Blog / Interviews

10 Questions for Ifa Bayeza

September 9, 2024 - By Franchesca Viaud

In three interconnected plays, The Till Trilogy is an imagined, speculative exploration of the epic of Emmett Till and the birth the modern Civil Rights Movement, the events as seen from the perspective of the youth, himself, in his final days of life, as a specter during the trial of his killers and a shadowed presence in the aftermath.
—Excerpt from Ifa Bayeza's "The Till Trilogy," Volume 65, Issue 2 (Summer 2024)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
Not counting “Mahatma Gandhi, Man of Peace,” which I presented to my fourth grade class after discovering him in the World Book Encyclopedia and reading “What Negroes Can Learn from Gandhi” in LOOK magazine (I guess I might call that a...

10 Questions for Nathalie Harty

September 3, 2024 - By Franchesca Viaud

In the village we let the nail go deep into the foot until picking up tetanus like
a surprise. We watch each other live, we turn to see every car that passes: it’s
winter’s fierce dance as it wraps us in its cure for lethargy.

I don’t know what it will take to be strong enough, with bedroom wi-fi needed
half the time to know how to look at the earth’s stark naked body.
—from Marie-Andrée Gill's "In the Village," Volume 65, Issue 2 (Summer 2024)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you translated.
The first literary translation I did was an excerpt of La route du lilas by Quebec novelist Eric Dupont. This long novel follows seventy-year-old Maria Pia. With the help of Americans...

10 Questions for Sabina Murray

August 26, 2024 - By Brooke Chandler

No form of art can express a life quite like the novel. No art form charts the lives of individuals—encounters, challenges, and relationships—as successfully as the book-length work of fiction. Perhaps this is because of the amount of detail provided for characters and their situations, which allows us to truly experience as they do, but beyond this, the living quality of novels is best understood by considering time: the time we take to read, but also the manipulation of time upon the page. All readers casually understand this, but it is worth looking at a few scientific concepts, in particular some properties of time, to better comprehend how it works.
—from Sabina Murray's "The Order of the Novel,...

10 Questions for Johanna Bishop

August 20, 2024 - By Franchesca Viaud

Profile of a solitary man, in shirt sleeves, whose pose of
sharpening a blade suggests he is a knife grinder. Often
called The Spy, since he seems to be listening to some-
thing attentively, it is thought to depict the man who
discovered the Catiline conspiracy; at other times of day
he appears to be Cincinnatus, at still others Manlius Capi-
tolinus.
—from Andrea Inglese's "Five Visions From The Big Duck," Volume 65, Issue 2 (Summer 2024)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you translated.
I suppose I translated a few poems and songs from French and Italian as a teenager—recently, an old friend even dug up a Natalia Ginzburg essay that we had the youthful hubris to tackle over a...

From Below the Earth and Across the Sea:

The Chthonic Choreography of Emma Cianchi

August 15, 2024 - By Anna Botta and Jim Hicks, with Emma Cianchi and Caterina Giangrasso Angrisani

Editor’s note: As will be clear, the following conversation with the Massachusetts Review’s Executive Editor, Jim Hicks, and the co-editor of our “Mediterraneans” issue, Anna Botta, was conducted just hours before the première of the choreographer Emma Cianchi and ArtGarageDanceCompany’s new performance, The Sea that Unites Us. After the dance that evening, the choreographer told the audience more about her inspiration. She commented, “When I came here, I had the idea of working on the theme of the journey. When I got to Jacob’s Pillow, however, I immediately felt that I also needed to bring something here from my land, which is rich in mythology. And I thought of the legends of female figures present in the story of...