Interviews

Searching for Meaning: Chukwuebuka Ibeh interviews David Emeka

April 13, 2026 Interviews

DAVID EMEKA and CHUKWUEBUKA IBEH first connected in 2020, after Emeka read Ibeh’s Gerald Kraak-shortlisted story, The Ache of Longing. Emeka had raved about it to a mutual friend, who encouraged him to send Ibeh a DM. He did, and they continued messaging on Twitter about shared goals and interests. Later, Emeka was accepted into the Washington University MFA program in St. Louis, where Chukwuebuka was enrolled. Ibeh didn’t know then, but Emeka applied to the program with a story Ibeh had provided feedback on. They’ve continued to share work since, and enjoyed many adventures as well.

For this interview, Emeka and Ibeh spoke over two days when Ibeh visited St. Louis for Christmas. Their initial conversation unfolded in Ibeh’s wonderfully warm apartment, and they continued connecting over email after Ibeh’s return to Lewisburg, PA, where he currently teaches.

David Emeka (left) and Chukwuebuka Ibeh (right)

Chukwuebuka Ibeh (CI): Congratulations on your Outpost residency! How did you feel coming out of it? What was your routine like?

David Emeka (DE): Thank you so much, Ebuka. Vermont was wonderful, and the Outpost residency even more so. I keep thinking about the meals, the warmth I felt from everyone there. The grounds—the trees, the cornfields, the mountains in the distance—were spectacular. I do some of my best thinking when walking, so I’d swaddle myself in a blanket and pace among the trees, just meditating. And then there was this hammock—that was my favorite spot. When my ideas had collected to supersaturation, I’d go into the hammock and cover myself with the blanket and write. I’m a morning person, but I love to write in the dark. Every day I woke up at dawn to write, had breakfast, paced and wrote and read, jogged around the neighborhood, then returned for dinner. Sometimes we cooked for each other—I would make sourdough bread, or D’mani Thomas, the other fellow, would make tacos. We took walks under the stunning sunsets. It was a splendid time.

CI: It truly sounds beautiful. How did this process translate when you returned home?

Writing the Rust Belt: Rosanna Young Oh Interviews Allison Pitinii Davis

March 9, 2026 Interviews

Allison Pitinii Davis (left) and Rosanna Young Oh (right)

ALLISON PITINII DAVIS and ROSANNA YOUNG OH explore how Davis’ personal connection to Youngstown, Ohio and scholarly interest in labor inspired her debut novella, Business. They discuss representing the Rust Belt in literature, their identities as eldest daughters who worked for their family businesses, and the dignity and ethos of the working-class communities that raised them. Allison Pitinii Davis is the author of the poetry collection Line Study of a Motel Clerk , Poppy Seeds, and Business, a novella in Agency 3: Novellas . She serves as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Poetry at Ohio State University.

From Teaching Herself How To Survive to Teaching Us All: Rosa Castellano Interviews Diamond Forde

February 9, 2026 Interviews

Rosa Castellano (left) and Diamond Forde (right)

DIAMOND FORDE’s newest poetry collection, The Book of Alice, was the winner of the Academy of American Poets’ James Laughlin Award and was recently published by Scribner Books. Her first poetry collection, Mother Body, was a Kate Tufts Discovery Award nominee.

For this interview, Forde connected with friend and fellow poet, ROSA CASTELLANO, over Zoom. Castellano sipped coffee in Richmond, Virginia, while Forde sat in her bright office in Raleigh, North Carolina. Her dog, Oatmeal, curled at her feet. The poets discussed navigating family memories, the Bible, and Scribner selecting Forde’s manuscript during their open call for poetry manuscripts in 2023.

A Kind of Mythic Convenience: A Conversation Between July Westhale and Daisy Atterbury

January 12, 2026 Interviews

Daisy Atterbury (left) and July Westhale (right)

DAISY ATTERBURY’s book The Kármán Line poses a question about speculative futures, queerness and space, and ‘a hope for a shared present.’ The Kármán line is defined by Atterbury as “the altitude at which the Earth’s atmosphere ends and outer space begins. The Kármán line is the edge of space, as opposed to near space, the high altitude region of the atmosphere. When they say altitude, they’re thinking in terms of the human. What is measurable from the ground. Beyond the Kármán line, the Earth’s atmosphere is too thin to support an object in flight.”

Northern Spaces, Idiosyncratic Characters & the Beguiling Icelandic Landscape: an interview with Nathaniel Ian Miller

December 8, 2025 Interviews

Jenna Grace Sciuto (left) and Nathaniel Ian Miller (right)

NATHANIEL IAN MILLER has always been intrigued by northern spaces, a link that connects his acclaimed first novel, The Memoirs of Stockholm Sven, to his latest work, Red Dog Farm. Red Dog Farm is a wonderfully engaging coming-of-age tale about a young Icelander named Orri and his relationships with family, friends, and the farm where he was raised. Miller’s ability to write characters—whether human or animal—that are, in his words, “emphatically (and believably) themselves,” is a unique strength. JENNA GRACE SCIUTO discussed the book with Miller, touching on what writing about northern spaces enables in his novels, his influences (Icelandic and more broadly), and the versions of himself that have gone into this story.

Translating Toward Possibility: Sarah Faux Interviews Mariam Rahmani

November 10, 2025 Interviews

Headshots of Sarah Faux and Mariam Rahmani

Sarah Faux (left) and Mariam Rahmani (right)

Friends for over a decade, MARIAM RAHMANI and SARAH FAUX have been connecting for years about their respective artistic practices. They recently spoke over Zoom for The Common: Sarah from her painting studio, and Mariam from her office in Vermont. In the following conversation, they discuss Mariam’s novel, Liquid, published earlier this year, which centers a queer Muslim woman who navigates 100 dates in one summer. They speak on how translating others’ work has served Mariam’s own voice in writing, and how messiness and uncertainty are at the heart of good literature.

The Epiphany in the Ordinary: An Interview with Teju Cole

October 27, 2025 Interviews, Issue 30

Teju Cole at LitFest 2025

For TEJU COLE, prose, poetry, and photography tug against and bleed into one another. At the tenth anniversary of Amherst College’s LitFest, on March 1, 2025, Cole spoke with The Common’s Editor in Chief JENNIFER ACKER about his novel Tremor, his approach to genre-bending, and the role of writers and photographers in bearing witness to catastrophe.

Stop Being Precious About Process: Julian Zabalbeascoa interviews Michael James Plunkett

October 13, 2025 Interviews

In this interview, JULIAN ZABALBEASCOA and MICHAEL JAMES PLUNKETT explore how a chance visit to the World War I battle site of Verdun sparked a decades-long journey that led to Plunkett writing Zone Rouge. Their conversation took place across time zones as Zalbalbeascoa was in Donostia-San Sebastian, Spain, and Plunkett was home in Columbus, Ohio, having just welcomed his second child. In their correspondence, they cover makeshift writing rituals from Morgan Stanley’s cafeteria to subway rides, the joys of publishing with independent presses, the art of dodging probable plot twists, resilience in the face of climate change, and “fiction’s ability to explore the human condition in ways data can’t.”

Julian Zabalbeascoa (Left) and Michael Jerome Plunkett (Right)

Julian Zalbalbeascoa (JZ): Since The Common is a journal that celebrates how place functions in our lives, I thought we’d begin with the setting of your novel: Verdun, site of the decisive battle in World War I, which resulted in the deaths of over 300,000 French and German soldiers. When did your interest in Verdun (the place and the battle) begin? And when did you think to yourself, There may be a novel here.

Hitting a Wall and Making a Door: A Conversation between Phillis Levin and Diane Mehta

September 8, 2025 Audio, Interviews, Poetry Recordings

Phillis Levin (left) and Diane Mehta (right)

DIANE MEHTA and PHILLIS LEVIN’s conversation took place over the course of weeks—over daily phone calls and long emails, meals when they were in the same place, and a weekend in the Connecticut countryside. Though what appears below can only be fragments of their full exchange, the two poets—both previous contributors to The Common—share what they draw from each other’s work, and the work of others, exploring the pleasures of language, geometric movement, formal constraint, and expressing multiple perspectives in poems.

This interview includes recordings of many of the poems mentioned, read by the author.

Giving the Poem a Body: Megan Pinto interviews Lena Moses-Schmitt

August 11, 2025 Interviews

Lena Moses-Schmitt (left) and Megan Pinto (right)

When we listen to language, what do we hear? When we look at an image, what do we see? LENA MOSES-SCHMITT’s poetry beautifully captures the nature of perception. Her lyric-narrative meditations are interested in the mind’s movement across the field (visual, sonic) and the page. Moses-Schmitt writes in “The Hill”: “This morning I heard the man/ who lives downstairs say I love you to the woman–/not the words, but the rhythm, the shape, and I filled in the rest/ as if with red crayon.” Her debut collection, True Mistakes, moves between perception and imagination, the grieving for and the making of a life. MEGAN PINTO sat down with Lena Moses-Schmitt on a sunny June afternoon in Brooklyn. They marveled at the light through the leaves and drank cold seltzers with bitters. Their conversation shifted from superhero alter egos to how poetry sustains them through life’s many blips and heartbreaks.

Interviews

Searching for Meaning: Chukwuebuka Ibeh interviews David Emeka

Writing the Rust Belt: Rosanna Young Oh Interviews Allison Pitinii Davis

From Teaching Herself How To Survive to Teaching Us All: Rosa Castellano Interviews Diamond Forde

A Kind of Mythic Convenience: A Conversation Between July Westhale and Daisy Atterbury

Northern Spaces, Idiosyncratic Characters & the Beguiling Icelandic Landscape: an interview with Nathaniel Ian Miller

Translating Toward Possibility: Sarah Faux Interviews Mariam Rahmani

The Epiphany in the Ordinary: An Interview with Teju Cole

Stop Being Precious About Process: Julian Zabalbeascoa interviews Michael James Plunkett

Hitting a Wall and Making a Door: A Conversation between Phillis Levin and Diane Mehta

Giving the Poem a Body: Megan Pinto interviews Lena Moses-Schmitt

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