T.S. Eliot imitations (I believe The Fisher King made an appearance!), some of which AGNI—at that time more a...

10 Questions for Bruna Dantas Lobato

April 25, 2019 - By Abby Macgregor

“It was raining, raining, raining, and I was going into the rain to meet him, no umbrella or anything, I was always losing them in bars. I was holding just a bottle of cheap cognac tight against my chest, hard to believe it said this way, but this was how I was going through the rain, a bottle of cognac in hand and a wet pack of cigarettes in my pocket. At one point I could have taken a cab, but it wasn’t very far away, and if I took a cab I could buy neither cigarettes nor cognac.”
—from “Beyond the Point” by Caio Fernando Abreu, translated from Portuguese by Bruna Dantas Lobato, Spring 2019 (Vol. 60, Issue 1)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you translated.
It was another story by Caio Fernando Abreu...

10 Questions for Christy Crutchfield

April 22, 2019 - By Abby MacGregor

“The old man yells stories at Cooper. ‘My buddy was deep in before he came face to face with a beaver.’

The old man says his buddy’s hands were too far into the cat­fish’s mouth—maybe a forty-pound fish—to protect himself, and the beaver tore his face off. Neither his buddy nor the catfish, probably, survived.”
—from “Handfishing”, Spring 2019 (Vol. 60, Issue 1)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
My mother recently found a story I wrote and illustrated for my grandmother when I was about eight. It’s about a hamster named Smokey. None of the other hamsters like her. The story ends there. Endings have always been hard for me.

What writer(...

10 Questions for Jim Daniels

April 17, 2019 - By Abby MacGregor

At the Saturday market, enormous eye-
bulge of skinned rabbits. My son, nine,
bulges back, looking, but not.
—from “Natural Selection”, Spring 2019 (Vol. 60, Issue 1)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
I’ll tell you about the first two pieces I got published, in the same issue of my high school literary magazine, because they led me down a path I continue on today. One was a horrible piece of teen angst that was written based on what I thought poetry was supposed to be about and sound like: “I who am about to die/I who weep but cannot cry…” The other, “Growing Up in a Party Store,” was my first real poem—it was set in the store I worked in for...

10 Questions for Dana Alsamsam

April 15, 2019 - By Abby MacGregor

With grapefruits & apricots. Without a cat or a dog.
With my father who wanted a son. With my mother who wanted
nothing but closed lips, nothing but nothing. With my father’s head
shaking slightly. With photographs sealed in boxes in the closet.
—from “Self Portrait With & Without”, Spring 2019 (Vol. 60, Issue 1)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
I don’t remember when my writing turned into “pieces” per say—but I used to write a lot about trains and bridges.

What writer(s) or works have influenced the way you write now?
My literary lineage has given me so much; particularly queer folx, Muslims, and immigrants or children of...