Studio Archives – ZYZZYVA

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A Conversation with Kathryn Ma

by John McMurtrie

January 31, 2023

Posted on January 31, 2023 (January 31, 2023) by Zack Ravas

The title of Kathryn Ma’s new novel, The Chinese Groove, refers to one young man’s fanciful term for a silent understanding that he believes unites Chinese people across borders and throughout generations. This code, he is convinced, is what will guide him as he leaves behind a life of poverty in Yunnan Province and embarks

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The Y

by Bethany Ball

January 25, 2023

Posted on January 25, 2023 (February 2, 2023) by Zack Ravas

Back then, Yale sat behind the front desk counter in the resident section of the Y and I sat beside him. Reggie worked maintenance and had the gray cast and steady hands of a true alcoholic. He was always on time and reliable. Robert was a resident and lived on the sixth floor. He had

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After Dark

by Rhoda Huffey

January 5, 2023

Posted on January 5, 2023 (January 11, 2023) by Zack Ravas

When the pigeon first appeared in my front yard, I noticed because he didn’t fly off immediately. He walked over to the jade plant by my front porch and contemplated the leaves of the succulent. My mind was full of other things at that moment: what to wear to that evening, did a man named

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Obverse

by Yuri Herrera

November 22, 2022

Posted on November 22, 2022 (December 2, 2022) by Zack Ravas

Translated by Lisa Dillman And that was why they decided to go off and explore the other side, on which, they hoped, there would be no watery cliffs or dragons awaiting them at the end. They traversed iotas and iotas. Deserts of iotas and dales of iotas and mountains of iotas. Millions of iotas. Until,

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Flat Map

by Yuri Herrera

November 15, 2022

Posted on November 15, 2022 (December 2, 2022) by Zack Ravas

Translated by Lisa Dillman Perhaps they could have saved the lives of all those who died chasing the truth to the ends of the earth if they’d thought more about, say, the thickness of trees. But these people, like all people, felt compelled to see things with their own eyes, which would later be eaten

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On the Art of Interviewing

by Michael Krasny

October 20, 2022

Posted on October 20, 2022 (December 2, 2022) by Zack Ravas

I learned an important lesson interviewing David Byrne. He was (and is) an artist I respect and admire, but he was a terrible interview. Monosyllabic grunts were what I got from him as well as a clear indication that he simply did not want to be there, in the studio, being interviewed. Sometimes you can

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May 17th, 1974

by Dagoberto Gilb

October 3, 2022

Posted on October 3, 2022 (October 2, 2022) by Zack Ravas

“Slauson,” Sherry said. “Doesn’t that sound…maybe Watts, like that, to you?” “What?” Danny said making the word shorter than it already was. “It’s kind of a ghetto name, right?” Danny might have looked up and away irritated if he wasn’t driving her car. Slauson was the name of the street they were on, wide and

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The Murmuring Killed Me

by Peter Orner

September 15, 2022

Posted on September 15, 2022 (September 14, 2022) by Zack Ravas

Every few years or so I go to visit my dead at Beth El Cemetery in Fall River, Massachusetts. It’s across the street from a Cumberland Farms. My grandfather always said that being dead didn’t seem so bad if he could run over and grab a pack of cigarettes and the Fall River Herald. On

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Part of a Deer

by Lucy Corin

August 10, 2022

Posted on August 10, 2022 (August 9, 2022) by Zack Ravas

Here it was suddenly ninety degrees, and across the country it was suddenly frozen. I’d been texting about it with Basil all morning, getting my stuff together for running errands. In the car, I swapped into my sunglasses, setting everything up to follow the driving instructions I’d texted to myself by trying to balance the

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The Immense Presence of the Mist: Q&A with ‘The Red Arrow’ author William Brewer

by Kristen Iskandrian

May 18, 2022

Posted on May 18, 2022 (May 23, 2022) by Zack Ravas

It’s probably fitting that I thought often of Keats while reading William Brewer’s The Red Arrow (Knopf; 272 pages), specifically, the odes, all of which seek to create vessels into which the unknowable and unnamable—the “alien corn” of existence—can be contained. Brewer is a poet, after all, whose brilliant collection I Know Your Kind, about

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Messiah Wolf

by Joe Donnelly

April 22, 2022

Posted on April 22, 2022 (April 21, 2022) by Zack Ravas

When I was a boy, my imagination was ripe for wolves. But, it wasn’t the usual folktales and fables that got to me, or the scenes of wolf packs airbrushed onto the panel vans of my suburban youth. At six years old, my wolf was a companion, not a cautionary tale or a signifier of

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The Bully of Columbus

by Tom Barbash

March 29, 2022

Posted on March 29, 2022 (March 28, 2022) by Zack Ravas

“You’re gonna get your ass kicked,” the greasy haired bully said. He said it every time I saw him, which was once or twice a week when I was coming back from therapy, or on my way back from school. I was 16 then. “Ass kicked,” he called out once I’d passed him on Columbus Avenue,

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