This hub of interviews has been created to honor our living and working writers.

Conversations with each other show us:

  • how writers live their modern and complicated lives
  • how writers think and process world events
  • how writers craft together everything from simple sentences to entire projects.

 

Poetry

Arthur Sze, author of Compass Rose (2014) and River River (1987)
In this interview, we talk about poems from Arthur Sze’s latest book Compass Rose and about an older book River River. We also discuss poems about place: physical place, the mental place, the place of violence in a poem, his brand of particularity, the forms his poem take and his evolution between these books. Sze also comments and whether art and science are antithetical.

Ann Cefola, author of Sugaring and St. Agnes, Pink-Slipped
This interview covers poems about landscape: the New England landscape, the landscape of grief, the female landscape, the landscape of the night sky, inspirations from painting, writing found poems and translations.

Jon Davis, author of Preliminary Report and Scrimmage of Appetite
We discuss aspects of meaning in language, the poetic seam, the allowance of sentiment in poems, and discuss prose poems and his alter ego Chuck Calabreze.

Barbara Rockman, author of Sting and Nest
This interview talks about ways to write the mother-daughter poem, the child and marriage poem, writing grief and the benefits of silence in a poem.

Tom Crawford, author of The Names of Birds
This interview talks about the importance of birds, meditation in poetry, the use of place, accentuating the ordinary and the inspirational hunch that begins a poem.

Fiction

Darcey Steinke, author of Sister Golden Hair
A discussion with author Darcey Steinke, the daughter of a minister and a beauty queen, about how a celebrity-obsession with Cher works in the narrative and what Cher’s “text” means vis-à-vis our struggles with ideals of beauty, role models and holiness. We also talk about the construction of her novel and depicting the trials of a teenager navigating issues of identity.

Gwendolen Gross, author of When She Was Gone
In this interview we touch on the border between our personal lives and our sense of our neighborhood, how to assemble a novel with a “gravitational” central character who drives the story, the motives of characters and opportunities of plot, pacing and point of view.

Non-Fiction

Maurice D. Harris, author of Moses, A Stranger Among Us
This interview talks at length about a modern and progressive interpretation of Moses, as well as some inspiring and informative discussion on when Maurice found time to write, publisher rejections and pre-writing marketing research.