MELODY NIXON interviews RUSHI VYAS
Growing up in the suburban US, as a brown person in white suburbia, we are taught to make grief palatable. Expressions of sorrow are permitted, so long as we “move on” or “move forward.” There is the assumption that, no matter who it is that died or how they lived, once they are gone we are to only “remember the good times.”

SARA FREEMAN
I was certainly interested in exploring the liminal spaces Mara inhabits (the seaside setting, the bar, hostel, and marina) and its workers and inhabitants, while also staying true to the protagonist’s more internal preoccupations: the recursive, often claustrophobic space of her mind.

MELODY NIXON
The Russian military has just bombed an art school in Mariupol that housed 400 civilians, including children, killing many of them. There are reports of civilians being loaded onto buses and sent to “distant cities” in Russia against their will—the echo of history jars my spine…

MELODY NIXON interviews MENSAH DEMARY
The personal reinforces the physical world; collective crisis and reawakening are terms that all lead back to death—our anxiety in realizing our lives will end, and we cannot predict how, or when, and the mortal threat the physical world poses to us.

MELODY NIXON
I studied in the academy for many years, and there you cannot allow yourself to write in a spontaneous way. For me that was an interesting restraint. I had some conflict between my need for spontaneity and this heavy, troubled way of writing: always thinking of the other that will criticize you.

MELODY NIXON | In my first months in New York City I rode in the back of taxicabs through Central Park thinking, “When will this sink in? When will it feel like I know where I am.”

MELODY NIXON | When I was 19 my full-time job was bartending a pub called Filthy McNasty’s. McNasty’s sat on Rose Street in Edinburgh, Scotland, one of the roughest streets in the city center at the time.

MELODY NIXON interviews JONATHAN MOODY Poetry can be used as a tool of activism whether you have military wives posting pictures of poems written on their naked bodies as a way to promote awareness of PTSD, or Cave Canem poets using social media to post video footage of them reading poems about police brutality.

MELODY NIXON interviews CLAIRE MESSUD | You know, when I’m teaching writing I always say the to the students, “If you can not write, don’t. If you can have as good a life, and feel fulfilled without writing, don’t. Why would you?” Some people – who are very talented – can be as happy not writing. And then there are the people who can’t; it’s how they stay alive.

MELODY NIXON
When I was 19 my full-time job was bartending a pub called Filthy McNasty’s. McNasty’s sat on Rose Street in Edinburgh, Scotland, known as one of the roughest streets in the city center at the time. Fights punctuated each hour of the night and later.