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10 Questions for Marianne Boruch

December 23, 2020 - By Edward Clifford

of a totaled car? Disc five there once,
the library lectures-on-tape (Daily Life in the Ancient World)
however fog-socked-in shattered day of arrival.

But arrival: that would be

the Present waitin for a Future to soothe
—from "Is the Past What's Left in the Glove Compartment," Volume 61, Issue 3 (Fall 2020)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
A very simple one about eating eggs for breakfast. Not the first I've ever written, but the piece about which I suddenly thought: my god, this is a poem! Which is to say, it looked back at me. It had its own secret life, could stand up for itself. I wasn't trying to xerox something that happened or make a sweetened scrapbook of some moment of...

10 Questions for Marcela Sulak

December 21, 2020 - By Edward Clifford

For three hours I've been thrusting my body past the breaking waves on the northernmost beach in Tel Aviv, where the surfers go, and the lifeguards keep calling—little girl!

Little girl, come back!—when I move just outside the border marked by red and white plastic lines tied to metal poles sunk into the sea floor.
—from "Breaking," Volume 61, Issue 3, (Fall 2020)

We asked Marcela Sulak the same 10 Questions we ask our other contributors. She provided the following interview.

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote. 
Roses are red.So’s the Indian Blanket.
What happened to the Titanic?
An Iceberg sank it.

At the time, I was proud of extreme...

10 Questions for Emily Van Kley

December 18, 2020 - By Edward Clifford

Often we bled
afterwards.
A seep high
in the nostrils,
then red. Or
our heads pounded
& we slept
for hours in dark
rooms, waited
for our thoughts
to unbrick.
—from "Effluvium," Volume 61, Issue 3 (Fall 2020)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
The first story I ever wrote was a near-total plagiarism of “Popcorn” by Frank Asch. If I remember correctly, my only ‘original’ contributions were the title—“Pippi Poppi Popcorn”—and the fact that the protagonist was a little girl instead of a bear in a racist Halloween costume (yikes).

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

The Offending Classic

December 17, 2020 - By Mark Franko

The Offending Classic

Photo: Nikolai Aistov as the Rajah, Julia Sedova as Gamzatti and Pavel Gerdt as Solor (ca. 1902). Courtesy of the Marius Petipa Society.

We have recently seen a conflict over a Depression-era mural on the wall of a public school in San Francisco. It came under attack by the student body for its offensive content to minorities, even though the 1930s mural in question was by Russian leftist émigré artist Victor Arnautoff (hardly a household name) and was created as a protest against the injustice propagated by the United States of America against minorities.[1] A dead Native American at the feet of the first President of the United States is the offending element within this image. The irony in this image, which contests...

Marvin K. Mooney, Will You Please Go Now?

December 16, 2020 - By Ward Schumaker

When my son was young we’d read a book or two each night before he went to sleep, and invariably he’d ask for just one more. For that extra read, one title became my favorite: Marvin K. Mooney Won’t You Please Go Now, by Dr. Seuss: “The time has come! The time is now! JUST GO, GO, GO! I DON’T CARE HOW! Marvin K. Mooney, will you please go now?!” As refrains go, this one was useful in persuading my son that it was finally time for to go to sleep.

Today I find the book relevant again. Why won’t Donald Trump and the G.O.P. just accept the will of the people and move on? I’m not the first to think the book germane to politics: Wikipedia tells me that, back in 1974 during the Watergate affair, the columnist Art Buchwald...