Blog / Interviews

10 Questions for Tyler Kline

July 25, 2023 - By Lara Stecewycz

It helps to think of your mind
as a landscape. Picture the grooves
and valleys carved like a penknife
to bark from years of compulsions;
it’s so easy following where the flood
knows it must go.
—from “From the Porch, A Moth,” Vol. 64, Issue 2 (Summer 2023)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
One of the first poems I wrote was about cherry tomatoes. I was working on a vegetable farm and spent a lot of time harvesting tomatoes. I remember using the word “hubris” to describe the tomatoes (I guess I thought they were gloating because of how delicious they were?). In any case, it was a terrible poem, but when it becomes tomato season, I always think of it.

What writer(s...

(Almost) 10 Questions for Susie Meserve

July 20, 2023 - By Lara Stecewycz

I hate AJ, Sam says, he steals
my blocks and punches me. AJ
didn't go to preschool. Here in the kitchen
my son narrates his day: phonics, Play-Doh,
the device he calls sand timer whisking away
choice time.
—from "Bioluminescence," Volume 64, Issue 2 (Summer 2023)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
Fourth grade, a poem called “Breeze.” Everyone around me was in agony over the assignment—we had to write acrostics about some kind of weather, then illustrate them—but I finished mine in record time. I thought, what’s so hard about writing poetry? Little did I know.

In high school, I wanted terribly to write good poetry. I was reading...

10 Questions for Colin Bailes

July 11, 2023 - By Lara Stecewycz

Less his offense and more

the punishment, how Actaeon was pursued
by his own hounds,

devoured by that which he thought he had tamed—
is that what I mean when I say

I, too, watched hunger
consume me?
—from “Actaeon,” Vol. 64, Issue 2 (Summer 2023)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
This is a difficult question to answer because I started writing dreadfully embarrassing song lyrics when I was very young—throughout middle school—and transitioned to what you might call poetry my freshman or sophomore year of high school. Even then, though, I wasn’t writing anything noteworthy, although I certainly thought I was at the time. The same could be said of the poetry I wrote...

10 Questions with Emily Flouton

July 3, 2023 - By Franchesca Viaud

Al had not been blessed with charm. Or pleasing aspect. Or verve. Or intellect, that I could discern, though she must have had some scrap of it to have gained acceptance in the first instance. She was a lumpen thing, all fuzzy hair, pigeon toes, and befuddled grin, her broad back humping round under that filthy yellow backpack, flouting our lofty ideals with her very existence. This was unforgivable to me.
—from "Invasive Species," Vol. 64, Issue 2 (Summer 2023)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
In second grade, I wrote a story about my teacher called “Why Are You So Crazy?” I gave it to my teacher as a gift. In my memory, she thought I was a genius and acknowledged that she was indeed crazy, but my mother...

10 Questions with Jane Zwart

June 27, 2023 - By Franchesca Viaud

After I persuade
my students there is
a name for everything,

for days I mull on what
to call the kind of kind
dissembling I've done.
—from "Dustsceawung," Vol. 64, Issue 2 (Summer 2023)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
Once I read an interview where Shane McCrae talked about reading some of his earliest published poems. Years had passed, and McCrae’s style and voice had changed, and he noted that, of course. But what I loved was how he regarded those early pieces without embarrassment. It felt like, in fact, he looked on them as sweet, bemusing reminders of the way he used to write. I would like to have that relationship with my oldest poems.

Instead, I am a little...