Blog

10 Questions for Diane Wilson

February 16, 2021 - By Edward Clifford

I dreamed my mother called my name in a voice that ached with longing. I dreamed the acrid smoke of a fire stung my eyes, blurred the edges of the woman who held a deer antler with both hands as she pulled on a smoldering block of damp wood. The flames were the only light in a darkness so complete the trees had disappeared.
—from The Seed Keeper, Volume 61, Issue 4 (Winter 2020)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
After a few years dabbling in freelance journalism, the first “real” piece I wrote was a story my mother had shared with me when I was a teenager, at an age when I was grappling with the usual teenage angst. She had told me that when she was 14, and living at the Holy Rosary Mission School on...

For the Record

February 13, 2021 - By Jim Hicks

Though we rarely think of them in this light, writers and professors of literature have training and skills with policy implications. They even, at times, feel called upon to weigh in on matters of national and international importance. In this country, however, I would be shocked if they were actually called upon, much less listened to. The one counterexample I can think of comes from abroad, and it has always appeared to me both memorable and laudable. When the Republic of Argentina formed a national commission to investigate, assemble evidence, and publish a public record after years of kidnapping, torturing, and murdering its citizens, they appointed a novelist, Ernesto Sabato, to head that commission. The introduction to its final report remains a model of clarity and...

10 Questions for Bojan Louis

February 11, 2021 - By Edward Clifford

Mouth full of raven's bones, eyes black beaks, on our exhausted bellies
we umbilicus to Earth. .54 mm bullets light up our backs, exit our bellies

Pre-K: St. Michaels, AZ. Nuns, black scapular and white cowl, shunt
milk-blood prayers down constricted throats; gurgling cramped bellies.
—from "Ghazal VI," Volume 61, Issue 4

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
Something that initially comes to mind is a poem I wrote in high school about payphones changing from 25 cents to 35 five cents. I think I was trying to be funny or ironic, but the piece was sort of long with a rhymey and ecstatic cadence, unmetered lines. I have no idea what other themes or images it possessed. It’s probably on a three-...

10 Questions for Michelle LaPena

February 8, 2021 - By Edward Clifford

The ilium represents the pelvis of a female. If the remains are one individual, it appears that she was a female​, and DNA testing indicates Native American ancestry. However, given the limited data for various tribes of the area, and the custom of intermarriage that results from a taboo against cousin marriage, it is difficult to ascertain her tribal affiliation. DNA cannot prove actual tribal identity.
—from "Excavation: She Was Dug Up," Volume 61, Issue 4 (Winter 2020)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
My first published piece was written a very long time ago, when I was an undergrad at UC Davis. I was assigned to write an essay for a class taught by Professor Inez Hernandez-Avila called Native American...

Under the Dome

February 5, 2021 - By Michael Thurston

Under the Dome: Walks with Paul Celan by Jean Daive, Translated by Rosmarie Waldrop (City Lights, 2020)

On or around the 20th of April, 1970, Paul Celan walked from his apartment on Avenue Emile-Zola to the Pont Mirabeau and stepped from the bridge into the Seine, from which he did not emerge alive. Celan’s suicide resonated throughout the European literary world: yet another among the seemingly countless casualties of the Holocaust, of the Nazi labor camps and death camps, after Celan had been imprisoned in the former and his parents murdered in the latter. For the French poet, Jean Daive, Celan’s disappearance continues, like the...