Interviews

A New Kind of Campus Novel: Bruna Dantas Lobato on Her Debut Novel

October 15, 2024 Interviews

EMILY EVERETT interviews BRUNA DANTAS LOBATO

Back in 2017, The Common published a debut short story by a young Brazilian-American writer with a beautiful, understated style, and an enormous talent for translating big emotions into quiet gestures, thoughtful moments, and tense, restrained dialogue. Publishing debuts is always meaningful, but the best part comes after: watching those early-career writers go on to greater and greater successes.

Last year, that writer, Bruna Dantas Lobato, was awarded the 2023 National Book Award in Translation for The Words That Remain by Stênio Gardel. And this month, her debut novel is out from Grove Atlantic’s Black Cat imprint. She sat down with TC managing editor Emily Everett via Zoom to talk about that novel, Blue Light Hours. Zoom felt like a fitting medium: Blue Light Hours follows a first-year college student communicating with her mother back in Brazil only via Skype. They also discussed her work translating from Portuguese, and the pleasures and pitfalls of connecting with her home country through writing and translation. Bruna was born and raised in Natal, Brazil, and now lives in Iowa.

Am I a Fraud? Are We All? An Interview with Aparna Nancherla

September 19, 2024 Interviews

Jennifer Acker and Aparna Nancherla talking at Amherst College's LitFest.

Photo courtesy of Jesse Gwilliam | Amherst College

APARNA NANCHERLA is in a class of her own. A writer, comedian, actor, and podcast host, Nancherla returned to her alma mater, Amherst College, for a conversation with The Common’s editor-in-chief, JENNIFER ACKER, during LitFest 2024. The two discussed her diverse creative portfolio, standup as a mode of self-expression, and her newest memoir-in-essays, Unreliable Narrator: Me, Myself, and Imposter Syndrome. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. For a recording of their full conversation and more about LitFest, visit the Amherst College website.

It’s a Gift to Be Alive: Jennifer Acker interviews Hannah Gersen

September 9, 2024 Interviews

HANNAH GERSEN is a novelist whose fiction ranges from the strictly realist to the gently speculative. Her first novel, Home Field, is a deeply felt story about family and grief in rural Maryland, described as Friday Night Lights meets My So-Called Life. Her second, most recent novel, We Were Pretending, leaps into today’s most pressing crises–climate change, the creep of technology–through the lens of Leigh Bowers, an at-sea single mom trying to secure a better future for her daughter and a better death for her mother, who is dying of cancer. It’s beautifully written, imaginative, and elegiac with surprising twists and turns.

You Have a Mouth: Rachel Morgenstern-Clarren interviews Ani Gjika

August 12, 2024 Interviews

ANI GJIKA’S An Unruled Body won the 2021 Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing and has been longlisted for the 2024 Mass Book Awards in Nonfiction. In this interview, Ani Gjika and poet and translator RACHEL MORGENSTERN-CLARREN delve into the profound influence of language and literature, particularly in the context of women’s liberation. They explore the pivotal role of books and language in empowering women, and shed light on the transformative and essential nature of literary expression in combating censorship, serving as a form of healing after traumatic experiences, and offering a new language to write about and confront the past.

Violence and Its Other: Toti O’Brien Interviews Dimitris Lyacos

July 8, 2024 Interviews

DIMITRIS LYACOS describes his new book, Until the Victim Becomes our Own, as a prequel to his world-renowned trilogy, Poena Damni—which begins with a fugitive on a train, but never clarifies what, whom, and where from he has fled, hinting at the past only through the traces it left, showing us a mere geography of scars. Until the Victim Becomes our Own reels us back to the pre-fugue universe, mapping both an archeological grid and a bird’s-eye view of our very own Western civilization, founded on Judeo-Christian traditions, then evolved through industrialization and capitalism up to the digitally-global present day.

Though he was bound to Israel when TOTI O’BRIEN reached out to him with her questions, Lyacos agreed to interweave their conversation with his travels, and we are glad he did.

Return to One’s Roots, Return to a Person, Return to Oneself: Vika Mujumdar Interviews Susana Praver-Pérez

June 10, 2024 Interviews

Susana Praver-Pérez’s work, moving fluidly between English and Spanish, from Puerto Rico to California and New York, is a moving meditation on how place shapes our understanding of ourselves and the world. Praver-Pérez’s debut collection Hurricanes, Love Affairs, and Other Disasters, and recent collection, Return Against the Flow, reckon with how we make a place home, considering with care and generosity the landscape of Puerto Rico and its impact on her selfhood. In lyrical, narrative poems, Praver-Pérez examines how geography is defined by its landscape and people. Through the narrativization of lived experience and the intertextual poetry of others, Praver-Pérez’s collection, Return Against the Flow is a necessary documentation of the way language shifts across landscape and time.

In this interview, VIKA MUJUMDAR and SUSANA PRAVER-PÉREZ discuss place and geography, the shifting influences of language, and the transitory nature of diasporic belonging.

Poetry as an Ethnographic Tool: Leah Zani interviews Adrie Kusserow

May 13, 2024 Interviews

ADRIE KUSSEROW and LEAH ZANI are a rare sort: trained cultural anthropologists and poets, anthro-poets. The two met while Adrie was judging the Ethnographic Poetry Prize, the world’s only prize for poetry written by anthropologists. Shortly after, they began working together on the editorial team of Anthropology and Humanism, one of the few peer-reviewed academic journals that accepts poetry.

In this interview, Leah Zani connects with Kusserow about her latest memoir, The Trauma Mantras: A Memoir in Prose Poems (Duke University Press, 2024), a collection of prose poems based on Kusserow’s experiences with refugee communities and humanitarian projects in Nepal, India, Bhutan, Uganda, South Sudan, and the United States. In this conversation, they discuss the lyricism of suffering and the role of poetry in enriching deep anthropological understandings of place.

Writing into Negative Space (Absence): Tiana Nobile interviews Sarah Audsley

April 8, 2024 Interviews

Tiana Nobile (left) Sarah Audsley (right)

Sarah Audsley’s debut poetry collection Landlock X (Texas Review Press, 2023) is described by Sally Keith as “formally active in its interrogation; it is as if somewhere—in poetry, in art, in translation—there is a combination for righting the painful history of adoption, for learning to live simultaneously with and against.” Audsley has received support for her work from The Rona Jaffe Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, and the Banff Centre. In this interview, long-time poet-friends TIANA NOBILE and SARAH AUDSLEY discuss writing into negative space. Their intimate conversation touches on contending with audience, silences, absence, and writing from the perspective of the adoptee experience.

Reaching a Pulse Point: Melody Nixon Interviews Rushi Vyas

March 11, 2024 Interviews

Content warning: This interview discusses death by suicide.

MELODY NIXON and RUSHI VYAS first met at a 2020 poetics seminar hosted by the University of Otago, where Vyas is completing a PhD in Poetics. Since that meeting Nixon and Vyas have exchanged thoughts on poetry, grief, and their own experiences of parental death by suicide as they each became new parents themselves.

This conversation distills some of those themes in relation to Vyas’ 2023 chasmic collection When I Reach for Your Pulse (Four Way Books and Otago University Press), which was a two-time finalist for the National Poetry Series and is currently longlisted for New Zealand’s Ockham Book Awards. Vyas is also co-author of the collaborative chapbook Between Us, Not Half a Saint with Rajiv Mohabir (Gasher Press, 2021). Born in Toledo, Ohio, Vyas now lives in Ōtepoti Dunedin, Aotearoa New Zealand, while Nixon lives on another Aotearoa island in Te Whanganui-a-Tara, Wellington.

No One Wore Pearls Anymore: Jennifer Jean interviews Jennifer Martelli

February 12, 2024 Interviews

One day in 2008, after not writing for almost 10 years, JENNIFER MARTELLI searched “poetry workshops on the North Shore of Massachusetts.” She signed up for the first “hit” that came up, a Sacred Poetry workshop led by JENNIFER JEAN at the now-defunct Cornerstone Books in Salem, Massachusetts. Both Jennifers bonded over poetry, parenthood, and publishing—and a great friendship was formed! They continue to write together, travel together (because Jennifer Martelli is afraid to drive over bridges, Jennifer Jean takes the wheel), and share their work.

In this interview, Jennifer Jean asked Martelli about her latest collection, The Queen of Queens, which explores the political and emotional zeitgeist of the present by probing the past in a lyrical, smart, and singular voice. Jennifer Martelli’s poetry is the self-deprecating inheritor of Sylvia Plath and Marie Howe.