Tag: q&a

Q&A with Rage Hezekiah: ‘Yearn’ & Dispelling the Secrecy

by Chiara Bercu

Posted on by Zack Ravas

Rage Hezekiah’s Yearn (65 pages; Diode Editions), the winner of Diode’s 2021 Book Contest, makes an active inquiry into notions of bodily autonomy and limitation, resilience, and an evolving sexuality—charting what Nate Marshall describes, in his blurb of the poetry collection, as a stunning exploration of “the erotic, the familial, and the mundane.”  Hezekiah is a New England-based poet and educator and a recipient of Cave Canem, Ragdale Foundation, and MacDowell Colony fellowships. She is the author of the poetry collection Stray Harbor (Finishing Line Press) and the chapbook Unslakable (Paper Nautilus). Her poetry has appeared in the Academy of […]

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Q&A with Robin Carlson: ‘The Cold Canyon Fire Journals’ and Rebirth from the Flames

by Rebecca Rukeyser

Posted on by Zack Ravas

When Stebbins Cold Canyon Reserve, an ecological preserve in the California Coast Ranges, was ravaged by the Wragg Fire in 2015, Robin Carlson found herself struck by a sensation of loss. “Although my mind understood fire’s importance in the ecosystem, my heart did not,” she writes. The way to reconcile her contradictory feelings—those of a Californian haunted by a well-founded fear of fires and of a trained biologist with knowledge of fire cycles—was to return to Cold Canyon, notepad in hand, to observe the devastation and first stages of regrowth. And she kept returning. Sometimes she was accompanied by scientists, […]

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Q&A with Staci Greason: ‘All the Girls in Town’ and Making the Grief Bearable

by Christine Sneed

Posted on by Zack Ravas

My first encounter with Staci Greason’s writing was in the fall of 2020 after we met at an online feature-script retreat organized by CineStory, a screenwriting-focused arts organization. I read her screenplay Treed and was particularly impressed by her assured comic touch and her ability to write about complex themes—environmental conservation and marital anomie, in this case—without being heavyhanded. She had also written Treed as a novel—albeit with a different title, The Last Great American Housewife. Soon after we met at the retreat, Greason, who has also acted, sold a different novel, All the Girls in Town, to indie publisher […]

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Q&A with Editor Natalie Eve Garrett: “The Lonely Stories” & Making Peace with a Solitary Life

by Sophia Carr

Posted on by Zack Ravas

Has there ever been a more appropriate time for a chronicle of writers’ individual experiences with the state of being alone than now, in the midst of an isolating and prolonged global pandemic? The Lonely Stories (240 pages; Catupult), edited by Natalie Eve Garrett, gathers essays from a diverse set of acclaimed authors—including Jhumpa Lahiri, Anthony Doerr, Lena Dunham, Maggie Shipstead, and Lev Grossman—and examines everything from struggles with personal demons such as addiction, failed marriages, and the loneliness of being an immigrant facing racial discrimination to  the sense of liberation and creative stimulation that a solitary existence can provide—particularly […]

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Prose Poems, Memos, Hybrid Forms All Ride in This Taxi: A Dual Q&A with Sean Singer and Christine Sneed

by Sean Singer & Christine Sneed

Posted on by Zack Ravas

Christine Sneed: I first met Sean Singer in the late 1990s. I was a poetry student in the MFA program at Indiana University-Bloomington and he was an undergraduate student. One spring semester he was granted permission to enroll in our MFA workshop, and as soon as he shared his first poem with the class, I was struck by how smart, playful, and mature his work was—in a word, precocious but absent any negative connotations. Not long after he graduated from Indiana University, I wasn’t surprised to learn he’d received the Yale Younger Poets Award for his debut collection, Discography. We’ve […]

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Catch up on two of our most recent events, including an interview with Vanessa Hua

by ZYZZYVA Staff

Posted on by Zack Ravas

In case you missed it: we’ve got handy Youtube links for two of our most recent ZYZZYVA-related events, including our Q&A with Vanessa Hua about her latest novel Forbidden City that happened at San Francisco’s The Booksmith on May 18th; as well as our May 19th Q&A with Ecuadorian author Gabriela Alemán about her new collection, titled Family Album: Stories, that occurred at City Lights Bookstore. What could be better than free literary-world entertainment, no? (And if you’re interested in reading more work from Alemán, do secure a copy of our latest issue, Issue 122, to read her story “School […]

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

by Kristen Iskandrian

Posted on 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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Signed with an XO: Q&A with ‘XO’ Author Sara Rauch

by Christine Sneed

Posted on by Zack Ravas

Most readers (all?) live for the books that compel them to ignore worldly distractions in order to reach the final page with as little delay as possible. I had that experience recently when I read Sara Rauch’s new memoir, XO (172 pages; Autofocus Books), which chronicles the author’s inexorable trajectory from a monogamous relationship with a female partner to a dizzying, disorienting affair with a heterosexual man whom she met as a student at her West Coast MFA program. He was an established, much-published writer. He was also married and one of the program’s faculty. Years ago, I read a […]

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Q&A with Juhea Kim: ‘Beasts of a Little Land’ & Suffering in the Name of Love

by Shelby Hinte

Posted on by Zack Ravas

Juhea Kim’s first novel, Beasts of a Little Land (416 pages; Ecco), is an epic tale of occupied Korea that spans nearly five decades. Beginning in 1971, the highly ambitious narrative delves into Korean history and mythology and grapples with the dilemma of seeking meaning in a perilous world. Kim was born in Incheon, Korea , and moved to Portland, Oregon, when she was nine. She is a climate advocate, and her story “Biodome” appeared in ZYZZYVA Issue 120. She recently spoke to ZYZZYVA over Zoom about her new novel, writing compassionately, and suffering for love. The interview has been edited […]

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Q&A with David Huebert: ‘Chemical Valley’ & Gasoline Rainbows

by Supriya Saxena

Posted on by Zack Ravas

David Huebert’s story collection, Chemical Valley (224 pages; Biblioasis), explores the ways in which humans cope with living in an imperfect and polluted environment. The stories are varied, featuring oil refinery workers, teenage climate activists, long-term care nurses, and more, showing the issues and intricacies of their lives in lush detail. The grim explorations of wealth inequality, illness, and bereavement are counterbalanced by the rich and lyrical prose, providing heartfelt insights into today’s damaged world and the individuals who inhabit it.  Huebert’s writing has won the CBC Short Story Prize, The Walrus Poetry Prize, and was a finalist for the […]

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Q&A with Robin McLean: ‘Pity the Beast’ and Living in Wild Places

by Peter Schlachte

Posted on by Zack Ravas

Robin McLean’s first novel Pity the Beast (384 pages; And Other Stories), has all the trappings of a traditional Western—the grime and the guts, the hard people amid an austere, extraordinary landscape—but McLean isn’t satisfied with the traditional. The novel revolves around Ginny, a rancher in the American west who cheats on her husband Dan and is gang-raped in a flurry of vengeance and violence. Ginny, left for dead, escapes into the mountains and is pursued by a posse of five townsfolk: her husband, her sister Ella and Ella’s husband Saul, a tracker named Bowman, and a mule-driver named Maul. […]

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Q&A with Jenny Qi: ‘Focal Point’ and a Full Picture of Grief

by Chiara Bercu

Posted on by Zack Ravas

Jenny Qi’s first poetry collection, Focal Point (98 pages; Steel Toe Books), sees release this week. Written over the course of Qi’s graduate study in oncology, and upon the loss of her mother to cancer, Focal Point quilts together meditations on memory, bereavement, racism, divinity, and motherhood. Victoria Chang describes the collection as a “book of crossing.” Its sixty poems forward a fresh, intertextual probe into experiences of transition and bring delicate attention to life in the wake of loss. Qi was the winner of the 2020 Steel Toe Books Poetry Award, and her essays and poems appear in the […]

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