In your writing, history is brought into the present moment of your narrative through memory, documents, and by giving voice to ghosts. What philosophical or personal beliefs underlie that choice?
Continue readingWhen did you start working on your memoir, Mosaic[from which The Seaweed Mattess is excerpted]? If it was after your immigration to America, what are the advantages, if any, to writing about one’s childhood and the past so far away from Odessa?
Continue readingIf we were doing this interview in person, we’d ask you to perform your life’s history in interpretive dance. Since we don’t have that luxury, do you think you could tell it to us in five sentences or less?
Continue readingIn 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?
Continue readingAccording 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?
Continue readingYour 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?
Continue readingWhat first drew you to Gyula Krúdy, and what led you to begin translating his work?
Continue readingIn 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?
Continue readingYour 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?
Continue readingWere you always this funny? What were your earliest comic influences?
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