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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?...

10 Questions for Mag Gabbert

September 15, 2021 - By Edward Clifford

annunciation is what we call the day when Mary conceived a son

blue has been known to belong to the gods even though it bespangles both men and death and

cloaked in it Mary was told she'd be blessed at least among women
—from "Blue," Volume 62, Issue 2 (Summer 2021)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
Anyone who’s encountered other interviews with me or kept up with my posts on social media might be somewhat familiar with this story already, but when I think of my earliest “work,” I always go back to a little poem-essay I wrote while visiting my grandparents in North Carolina for Christmas one year. At the time, a small herd of deer lived near their house, and they often grazed in...

10 Questions for Emily Vizzo

September 13, 2021 - By Marissa Perez

Trust your move, Galileo, in the warring
starry fields.

The bone I own.
—from "Galileo Stumbles Once & a Planet Suddenly Skews," Volume 62, Issue 2 (Summer 2021)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
I wrote a poem about mud in fifth grade that I was really proud of; it was a pretty good poem and my teacher asked me to read it at our spring festival, this auditorium filled with kids and parents. And I got nervous and decided to read it in this ironic, self-mocking way, I really sold myself out. And I felt terrible afterward about myself, because I knew I had dishonored the poem, and somehow I knew that this was a serious thing, a big deal, to pretend that I had this lightweight and cynical...

A Short Inquiry into the End of the World (Working Title 6.2)

September 11, 2021 - By David Stromberg

It looked like a regular day—all business as usual—but I knew that the world had come to an end. People went about their business as if nothing had happened. And I, too, did all the same things. I woke up in the same bed, went into the same shower, used the same soap. But I knew it was the end of days. And that, to understand how we got here, I had no choice but to investigate.

With everything destroyed, I couldn’t go outside, so I sat down at my desk and began with the only resource I had: my library. And since my only clue was the date of the apocalypse, September 11, 2021, I began by looking in the rubble of Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers.

I’d been in the audience, as a young gumshoe, when Spiegelman came to our college...

10 Questions for Jessica Jacobs

September 10, 2021 - By Marissa Perez

In the original, Adam has my back—
is my back—our bodies one
body. We take turns
walking forward. With each seeing
half the world, we see it
—from "Creation Stories," Volume 62, Issue 2 (Summer 2021)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
As a kid who camped out in front of Teen Wolf whenever it came on TV, convinced I was secretly a werewolf, I wrote a short story about—what else?—a young werewolf so distraught at being separated from her true clan she became catatonic, a word I stole from Ferris Beuller’s Day Off. Poetry it was not.

What other professions have you worked in?
Deep breath; let’s begin at 14...