Interviews

RAISED IN PENNSYLVANIA, JOSEPH MILLAR RECIEVED an MA from Johns Hopkins University in 1970, after which worked a variety of jobs, including telephone installation and commercial fishing. His writing includes two books of poetry from Eastern Washington University Press, Overtime (2001) and Fortune (2006), as well as two chapbooks, Slow Dancer and Midlife: (Passionate Lives: Eight Autobiographical Poem Cycles). In 1995, Millar was … Read more

KIRSTEN SUNDBERG LUNSTRUM WAS BORN IN CHICAGO and raised in the Pacific Northwest. She holds a BA in English and writing from Pacific Lutheran University and an MA from the fiction writing program at the University of California, Davis. Her short fiction has appeared in Calyx and Willow Springs, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her first … Read more

LARRY HEINEMANN NEVER EXPECTED TO BE A WRITER. In Black Virgin Mountain, his most recent publication (2005) , he tells us, “I came to writing.. . .because I had a story to tell—a story that simply would not be denied and wasn’t going away anytime soon.” That story began publicly in 1977 with Close Quarters, a novel in … Read more

MELLISA KWASNY COMES FROM THE GREAT tradition of poets writing in dialogue with the natural world, from the direct-address influence of Sappho, to H.D.’s treatment of nature as a character. Her first book of poems, The Archival Birds, was published in 2000 by Bear Star Press, and her latest book, Thistle (2006, Lost Horse Press), won the 2005 Idaho … Read more

MICHEAL JAYME IS A NATIVE OF EL MONTE. A graduate of the University of California, Riverside, his early work was collected in 1996 as Look Back and Laugh for the Chicano Chapbook Series, edited by Gary Soto. The following year he began publishing under the surname “Jaime-Becerra” and shortly thereafter a limited-edition collection of prose poems, entitled The Estrellitas Off … Read more

PATRICIA GOEDICKE WROTE THIRTEEN BOOKS OF POETRY, including her final manuscript, The Baseball Field at Night, published by Lost Horse Press in 2008. Her numerous awards include a National Endowment for the Ans fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, and the William Carlos Williams Prize. Goedicke was an accomplished and passionate downhill skier and her poems frequently celebrate both … Read more

WILLIAM KITTREDGE WAS 35 WHEN HE STOPPED ranching on his family’s huge Eastern Oregon spread to attend the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, earning his MFA in 1969. In the subsequent decades he has become a distinctive voice of the Western experience. In his memoirs, essays, and fiction he has explored the legacy of the agricultural West, and … Read more

TERSE AND BOTH RHETORICAL AND LYRICAL, Jericho Brown’s poems explore race and sexuality with an unflinching gaze. Sometimes formal and always smart, the poems are infused with a sense of grace. Subjects that feel at first deeply personal become part of the experiences of a greater we. At the core of Brown’s poems is a call … Read more

MANY REVIEWS of Charles D’Ambrosio’s work compare it to the short stories of Raymond Carver, Thom Jones, and Denis Johnson. D’Ambrosio is the author of an essay collection, Orphans (Clear Cut, 2004), and two short story collections: The Point (Little, Brown, 1995), a PEN/Hemingway Award Finalist and New York Times Notable Book of the Year, … Read more

Tim O’Brien’s characters occupy a world in which narrative has the power to consume, to unite, and to heal. Stories are repeated and memories revisited, until accuracy sometimes gives way to isolation, fear, and despair, until the only way forward is to keep telling them. “The best of these stories are memory as prophecy,” writes Richard … Read more