Did you know online literary magazine High Desert Journal features an exclusive podcast interview with Native American writer CMarie Fuhrman? If not, definitely go check it out. You may need to really crank the volume so you can hear her responses to the interviewer’s questions.
And I think that says something, too, about our culture not wanting to face death.
Listen to the the full interview here: www.highdesertjournal.com/podcast.
In Southeast Review‘s special Online content, John Sibley Williams interviews José Angel Araguz, a CantoMundo fellow, author of several chapbooks and collections, and the Editor-in-Chief of Salamander.
Araguz talks about how place, specifically Corpus Christi, Texas and Matamoros, Tamaulipas, has defined him, his work, and his politics.
Not only is my family’s story scattered across these two places, but some of the essential issues of our times play out on this border: immigration from a variety of countries (not just Mexico), narcotraffico, and the ensuing violence against women, children, and the poor. There is no memory that isn’t tinged with darkness, with threat and danger.
Since Araguz’s work does feature a lot of his own culture, he is asked how he approaches work to make it universal to readers of all cultures and his response is great: “I tread carefully around the word “universal.” There’s so much instability to language that to count on a poem alone, the mere words on the page, to be universal, is to invite failure.”
Learn more about José Angel Araguz, how he crafts his poetry, and how his experiences helped form his work.
Runestone Volume 6 was released at the end of February and features an interview with John Ostrander, prolific writer of comics in the the DC, Marvel, and Star Wars universes.
Ostrander answers questions about comics he loved as a child (he had to hide super hero comics from his mother), the challenges of joining an already well-established comics universe, and how involved in the process he was for his comics being adapted into films.
In terms of working minorities and more diverse characterization in, I’m very proud of that. One of the characters I created was Amanda Waller for The Suicide Squad. There was no one like her at the time, and really not many like her since then. When I was first working on it, I knew that as the head of it I wanted someone who was not super-powered, I wanted someone who was African American, I wanted a female, I wanted someone slightly older, and I wanted them to be tough as nails.
Garth Greenwell interviewed by Ilya Kaminsky in The Paris Review.
I don’t know how much these distinctions exist for me. Certainly I think the conversation of art doesn’t care about them very much. I’ve always been turned off by a kind of assertive Americanism, and the American writers I love best, from Hawthorne and James and Baldwin to Alexander Chee and Yiyun Li, have all been cosmopolitan in their tastes and views. Of course, America is important to my writing—the landscape of the American South, the rhythms of American speech, the expansive, sometimes-redemptive, sometimes-toxic sense of American selfhood.
What it means to be American is one of the subjects of my books, as it is of any book about Americans abroad. Bulgaria is important to the books, too. I was speaking Bulgarian every day as I wrote What Belongs to You. Often enough, I spoke only Bulgarian. The rhythms of Bulgarian—the most beautiful, the most musical language in the world, so far as I’m concerned—are part of those sentences, as is the cityscape of Mladost, the quarter of Sofia where I lived, which I also think is very beautiful, though maybe with a difficult kind of beauty.
“Larry Kramer Wishes More People Wrote About Gay History” – his new book is “The American People: Volume 2.”
Which subjects do you wish more authors would write about?
Gay history. Most historians taken seriously are always straight. They wouldn’t know a gay person if they took him to lunch. A good example is Ron Chernow’s biography of Hamilton, which doesn’t include the fact that he was both gay and in love with George Washington. Gore Vidal pointed this out to me.
Have you ever gotten in trouble for reading a book?
Not for reading one but plenty of times for writing one. Gay writers writing about other gays is not exactly a winning audience. And gays are not the best buyers or readers of their own. In “Faggots,” I used my best friend for one of the leading characters because he told such good jokes that I used. He never spoke to me again after the book came out.
Caoilinn Hughes talks with Mary Cregan about her new book The Scar. …But this book is far more than a memoir: it is the result of decades of research on the medical history of the diagnosis, as well as the classification and treatment of depression and melancholia. To this rigorous and fascinating scholarship, Cregan has added the work of a variety of artists—from the ancient Greeks to Leonard Cohen. No surprise, then, that she teaches literature at Barnard College.
For a long time I couldn’t figure out how to write the book because the subject is seen by most people as “depressing.” How does one not write a depressing book about depression? Add to that the trigger of the death of an infant, and it seemed a daunting thing to invite readers to enter into. Death, grief, suicide, illness: these are subjects that a lot of people prefer to avoid thinking about.
The Fall 2019 Issue of The Main Street Rag includes an interview with Cathryn Cofell. The interview touches upon career, inspiration, and the Cofell’s submission process.
Cofell was named the winner of the 2019 Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award and readers can also find three of her poems in this issue: “Rush Hour,” “What I Learned from My Father,” and “Resignation Notice.”
Stick Figure with Skirt, the winning book, was released in November 2019 and is available at the Main Street Rag bookstore. Readers can also find additional sample poems from the book at the store.
Learn a little more about current U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo in the latest issue of World Literature Today. In addition to a featured poem by Harjo, “Bless This Land,” there is also a mini, three-question interview with the poet.
Harjo answers the questions:
What recent book has captured your interest?
What outside the realm of literature has drawn your attention of late?
What current writing projects do you have underway or have planned in the near future?
The interview is brief but informative and gives readers jumping off points for what to pick up next.