Pam Uschuk

interviewed by Derek Alger

Originally published on March 13, 2009

“…Almost too late, I learned to love my mother. Sometimes taking care of her constant needs felt like an imposition, but I’ve come to understand that it was also a huge gift I’m still unwrapping. I’ve written about her in poetry and prose, and I continue to untangle the web of my knotty childhood.”

Greg Herriges

interviewed by Derek Alger

Originally published on March 10, 2009

“…While my students were dying in gang fights, I had to enter a numerical symbol next to each dead student’s name… A big “L” meant the student had left the system. A little “l” meant the student had been transferred to another class in the school. “99″ meant you’d been capped, hacked, and stacked, Jack. It was enough to make you sick.”

Jamie Malanowski

interviewed by Derek Alger

Originally published on October 21, 2008

“No editor or publisher ever wakes up in the morning, looks out his window, and scans the landscape for a brilliant writer who’s just too shy to put himself or herself forward. It’s a put yourself forward business, at every level.”

Molly Peacock

interviewed by Derek Alger

Originally published on October 21, 2008

“I went to the State University of New York at Binghamton and studied with the poet Milton Kessler. He gave me the best advice about my poems. He’d point to something in a poem that he thought was successful and he’d say, ‘See that?’ ‘Yes,’ I’d say. ‘Well,’ he’d say, ‘”do that again.’”

Walter Cummins

interviewed by Derek Alger

Originally published on October 15, 2008

“All through college, I wrote for the school paper and even edited a humor magazine, for a while emulating a then-popular humor writer named Max Shulman. Junior year, with trepidation, I signed up for a creative writing course, which started my life of fiction despite the disasters of those early stories.”

Lynn Aarti Chandhok

interviewed by Derek Alger

Originally published on June 17, 2008

“I was always a good writer, but I didn’t think I had an imagination. I liked pottery because I understood that if I just practiced over and over again, I could get a form just right…That’s really how I started to feel comfortable writing poems -– by trying to attend to form…I think the forms gave me a space to work out what really was there in my imagination.”

Xujun Eberlein

interviewed by Steven Wingate

Originally published on June 17, 2008

“…when I wrote fiction I was often unconscious about which part was from memory and which from imagination. For nonfiction, I tended to double check my memory, and I often turned to other sources to verify my memory. But if I found a conflict between a second source and my own memory, I might believe in myself more.”

Mathias B. Freese

interviewed by Derek Alger

Originally published on June 16, 2008

“…I believe to become a great writer or a very good one the writer must avoid organized teaching. I think like a shrink, a father, a lover, a mensch, but not as a writer. When I come to write, I go inward, very inward, and I allow my unconscious to blast through, often ooze, into awareness; that is how I write.”

Afaa Michael Weaver

interviewed by Derek Alger

Originally published on April 8, 2008

“When I think of sociologists who aspire to be writers, I think of W.E.B. DuBois, whose prose was quite good as we all know. But he was not a poet or a novelist. One day, I hope These Hands I Know will be recognized for what it is, an excellent primary source for people such as sociologists. The book gives a view to the effects of racism on black family life and the effects of child abuse.”

Richard Goodman

interviewed by Derek Alger

Originally published on April 8, 2008

“People I respect very much have liked the book. I sent two chapters to M.F.K. Fisher before she died, and she wrote me back a marvelous letter telling me she liked the writing very much. She said that she didn’t like 99% of what had been written about Provence…’But Richard, you have broken the spell’.”