Interviews

Okla Elliott

Interviewed by Gentris L. Jointe

In an interview with Pif Magazine, you said your father, a soldier in World War Two, “came home a mostly useless drunk and ruined his family.” Did you have his experiences and nightmares in mind when you wrote “The Patience of the Landmine?” How did you arrive at this poem?

Interviews

John Brandon

Interviewed by Daniel O’Malley

According to the jacket on your novel Arkansas, while you worked on the book you also “worked at a lumber mill, a windshield warehouse, a Coca-Cola distributor, and several small factories that produce goods made of rubber and plastic.” That’s not a small number of jobs—what kind of time span are we talking about here? Were you moving around a lot? How’d that experience affect your writing?

Interviews

Sebastian Boensch

Interviewed by Trevor Crown

Your one-page piece in Subtropics 19 explores the idea of wanting to accomplish something before death. How do you as a writer define accomplishment, and what do you seek to accomplish?

Interviews

John Batki

Interview and kitchen testing by Rachel Khong (additional kitchen testing by Magdalen Powers)

What first drew you to Gyula Krúdy, and what led you to begin translating his work?

Interviews

C. Dylan Bassett

Interviewed by Victor Florence

In Anti-, you have an Anti-Thesis in which you state that you are “against poems that think they know what they’re talking about.” What brought you to seeing rationality in poetry as something to be pushed against?

Interviews

Ari Banias

Interviewed by Claire Eder and Ezra Stewart-Silver

Your poem appearing in Subtropics 15 is sort of an allegory about memory and experience. How do you start writing about such large philosophical questions? Where did this poem begin?

Interviews

Chris Bachelder

Interviewed by Anthony Luebbert

Were you always this funny? What were your earliest comic influences?

Interviews

Ryan Ruff Smith

Interviewed by David Leavitt

You’re principally a fiction writer. How did you find the transition from writing about (and from the point of view of) people who were not yourself to writing as yourself?

Interviews

Thomas Pierce

Interviewed by Patrick May

The banana is arguably one of the funniest of fruits. Why did you decide to center your story Two Bananas around it and not something else, like an apple?

Interviews

Alan Michael Parker

Interviewed by Olga Rukovets and Tara Tatum

In A Poem for Sally, the speaker “swallow[s] whole / his youngest daughter” in an effort to protect her from the external world and her own inner turmoil. Although you describe the speaker’s act as one of consumption, it brings to mind the image of returning the daughter to a fetal stage. What was your intention behind the speaker’s action in this poem?