NICOLE TRESKA interviews TRACY O’NEILL
It’s a drizzly summer night, and I’m meeting Tracy O’Neill in Manhattan’s East Village to talk about her debut novel, The Hopeful, the story of a figure skater who breaks her back on the cusp of Olympic competition. O’Neill skated as a child, and in her pearl raincoat, cinched at the waist and hooded, it’s not hard to imagine a younger Tracy, her hooded warm-up hiding a sequined costume, awaiting her moment on the ice.
With ROSE BUNCH
Your name: Rose Bunch
Current city or town: Fayetteville, Arkansas
How long have you lived here: Most of my life, give or take a decade or so.
MARNI BERGER interviews JUDITH FRANK
Judith Frank is the author of the novel, Crybaby Butch, and a professor of English at Amherst College. She received a B.A. from Hebrew University in Jerusalem and a Ph.D. in English literature and an M.F.A. in creative writing from Cornell. She has been the recipient of a grant from the National Endowment of the Arts, and support from both Yaddo and MacDowell. Marni and Judith spoke online about Judy’s new novel, All I Love and Know, and what it means to write about violence in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
I heard him yelling as I ate breakfast.
“Help! Won’t anyone come out and help me?” I looked out the window and saw a tall man with feathered blonde hair and large sunglasses standing on the sidewalk across the street. He reached out, trying to find something, anything, to guide him.
SARETTA MORGAN interviews RACHEL ELIZA GRIFFITHS
Rachel Eliza Griffiths is a poet and visual artist. Her most recent collection of poetry, Lighting the Shadow (Four Way Books), was published in April. Griffiths teaches creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College and the Institute of American Indian Arts, and lives in Brooklyn, NY. Saretta Morgan corresponded with Griffiths via email over the course of four weeks this summer, during which time they each traversed several locales—Upstate New York, Mexico, Colorado, Vermont and Washington, D.C.—as they discussed form, representation, and the risks of opening oneself up artistically.
Saretta Morgan (SM): Your fourth book of poems came out this year, and you’re very close to completing your first book of photographs and your first novel. You also work in photography and video. Could you share a little bit about your relationship to these modalities? What complications and limitations do you find in each?
I think of the winter years ago when I taught an evening class there made up of a group of nontraditional students studying social work and counseling, many of them driven to do so by the addiction or poverty or general hard times that affected, in one way or another, everyone. I’d leave the southern Willamette Valley in the dark and rain and cross the Calapooya Mountains towards the small city of Roseburg. That stretch of interstate still held remnants from the slower travel of the past where people stopped more often, sat down for meals, and had their cars serviced in the meantime. One exit still operated an all night diner and lounge, gas station and motor lodge, decked out in the original neon glaring through the night like brightly colored clouds; another exit twenty miles away with the same amenities along with roadside carnival rides, stood completely abandoned, as if at some point in 1963, everyone just walked away, not even bothering to flip the faded sign on the door from Open to Closed.
Artist: BEN SHATTUCK
When I first heard of the Nicaraguan Canal Project, I thought of the 19th-century artists Martin Johnson Heade and Norton Bush. It was winter, and I was driving through Wisconsin, early evening, listening to the news. The canal, the reporter said, would be three times as long and twice as wide as the Panama Canal. It would fit extra-large container ships. It might stimulate Nicaragua’s economy. Environmental groups were protesting potentially large-scale disaster.
Come see The Common’s Managing Editor Diana Babineau in conversation with editors of three other premier Massachusetts literary magazines. The panelists will present their journals’ identities: who they are, what they are looking for, and the process of getting published by them.
The Straw Dog Writers’ Guild––the panel’s hosting organization––is a collaborative open to writers, readers, booksellers, and editors alike, providing a vibrant network of resources to the Western Massachusetts writing community.
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