Q&A with Poetry Contributor Hannah Craig

Q&A with Poetry Contributor Hannah Craig

"I guess I like poems that seem to speak to/with someone, to be in a dialogue of sorts, even if we only see one side of that conversation physically drawn out on the page."

Q&A with Poetry Contributor George Perreault

Q&A with Poetry Contributor George Perreault

"I think if you edit by ear you will find the rhythm of a poem, and that rhythm will take you to the structure."

Q&A with Nonfiction Contributor Paulette Fire

Q&A with Nonfiction Contributor Paulette Fire

"Don’t try to write a good story. Just write what’s true. A true story is a good story."

Q&A with Nonfiction Contributor Jessi Lewis

Q&A with Nonfiction Contributor Jessi Lewis

"If I slowed myself down, I could process what it meant to confuse memories with hauntings and hauntings with the creaks of an older home.

Q&A with Nonfiction Contributor Eric Wilson

Q&A with Nonfiction Contributor Eric Wilson

"In contrast, the fiction-writing students were treating literature as something alive and breathing, something they themselves were creating.

Q&A with Poetry Contributor Brenna Womer

Q&A with Poetry Contributor Brenna Womer

"Perhaps the call to action, as you say, to myself and readers of the poem, is to risk having connections, investments, and loves big enough to wreck you."

Q&A with Poetry Contributor Jennifer Martelli

Q&A with Poetry Contributor Jennifer Martelli

"When I’m at a loss for words (for poetry), I mix a cocktail of Sylvia Plath and Laura Jensen (a poet who should be lauded far more)."

Q&A with Poetry Contributor David Salner

Q&A with Poetry Contributor David Salner

"As a child I lived in the country, and those cold fall days after the harvest stick in my memory."

Q&A with Poetry Contributor John Sibley Williams

Q&A with Poetry Contributor John Sibley Williams

"I’m not sure if I have favorite tools. Each poem makes its own demands."

Q&A with Poetry Contributor Mag Gabbert

Q&A with Poetry Contributor Mag Gabbert

"So, once I saw how those writers conceptualized their own worlds, I wanted to emulate that perspective. I wanted my pieces to end with someone kicking the door open, or picking the mic up for once."

Q&A with Poetry Contributor Kathryn Merwin

Q&A with Poetry Contributor Kathryn Merwin

"I like to write anatomically and explore the way a person's body interacts with and is influenced by her surroundings."

Q&A with Nonfiction Contributor Amanda Parrish Morgan

Q&A with Nonfiction Contributor Amanda Parrish Morgan

"I used to encourage my students to use the literature we read as a way in to more personal essay writing, and so bringing the novel to my own experience felt like what I, as a teacher, would have told myself to do."

Q&A with Poetry Contributor Marianne Chan

Q&A with Poetry Contributor Marianne Chan

"Editing has helped my writing because reading poems only makes me want to read more poems and write more poems and see, hear, and taste more poems—and learn more about what makes poetry poetry."

Q&A with Nonfiction Contributor Andrew Wingfield

Q&A with Nonfiction Contributor Andrew Wingfield

"Artists embrace the challenge of making the familiar new again by uncovering what is unique in their experience and resisting the constant temptation to succumb to cliché."

Q&A with Poetry Contributor Cady Vishniac

Q&A with Poetry Contributor Cady Vishniac

"It’s about the individual, and my individual tendency is to ramble."

Q&A with Poetry Contributor Anne Champion

Q&A with Poetry Contributor Anne Champion

"I think that poetry, no matter what its topic is, makes us reach for hope."

Q&A with Poetry Contributor Dahlia Seroussi

Q&A with Poetry Contributor Dahlia Seroussi

"As someone who is pretty attached to reality, it felt very transgressive to “write away” from my experience—but it was also liberating."

Q&A with Poetry Contributor Jacob Sunderlin

Q&A with Poetry Contributor Jacob Sunderlin

"But form is best for me when it’s the most invisible, and the single-stanza whoosh is somehow both almost-invisible in its proximity to prose as well as it is hyper-visible in its looking like a brick wall."

Q&A with Nonfiction Contributor Sharon Dilworth

Q&A with Nonfiction Contributor Sharon Dilworth

"I tend to transform and twist the more immediate narratives into something unrecognizable from reality. Over time nostalgia pushes me toward the truth."

Q&A with Nonfiction Contributor Andrea Cheatham

Q&A with Nonfiction Contributor Andrea Cheatham

"If anything, the American Dream in this story is as elusive for me, my grandmother, and Catherine as it was for Gatsby. You never reach it, or never feel yourself to have reached it. It only exists as a possibility, not really as a clean and finished fact.