News & Review Type: News
Thea Prieto featured in CRAFT!
Eleanor Wilner interviewed for Harvard Review Online!
Eleanor Wilner, recipient of the 2019 Frost Medal for distinguished lifetime achievement from the Poetry Society of America, published her first book of poetry when she was forty-two. She has published eight collections of poetry across her career, but until this year, her earliest work has remained in a drawer; now, Gone to Earth: Early and Uncollected Poems 1963-1975 adds those first poems to her distinguished catalog. In this interview, conducted by email, Wilner reflects on the transformations our earliest writing can undergo, the corrective possibility of communal myths against culture-wide violence, and what art offers us.
Diane Thiel interviewed for DailyLobo.com!
In a digital age, classic romantic gestures can go a long way, especially during the month of love. Two University of New Mexico creative writing professors sat down with the Daily Lobo to share tips with readers on why and how to write the perfect love letter.
Diane Thiel has been teaching creative writing at UNM for 20 years and believes that “love letters are a beautiful way to build a deeper connection.”
Andrew Lam’s BIRDS OF PARADISE LOST in a study in Studies in the American Short Story
In Andrew Lam’s “Birds of Paradise Lost” and Viet Thanh Nguyen’s “The Immolation,” the act of self-immolation is perceived differently by members of the first-generation and second-generation Vietnamese Americans. In a larger context, both stories demonstrate how violent memory threatens familial harmony yet fosters a sense of community among Vietnamese Americans. Furthermore, the narratives address such crucial issues within the Vietnamese diasporic communities as cultural and political identity, generational conflicts, the collective memory, and the role of the United States media in manipulating the news.
Joan Nockels Wilson is a guest on Speaker’s Forum!
This episode of Speakers Forum centers around three very different experiences of childhood sexual abuse. However, all three guests consider the responsibility of caregivers to prevent abuse and the difficulty of demanding justice decades after the crime.
‘I wish I could have told him, scream, and then scream louder, I’m here, and we will bring this to an end.’
JOAN NOCKELS WILSON
Maurya Simon essay featured in Press Enterprise
Memory is fickle, quixotic and slippery as an eel. It latches itself onto strong emotions like fear, anger, or surprise and it won’t let go. Up until adolescence, children often think their parents are invincible, possibly immortal. They’re celestial gods who’ve mysteriously landed on Earth. It’s a cruel loss of innocence to eventually see their mortal coils.
Beth Gilstrap interviewed on This Podcast Will Change Your Life!
This episode of This Podcast Will Change Your Life stars the Beth Gilstrap (Deadheading & Other Stories, I Am Barbarella: Stories). It was recorded over the Zoom between the This Podcast Will Change Your Life home studio in Chicago, IL and Gilstrap’s home in Kentucky, not North Carolina, in December 2021. You can listen to this episode here, or below, either is totally cool with me.
Kim Stafford’s “What For?” featured in The Writer’s Almanac!
Thanks to The Writer’s Almanac for featuring Kim Stafford’s poem “What For?” from his latest collection SINGER COME FROM AFAR on January 30, 2022!
Charles Harper Webb, author of URSULA LAKE, guest writes for Psychology Today!
Surely one of the most vivid and memorable metaphors in psychology is Carl Jung’s shadow. Similar in many ways to Freud’s “Id,” the term shadow helps us to visualize the way in which troublesome human instincts and impulses may be consigned to darkness within the psyche. I picture a troop of chimpanzees, caged up in the dark, getting more and more enraged, waiting for a chance to kill their jailer and launch themselves at the world.
The National Features a Poem by Lena Khalaf Tuffaha
Buzzfeed News Features I ONLY CRY WITH EMOTICONS!
Thea Prieto talks FROM THE CAVES and a changing world with Lily Brooks-Dalton in an interview for Ecotheo Collective!
Ursula K. Le Guin once wrote “Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive,” and back in 2016, when Lily Brooks-Dalton’s post-apocalyptic novel Good Morning, Midnight (Penguin Random House) was released, and when Lily and I discussed early drafts of my post-apocalyptic novella From the Caves, our stories were not supposed to be predictive. In December of 2020, the film adaptation of Good Morning, Midnight—titled The Midnight Sky, starring and directed by George Clooney—premiered to an audience much more terribly acquainted with global disasters and extreme isolation. In August of 2021, the release of From the Caves (Ren Hen Press), which is set in a wildfire-devastated Pacific Northwest, coincided with the one-year anniversary of the 2020 California lightning siege, which forced my family and I, among thousands of others, to evacuate our homes before the largest fires in California history. These events led Lily and I to discuss what it means to write about the end of the world in the midst of cataclysmic change, and the importance of exploring human endurance and hope through fiction writing.
GHOST IN A BLACK GIRL’S THROAT and gossypiin featured in Book Riot!
Jim Peterson talks about THE SADNESS OF WHIRLWINDS on Fall For the Book Podcast!
Jim Peterson takes readers on a surreal journey in his short story collection The Sadness of Whirlwinds. In this first episode of the 2022 season of The Fall for the Book Podcast, he discusses how each tale dabbles or drips with magical realism and why it’s important for the reader to ask questions.
Jennifer Risher discusses her 14-year memoir WE NEED TO TALK: A MEMOIR ABOUT WEALTH, in her new podcast on Apple!
There’s a ancient saying that money is not so much the problem; it’s the love of money that causes the trouble. There’s another truth about the topic: It’s really hard to write about money – specifically, your money. And yet, that is exactly what Jennifer Risher does in “We Need to Talk: A Memoir about Wealth.” She and her husband became what only can be described as an “ultra high net worth” family through their stock options from Microsoft and Amazon. In this interview, Jen inspires all of us as she describes her 14-year writing journey of rejections, rewrites, and, ultimately, publication. In her memoir, she writes beautifully about a tough subject with candor, warmth, and humility.