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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...

A Shade of Recognition

September 26, 2021 - By Peter I. Rose

(Photo: A bus stop in San Juan, PR; CC BY-SA 4.0)

On NPR the other day there was a story about sunny, hot, and sticky Los Angeles and the utter lack of shade trees in Watts and other Black and Latino neighborhoods in contrast to their profusion in nearby Beverly Hills and other upscale areas. Hearing this report brought back a vivid memory of an experience I had in Puerto Rico sixty years ago.

A very junior professor of sociology and anthropology in my third or fourth year of teaching, I was thrilled to get a consulting gig with the Social Science section of the Department of Health in San Juan. My boss was to be Ed Suchman, a former teacher of mine for whom I had also worked when I...

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...