Winter 2024 Author Mini-Interviews
To give authors a chance to talk more about their process and craft, or just to give us a little more insight into their piece, we provided them with a list of questions from which they could pick one to answer. We hope you enjoy this peek behind the curtain!
Rebecca Fishow
Q: What’s something you’ve read lately that you really loved/found inspiring?
A: I read Moby-Dick many years ago, before I took up creative writing seriously. Like many readers, I found the novel’s encyclopedic reach to be—ahem—tedious. But in the past few months I took a deep dive back into Melville’s fiction, revisiting Moby-Dick, and reading Billy Budd, Bartleby the Scrivener, and Benito Cereno. I’m so happy I did because his fiction is truly a masterclass on craft. I was delighted by prose that feels charged and innovative, even today. Melville is a wizard at using point-of-view in surprising and meaningful ways, and he reckons with language at its most perplexing and provocative boundaries. He’s a risk-taker, and his work is a clear reminder that when done with purpose the rules of literary craft can and should be broken.
Brigid Swanick
Q: How did this piece begin? What was its seed idea?
A: I am pretty fascinated these days by the way people talk to each other - with exaggerations and rhetorical statements, sarcasm, inferences, and sometimes fabrications. We often modify the way we speak according to our listener, which I find myself doing all the time, and most of what we say and its meaning is entirely dependent on context and the expectation that our audience understands us - not literally word for word, but our intended meaning. It is why two people can talk to each other in a succession of misremembered idioms and still know exactly what the other means to say. Communication breakdown can happen when we communicate poorly or in such a roundabout way that the meaning is lost. Sometimes even we intentionally misunderstand each other. So much of communication is guessing the intention of the other person’s words, and this is one example of that I found privately entertaining. I am somewhat of an overthinker, but partly that is because I am so interested in things like this. It was fun to take a curious thought about a curious comment and expand it.
Bela Koschalk
Q: Tell us about the place/conditions under which you do your best writing.
A: In the psychomantium (my home, after Miranda’s bedroom in Helen Oyeyemi’s White is for Witching), I have a desk sanctioned for writing. It is here that I do my best and worst work.
On the wall above my desk is the ABC wall of executions. Below that, I pin second drafts of whatever’s in progress. On the desk: my Smith-Corona Coronamatic 2500 typewriter, two ink bottles, a cow tooth wrapped in red thread, a piece of fossilized coral, a figurine of Santo Nino Cieguito, the blind child g-d, and a worry-eyed bird sculpted by my emergency contact.
When I write I put on Does Spring Hide its Joy, a three hour drone record by Kali Malone and Stephen O’Malley. I like long periods of working. I am interrupted only by the need to flip the record, or a text from my downstairs neighbor telling me the typewriter noise has gone on too long.
I can hear someone practicing acoustic guitar through the wall when the sun sets. Other than that it is quiet. Lake Michigan is outside the door. I can see the moon through the windows. The psychomantium takes care of my writing very well.
Rebecca Tiger
Q: What’s something you’ve read lately that you really loved/found inspiring?
A: As I was sitting at my sick mother’s bedside recently, I posted a request on Facebook for favorite poems that I could read to her, knowing she would appreciate hearing my voice. Many of my friends played along - I received an abundance of beautiful poems but “One Art,” by Elizabeth Bishop stood out. “The art of losing isn’t hard to master,” she writes. The simplicity and obviousness of it, the comfort in reading the list of things Bishop lost with the conclusion that “None of these will bring disaster,” was just what I needed to hear. I know little about poetry and sometimes think I’m not subtle enough to get it, but the chance to read this poem, many times, to my mother was a balm for me. “Then practice losing farther and faster.” Do we have a choice?
Rajan Sharma
Q: What’s a helpful revision tip you follow?
A: The best revision trick I have learned is, after you’ve revised the piece more than you think is necessary or even beneficial, leave it alone for a while in a desk drawer, and then come back to it after some time. It should be enough time for you to distance yourself from the piece so that when you read it again you do so with fresh eyes. This can help you see weaknesses in the writing or other possibilities that were there but might have been missed by you in the heat of composition.
Another trick is to use the Track Changes feature in Microsoft Word during your revision process. I do this as an attorney when I’m working on briefs or contracts, sometimes with multiple collaborators. To me, it’s better than creating different versions of the same piece. Visually it helps you see the changes in real time in the text, highlighted in red, while edits are removed in balloons. Then you can accept change or reject change using the reviewing feature in the Word toolbar. True or not, I believe it helps my bring some of the precision of my work as a lawyer into my writing.
William Hawkins
Q: How did you land on this title?
A: The title for this piece actually comes from the Tosca libretto - Oh, come la sai bene l'arte di farti amare! - though the title is a paraphrasing.