All posts tagged: interview

The Challenge of First Impressions: Lisa Wells Interviews Ted Conover

LISA WELLS interviews TED CONOVER

 

Ted Conover

Ted Conover began reporting his latest book, Cheap Land Colorado, in May of 2017, in a scenic and unforgiving stretch of the San Luis Valley known locally as the Flats. He tells the story of a diverse cast of off-grid homesteaders, struggling to bootstrap a life on the rural margins. Conover was first introduced to the locals as a volunteer for a nonprofit called La Puente. Under the tutelage of a military vet named Matt Little, he went door to door offering help with basic necessities like food and firewood. Over the course of the next five years he became a regular fixture in the valley, splitting time between a rented trailer parked on the property of a local family (the Grubers) and his adopted home of New York City where he teaches in the NYU Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. Eventually, Conover bought his own parcel in the Valley, haggling down from twenty to fifteen-thousand dollars. When we spoke by phone in December, he said, “I’m probably not the only writer in New York on a crowded subway car who sometimes misses the place they grew up.”

The Challenge of First Impressions: Lisa Wells Interviews Ted Conover
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Finding One’s Way Through Bewilderment: Virginia Konchan interviews Nathan McClain

headshot of nathanhmcclain

In this interview, VIRGINIA KONCHAN talks with NATHAN McCLAIN about his second full-length collection, Previously Owned. Touching on process and craft, literary influence, racial justice, and faith, this rich conversation celebrates the range of McClain’s poetry and the sense of history and place in his work.

Finding One’s Way Through Bewilderment: Virginia Konchan interviews Nathan McClain
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Permission to Dream Forth: An Interview with Arisa White

JULY WESTHALE interviews ARISA WHITE

picture of white and westhale together

In Arisa White’s lyrical memoir, Who’s Your Daddy, she writes of her father’s absence throughout her coming-of-age in tender, genre-bending poems. July Westhale and Arisa White, former teaching colleagues and Bay Area community, approached this interview in an epistolary way, discussing form, family, voice, and taking up space on the page.

Permission to Dream Forth: An Interview with Arisa White
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Cheetos and Rimbaud: An Interview with Tina Cane

MATT W. MILLER interviews TINA CANE

image of tina cane and matt miller

Tina Cane’s Year of the Murder Hornet was published in spring of 2022 by Veliz Books. In this interview, Tina discusses her new collection with Matt Miller. Threaded through by grit and lyrical beauty, the book weaves survival, strength, and hope out of this pitched moment of American politics, the Coronavirus pandemic, and popular culture.  

Cheetos and Rimbaud: An Interview with Tina Cane
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Connection, Collaboration, and Community: An Interview with Kirin Makker and Sejal Shah

KIRIN MAKKER and SEJAL SHAH interviewed by ABBEY FREDERICK

“I am a reliable witness to my own experience”—a line from Lacy Crawford’s Notes on a Silencing—has become a refrain in Sejal Shah and Kirin Makker’s friendship. They met in 2020, just before the pandemic began, drawn to each other in part by similar experiences of betrayal at the hands of two institutions that often give legitimacy and legibility to women—marriage and academia—and by their longing to forge new forms of intimacy, learning, and support all their own. For Makker and Shah, conversation is a generative force for affirmation and transformation. This interview fuses several conversations conducted virtually with Abbey Frederick during the spring of 2021, in which they discuss making connections outside conventional routes, collaborating across distances, and creating space as women artists for ourselves and for one another. 

Connection, Collaboration, and Community: An Interview with Kirin Makker and Sejal Shah
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Art is Always a Verb: An Interview with Joseph O’Neill & Chigozie Obioma

JOSEPH O’NEILL and CHIGOZIE OBIOMA interviewed by DW GIBSON

Joseph O’Neill and Chigozie Obioma

In celebration of Art Omi’s 30th anniversary, DW Gibson connected with residency alumni to dive into different aspects of their work and process. When presented with the opportunity to interview Joseph O’Neill and Chigozie Obioma, Gibson was eager to talk with them about the importance of place in their fiction because the settings of their novels and stories feel so acutely important. Whether it’s New York in O’Neill’s Netherland, Dubai in The Dog, or the village of Akure in Obioma’s The Fishermen, the landscapes of these novels are always front and center and, in some ways, steering the storytelling. In this conversation, O’Neill and Obioma bring to light how a sense of place does—and doesn’t—play a part in their process, and how the settings we choose as writers relate back to our own identities. This interview is a collaboration between The Common and Writers OMI. 

Art is Always a Verb: An Interview with Joseph O’Neill & Chigozie Obioma
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Words We Use to Talk About Home: An Interview with Abeer Khshiboon, author of “The Stranger”

ABEER KHSHIBOON interviewed by NASHWA GOWANLOCK

 

headshot of Abeer Kshiboon

Abeer Khshiboon’s short story, “The Stranger” is featured in Issue 23’s portfolio of stories from Palestine. Here, Abeer and translator Nashwa Gowanlock discuss the story’s inspiration and the context in which its events unfold.

Words We Use to Talk About Home: An Interview with Abeer Khshiboon, author of “The Stranger”
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Reclaiming Brooklyn and Puerto Rico: An Interview with Xochitl Gonzalez

EMILY EVERETT interviews XOCHITL GONZALEZ

Headshot of Xochitl Gonzalez, wearing a green blouse with a bright pink bush in the background.

Xochitl Gonzalez has an MFA from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was an Iowa Arts Fellow and recipient of the Michener-Copernicus Prize in Fiction. She was the winner of the 2019 Disquiet Literary Prize, and her work has been published in Bustle, Vogue, and The Cut. She is a contributor to The Atlantic, where her weekly newsletter Brooklyn, Everywhere explores gentrification of people and places. Her debut novel Olga Dies Dreaming is out now from Flatiron Books. Prior to beginning her MFA, Xochitl was an entrepreneur and strategic consultant for nearly 15 years.

Reclaiming Brooklyn and Puerto Rico: An Interview with Xochitl Gonzalez
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I Will Be in the Place You Least Expect to Find Me: 10 Questions with Latifa Baqa

Latifa Baqa’s gripping stream of consciousness short story “Adam’s Apple” is a highlight of Issue 21’s portfolio of fiction from Morocco. A feminist, human rights activist, and award-winning author, Baqa is interviewed by The Common interns Sofia Belimova, Olive Amdur, Adaku Nwokiwu, and Eliza Brewer. They discuss editing, the devil in the details, and countering the traditional expectation of the male gaze. Nariman Youssef translated the interview, as well as the original story. This is the first of two interviews conducted by the summer interns with Issue 21 contributors; the second will be with Abdelmajid Haouasse.

Headshot of a middle aged Moroccan woman with glasses standing in front of a pond on a sunny day

TC interns (TC): What inspired “Adam’s Apple?” Can you describe your process of writing and revising it?

Latifa Baqa (LB): The idea behind ​​“Adam’s Apple,” like pretty much all ideas you may find in any of my fictional texts, began with a sentence. Meaning that one sentence preceded the idea, in a way not unlike how one note might resonate in a musician’s head before the rest of the tune. This is how it often happens: before I begin writing, a lone sentence rises up in my thoughts, for no obvious reason. I remember how this one stuck in my head for days: “We shouldn’t lay bare what we carry within us more than once.” The rest of the story followed from that sentence, beginning with a minor character who barely features in the narrative: Alzamourie, the neighborhood’s baker, who was a real person in the working class neighborhood where I was born and raised. To be more precise, one element that started making its way into the story was Alzamourie’s teeth. I just could never forget his teeth. It seems almost absurd, but I find more reassurance in the foggy arbitrariness of memory than in the clarity of conventional reality.

I Will Be in the Place You Least Expect to Find Me: 10 Questions with Latifa Baqa
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