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?
Continue readingIn 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?
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Continue readingThe quickie that the speaker suggests to his beloved in Lucky Me seems to be a way to stop dwelling on growing older, a way of having fun right now. Is one method more valuable than the other? Can we have one without the other?
Continue readingWhat I love about Evidence is that it’s both domestic and sinister: these hints of almost ludicrous preciousness (“like I’d fallen and spilled / into little tinsels of gold” or those wee ceramic foxes) combined with that slab of meat at the end (“is it done is it done”) or the title’s implication of a crime. From what I’ve read of your work, for example in your collection Girl-King, you often interrogate different aspects of femininity. Is this poem asking similar questions?
Continue readingSince you switch quickly from talking about varieties of happiness to speaking about performance in line 4, are you suggesting that happiness is a kind of performance? If the poem does mean that happiness is a performance, I wonder if you could expand on that notion?
Continue readingWhat inspired your story, Blender?
I’m living on a farm in Vermont with my father right now, and he’s been raising sheep for the past few years. Watching the ewes give birth and the ways in which their maternal instincts do or don’t kick in has been really enlightening for me. Even among sheep, some seem to have more of a knack for it than others—one ewe stepped on her lamb’s tiny leg without noticing she was there, while many of them immediately knew to lick the—sorry—fluids from the wool of their newborns (in order to clean it, but also for the nutrients).
Continue readingThree characters in this story, the narrator, Liam, and Henry, work in academia. Others, Bobby Cooper, Ruthie, and the narrator work in publishing. How has your experience teaching at the University of Texas, Austin and editing the O. Henry Prize Stories influenced your own fiction?
Continue readingHow did you begin Committed? What inspired this work?
I began with the poplar seeds. In June, the fluff is everywhere. Always in the air and underfoot. Russian pop songs are written about it. I remember a picnic on the riverbank with my wife that was lousy with it. We were in Samara. In the streets, small children gather the fluff into balls and light them on fire. And on the sidewalks older kids write chalk love letters to girls in balconies overhead. I combined these images for Sofia’s young suitors and wrote that scene several years ago hoping to eventually use it as part of something larger.
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