Conversations

Doug Carlson: When I read the typescript version of “Golden Gloves” for the first time, I confess I was most of the way through before I noticed something odd about its shape. And only after I looked back did I figure it out. Obviously I was more taken by the characters and what they were […]

Laura Solomon: I find your mark-making deeply expressive and uniquely unpredictable—at times even messy—and yet simultaneously highly economic—sometimes, with regard to your approach to figures, a bit like Egon Schiele’s. In my introduction to We Dust the Walls, I talk about your allusions to Italian Renaissance painters, but I also noticed that what I see might […]

Thibault Raoult: “Auto-Duet” is heartbreaking, illuminating work, which, while possessing airtight transitions, nonetheless leaves me, as reader, bouncing around in the ideational echo chamber you so seamlessly build. Rather than continue to bounce around (poignant as that may be), I’ll begin with the end of your essay, where you are in the hospital post-surgery: “Baby’s […]

Jenny Gropp: “The One I Get and Other Artifacts” lyrically documents your family’s painful experience living in Sandy Hook, Connecticut, during and after the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings on December 14, 2012. In the essay, you unfold the reactions and reflections of psyches in trauma, and allow us to move through that fear with […]

Thibault Raoult: Upon first encounter with your new book Broken Cup, I’m taken back to Donald Hall’s Without—his poetic confrontation with the death of his poet wife Jane Kenyon. The circumstances are different in each book, to be sure, but nonetheless the reader senses at once a reeling and holistic aspect to the work. There […]

Gina Abelkop: “L is for Leaves,” your poem in our Summer 2014 issue, begins softly, with a meditation on daily routine and watching the leaves outside through a window, but ends with a darker finish with the narrator “not knowing / which of us is screaming, Hold on, hold on.” I was surprised when I […]

John Brown Spiers: Your essays are layered almost impossibly well. Not only are they never about just one thing (or even just a couple of things), they very rarely meander, or “essay,” in the sense of a journey without a firm destination or even a firm path. Similarly, you admit from the outset of “Still […]

John Brown Spiers: From the outset of “Secret Information,” you inform us that you’ve written the essay because “I feel obligated to relate something about that ominous place I had been taken to under the Nevada desert, and the abyss I peered into.” And, near the end, you realize that the scientist who serves as […]

John Brown Spiers: “Dead Last is a Kind of Second Place,” your piece in the Winter 2013 issue of The Georgia Review, is excerpted from your forthcoming memoir A Few Seconds of Radiant Filmstrip. After having read “Dead Last,” which follows the seventh-grade Kevin exclusively, I’m gathering that this book differs from your others in […]

John Brown Spiers: To what extent do you think a novel needs to be dependent upon plot? You’ve spoken of what you perceived to be your own deficiencies with plot while writing Strange As This Weather Has Been, but that novel seems to be driven as much by event—driven successfully—as it is by character and […]

John Brown Spiers: An early paragraph in “Shadow Animals” describes your reaction to your father laying sand on a wild-game trail on your new property in northwest Montana. He does this to capture hoofprints and determine what sort of wildlife lives in the woods, but as he furrows the sand with a rake, you imagine […]

C. J. Bartunek: “The Circus Train” gives a feeling of a whole life distilled into this one elegantly spare essay. In it, you write, “This could be called a pre-posthumous memoir.” Would you tell me about how you came to write this piece and about what your vision of it was when you first conceived […]