Interviews

Interviews J. Kates Interviewed by Bredt Bredthauer I’m interested in the way translators come to the poetry they translate. How did you come to Magny’s work and what made you want to translate him into English?

Interviews David Huddle Interviewed by Claire Eder and Andrew Donovan Why did you choose a wren and a bear for your poem “Wren & Bear” from Subtropics 14?

Interviews Suzanne Halmi Interviewed by Tarah Dunn Where are you from? What do you do? I grew up in northwestern New Jersey when it was more rural than it is now, although there are still a lot of farms and wooded areas despite more and more development. I was a librarian and then a doctoral […]

Interviews Lauren Groff Interviewed by Emma Smith-Stevens 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?

Interviews Mark Girshin Interviewed by Anastasia Kozak When 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?

Interviews Edward Gauvin Interviewed by Carrie Guss and Sabrina Jaszi If 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?

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Interviews Jon Loomis Interviewed by Jackson Sabbagh The 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?

Interviews Brittany Cavallaro Interviewed by Ashley Keyser What 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 […]

Interviews Troy Jollimore Interviewed by Michael Lupi Since 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?

Interviews Heather Wells Peterson Interviewed by Janna Moretti What 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 […]

Interviews Laura Furman Interviewed by Thomas Sanders Three 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?

Interviews Russell Dame Interviewed by Alex Ender How 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 […]

Interviews Alice Friman Interviewed by Olga Rukovets and Tara Tatum In your poem When did we first, the speaker seems to question our need to philosophize over simply experiencing the world. Do you view this impulse as negative? Do you think poetry is an extension of this need to intellectualize the world around us? The […]