Young Adult novelist Martin Wilson grew up in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, where much of his fiction takes place. His first YA novel, What They Always Tell Us, was the winner of an Alabama Author Award and was a Lambda Award nominee.
I have been the grateful beneficiary of Karen Green’s generosity and the artwork she has made available to me to share with readers in each of the issues of the KBBBAR Lit Journal this year. Her vibrant, colorful, and uniquely enchanting work has not only enlivened the fiction and the poetry in which it appeared, but also, as in “Mr.
Hometown: San Francisco, CA
Current town: Olympia, WA
What are you working on now?
Tragedies like the mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton bring everything to a stop. As we read the details and look at the pictures, we all pause, look around, and take stock of our priorities and what we hold dear. Writers are no different, except for the work we do. We’re often in the middle of describing a particular part of the world—when another part is suddenly falling apart. Jon Roemer and David Winner polled a handful of active writers and asked how public tragedies impact their current and future work—projects that may or may not portray mass shootings.
Travis Jeppesen is bad. The United States–born, Shanghai and Berlin-based writer, artist, and critic has been rebelling against the staid, familiar form of “critical” writing and churnalism overtaking many art publications, so often press releases by another name, by carving out a form of art writing that rises to the occasion of art itself.
In November 2018, Karina Longworth released Seduction: Sex, Lies, and Stardom in Howard Hughes’ Hollywood, a biography of both the businessman himself and 10 of the Hollywood women who entered and eventually left his life. The Hughes decades of Hollywood are a vessel for Longworth’s snapshots of movie stars as well-remembered as Katharine Hepburn and as lost-to-history as Billie Dove. The bulk of the book covers Hughes’ bursting onto the movie scene in the ‘20s to his gradual retreat into seclusion in the ‘50s.
Eileen Myles moves around a lot. We met for an hour because they had more places to be: a reading by some of their students and then their own reading in Ridgewood. I bungled my public transit route and was late to the interview. I received a text saying “What if we meet at 3:45. I will nap. See you then.” The ease through which they move around the city makes it clear that Myles is no recent transplant.
R: Apeirogon is a novel where you make the whole world complicit in the events of one story. We are collectively responsible for the moment when a bomb exploded and killed one daughter, when a gun was drawn and emptied into another. Were you aware of that inescapable complicity when you were writing this book?
ISW: I will not be able to ask you the first question that I should ask a Russian poet at this moment, because you live in a country where you might face severe consequences for answering it. We will have to conduct this conversation in the shadow of that fact as if it were something acceptable, which it isn’t. That means that my first question will have to be something else. So, I will start by giving you an opportunity to tell readers a little about your own background and experiences. What is it like being a contemporary Russian poet?
An intelligent and exciting debut short story collection, White Dancing Elephants (Dzanc Books, Oct 2018) focuses on the varied experiences of women of color. Bhuvaneswar deftly explores the complexities of intersectional feminism through tales about queer Indian women, queer biracial women, diverse immigrants, narrators with physical and mental illnesses, women of color coping with the trauma of miscarriage and rape, etc. Chaya's prose is simultaneously crisp, clear, and layered with storytelling references.