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Finding Hope in Horror: Blake Hammond Interviews Julian Zabalbeascoa

March 10, 2025 Interviews

JULIAN ZABALBAEASCOA’s debut novel What We Tried to Bury Grows Here is a work of narrative ingenuity and empathy, set during the Spanish Civil War and has recently been named a finalist for a Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His short stories have appeared in American Short Fiction, One Story, and Ploughshares, among other journals. In this interview, BLAKE HAMMOND and Julian Zabalbeascoa discuss writing about your heritage, riffing on your research, and empathizing with evil characters.

Blake Hammond: Your story “Igerilaria,” published in The Common in 2021, is about a Basque refugee, the Euskadi Ta Askatasuna attacks, and fascist Spain in the late 20th Century. When did you start writing about the Basque Country? Or has it always been a central aspect of your work?

Julian Zabalbeascoa: Since the word go, really. And then, with even greater fervor, when I was twenty and studying in the Basque Country in Spain. It was a transformative experience. As the world was opening to me, I was trying to put it on the page. My family is from the Basque Country. My father is from the Spanish side, and my mother’s family is from the French side. And I grew up in a community of Basque immigrants in the Central Valley of California. It’s a common story, I think, but, in my teen years, I was determined to get as far as possible from my hometown. But what did I end up doing? Studying in the Basque Country. Planting myself in the headwaters, the source of it all. From the frying pan into the fire. It was magical though. It was also me trying to make sense of everything—my childhood, what brought my family to America, the stories we tell ourselves, the stories that shape us, etc. I never sit down at the desk as though reclining on the therapist’s couch, but I suppose that’s what I’m unwittingly doing morning after morning on the page.

BH: You can tell Spain is a huge part of your life because the setting is so central to every chapter, especially for a country as regional as Spain. In a way, the landscape is one of the most constant characters throughout the book. Can you speak more about that regionality and your approach to writing settings and landscapes?

JZ: Few things on this planet stir my soul as much as the mist on the mountains in the Basque Country, on both sides of the border, Spain and France. It’s an ancestral feeling, I’m sure. A sort of pleasurable response that has existed longer than I have. But I also love Spain’s arid landscapes, its high plateaus, the near-forests of twisting olive trees, the stone-scraped mountain peaks found around León, the Arabic influences in architecture down south, all of it. It’s a lifelong love affair for me. So it was bound to find its way into the book. However, my characters are fighting for this land, killing and dying, and risking their moral compasses, so the land would have to be central to how they view and experience the world.

BH: With this ancestral connection, and having spent so much time there, I’m curious about your research for this book. Did any of it come from first-hand accounts you heard while in Spain?

JZ: While I’m an advocate for the powers of the imagination, it would have been very difficult for me to write this book without many of those lived experiences, which included being told anecdotes by people in Spain and the Basque Country that helped give it shape. I did a year of undergrad in the Basque Country in Spain, then attended grad school in Madrid over the course of five summers. Since 1999, I’ve been in Spain and the Basque Country at least once a year, oftentimes more. So many of those experiences, which included focused research with a clear eye of where my characters would wind up, informed the writing of this novel. The thing with research, though, is that if you’re not careful it becomes endless. It is important to step out onto the high wire before you fully test its viability. You should be a little reckless. Meaning, you should give your imagination space to dream. I’m currently studying the Spanish Civil War once again for a class I’m teaching this spring, and I’m coming across a few things I would have loved to include in the novel. This is despite having studied the war for over a decade now. But if I were going to wait to read all that can be read about the Spanish Civil War before putting the first words down, I’d still be stretching my legs behind the starting line.

I never sit down at the desk as though reclining on the therapist’s couch, but I suppose that’s what I’m unwittingly doing morning after morning on the page.”

BH: You do a great job of weaving the historical context for the war, and the political turmoil of the time into this book. How did you create such an authentic sense of urgency from a conflict so far removed from the American consciousness?

JZ: This follows that idea of research. You want to know your material and be able to internalize it, but then you should forget about much of it. Have you learned your instrument? Great, now start jamming. I knew I didn’t want these narrators to be tour guides for the Spanish Civil War. I didn’t want to bog the reader down with exposition that might deepen their understanding of the conflict but, quite possibly, slow down the narrative. I wanted to put faith in the reader that they’d meet my characters where they were, and that enough context could be created through action. I also had faith that there were recognizable elements in the conflict for today’s American reader. I began this novel in 2011. I wouldn’t have guessed then that the Venn diagram would overlap with America as much as it does now.

BH: I was interested in your decision to write from the viewpoint of characters on the fascist side of the conflict in some of these chapters. Can you talk more about that?

JZ: This war affected most everyone in society, so I strove to have diverse voices on the page. That includes fascists. To that, there’s no great sport in putting a character on the page to ridicule them or tear them down. As much as I might disagree with a character’s view of the world, it’s not my job to judge them. Instead, it’s my job as a writer to remain curious, to follow after them, transcribe what they’re telling/showing me, and keep asking questions. We’re not encouraged to show such generosity, especially not online, but I think it’s an integral quality to maintain when you’re at your desk.

BH: Was it difficult for you to inhabit those characters, the ones you don’t agree with? To try to remain neutral while getting their voice onto the page? Faustino and Juan are two fascist characters that come to mind, and even though they’re committing unspeakable acts of violence, I felt bad for them. They didn’t feel villainized.

JZ: I was recently in conversation with the writer Sebastian Stockman about my novel, and he referenced this line from the Jean Renoir film The Rules of the Game: “The awful thing about life is this: everybody has their reasons.” Part of the job of the fiction writer is to explore what those reasons might be. To withhold judgment while doing so. I have some strong, possibly even inflexible, political opinions. I likely wouldn’t have written this novel were I not so concerned about the current trajectory of the country and the world. But I’ve learned not to let those convictions drown out whatever my characters are trying to tell me. Otherwise, what would I produce? Something akin to a social media post that might fetch a few likes. But certainly nothing cousinly to literature.

BH: There are some incredibly well-written, yet horrifying, passages of violence and war in this book. But what seemed to connect everything was the theme of family, especially parental and sibling relationships. Was that an intentional throughline, or did it occur as you were writing?

JZ: It’s amazing how, in fiction, you can out yourself. Even in historical fiction! Half of this novel was written very slowly over more than a decade, while the other half was written all at once, not long after my wife and I learned we’d be having our first child. Becoming a parent was very much on my mind while working on these chapters every morning. It is also representative of the struggle playing out in the book. You have those fighting for a positive vision of tomorrow, who want a better and more just—and therefore a more secure—world for their children to live in. Meanwhile, they’re at war against reactionaries of various stripes, those determined to return the country to a past they can recognize and feel secure in. They likely believe their children will, as well. And so the fight goes on for another day.

BH: That positive vision of tomorrow gives the book an admirable overtone of hope, which was moving for a story that is also so filled with terror. Out of all this tension between hope and fear, right and left, family and war, what do you want readers to take away from this book?

JZ: In the end, hope. But, along the way, visceral glimpses of the terror? Is that something you can want for the reader (even though life has a surplus of it and dishes it out disproportionately and at random)? If so, first, the terror: Spain’s fate in the 1930’s need not be ours. We still have time. We can give in to the algorithms and the demagogues, blame our fellow citizens for all the ills we feel are before us, and remain constantly outraged, but what will happen then? We’ll ultimately become irrevocably divorced from each other, leading half the country to fully embrace an authoritarian’s agenda. Ours remains a democracy, and a democracy requires us to maintain conversations with those we agree with, those we don’t, and those who’ve tuned out for all sorts of reasons. When we stop talking to one another, when we subscribe wholesale to the us vs. them narrative, when only cultural and ideological hegemony can save the country, then we will begin to hear, as Twain warned, history rhyming. Now for the hope: those fighting in Spain against the fascist-backed Nationalist Movement stood under all sorts of flags. In the novel, I tend to focus on those fighting to defend the Second Republic. The odds were against them from the start. The world’s democracies had abandoned them. Meanwhile, the insurrectionists had the backing of Nazi Germany and fascist Italy. Despite being outmatched and suffering one loss after another, they maintained hope and continued fighting to realize it in their world. I believe that we are in urgent need of that sort of hope and resiliency.

Few things on this planet stir my soul as much as the mist on the mountains in the Basque Country, on both sides of the border, Spain and France. It’s an ancestral feeling, I’m sure. ”

BH: Many of these chapters have been published as stand-alone short stories, and this book functions as both a novel and a collection of short stories. At what point did you realize that you had a novel on your hands? Were you thinking of it as a collection, or a novel, or just writing?

JZ: Six of one, half dozen the other. There was a time when I was trying to have the novel be a thing it was not. The Great Basque American Multi-Generational Novel. Once I abandoned that track and focused solely on the Spanish Civil War, I refused to put any guardrails on the novel, the shape it would take, and how it might even be classified. Not pragmatic for the marketplace but necessary to invite some generosity from the muses. So whichever narrator was speaking to me, whichever image wouldn’t leave me alone, whatever the murky subconscious was trying to bring forward, I’d abandon myself to it. I’d glance at the structure the novel was beginning to take, but I tried not to let that dictate much. Just as I’d blindly follow a character to a chapter’s denouement, having faith all the while I was heading…somewhere, the same was the case with the overall structure of the novel. I had faith it would all coalesce into a unified shape. Now, having said that, after all that dreaming on the page was through, my heady waking self shouldered in and began barking orders. Such is the revision process. Gone is the mystic communing with the subconscious or collective unconscious. In comes the cold, calculating, and merciless logician. I also had the immeasurable great fortune to fall in love with an incredible fiction editor: Katie Sticca, the Managing and Fiction Editor of Salamander. The novel wouldn’t be what it is without her careful reads and notes that filled up all the margins.

BH: Speaking of your editing process, I was curious about revising a novel with this structure, with each chapter giving us a new voice. Some characters appear and then reappear later, and some only appear once, with Isidro in the center. Was it harder to deepen Isidro’s character? Were there characters who appeared in drafts that you felt deserved their own stories?

JZ: There were some challenges along the way, most certainly. Plenty of reverse engineering. Each narrator will experience a sort of narrative arc in their respective chapters, but throughout all these, there is the character of Isidro, and even Mariana, who experience a larger and longer arc. Isidro has an unquenchable thirst for life, and a deep and constantly present appreciation for the flightiness of time and the brevity of our lives, so some of the narrators might be able to appreciate that we’re following him throughout the novel. But I’m willing to wager that if you asked the other narrators, they’d tell you their experiences constitute the authoritative story of the Spanish Civil War and that Isidro played a small, sometimes meaningful, part in it. The world, as we experience it, tends to feel like it’s spinning around us as its primary axle. So I had to honor that feeling while also, adding new textures to Isidro and Mariana’s storylines. As for the second part of the question, sometimes a character required their own chapter. Xabier’s, Isidro’s brother’schapter was one of the last I wrote, as I felt that people’s thoughts and memories of him made him a touch one-dimensional. He seems to be everybody’s martyr, so he requires his own chapter to demonstrate to the reader that he is just as conflicted and ego-driven as all the rest of us. But by and large, when a character does reappear, they do so as quickly-glimpsed shadows. I’m hoping there’s some fun for readers in identifying them when they brush a scene’s periphery.

BH: What books and authors inspired you as you wrote this novel?

JZ: The novel was written over thirteen years. So the bibliography would go on for pages. But the two biggies for me when I was carried off on an eight-week writing sprint in which I wrote half this novel, would be the work of Svetlana Alexievich and Irish fiction writ large. I dedicated a couple of chapters to Svetlana Alexievich. She won the Nobel Prize in Literature nine years ago for her oral histories of the Soviet Union and Russia. Anything with her name on it, pick it up. It’s oftentimes brutal. Secondhand Time stands alongside Part IV of 2666 as the most violent and visceral series of pages I’ve ever read. But it’s also shot through with humor and great wisdom and many people who, despite their circumstances, continue putting one foot in front of the other. Her work made me realize I could write a novel populated with voices. Mine has twenty chapters, and each chapter is told by a different narrator. It was Svetlana Alexievich who permitted me to pursue that. As for the Irish, they constitute a large part of what I’ve been reading since 2020. I’ve been beating this drum since that seismic year, but the island of Ireland is producing some of the most exciting and dynamic literature of our times. It’s not even a pound-for-pound thing. They can enter the ring against any country, no matter the size, and have their opponent on the mat before the bell ends the first round.

Blake Hammond is an MFA student at SNHU’s Mountainview MFA program. His work was a finalist in the Salamander2024 Fiction Contest, and has been published in Mulberry Literary.

Julian Zabalbeascoa’s debut novel What We Tried to Bury Grows Here was published this November by Two Dollar Radio. Among other journals, his short stories have appeared in American Short Fiction, Boulevard, The Common,Electric Literature, Glimmer Train, Gettysburg Review, One Story, and Ploughshares. He teaches in the Honors College at the University of Massachusetts Lowell.

Home and/or Home: Seán Carlson Interviews Erin Fornoff and Gustav Parker Hibbett

February 10, 2025 Interviews

When ERIN FORNOFF, GUSTAV PARKER HIBBETT, and SEÁN CARLSON met over a drink in the lobby of the Arms Hotel, located on the main square of Listowel in southwest Ireland, they introduced themselves by comparing their American upbringings. Having grown up in North Carolina, New Mexico, and Massachusetts, respectively, they shared their experiences residing and writing in Ireland.

For Fornoff, Hibbett, and Carlson, their lives in Ireland have granted them new perspectives on their lives in the U.S. and welcomed them into new communities that help bring their poetry to life. Before leaving, they all paused for a photo beside a typewriter and a goose-feather quill pen on display under the gaze of a countertop cherub sculpture. In the longstanding hub of an agricultural community, where tractors still regularly cart calves to market, the traditional tools of writing also reinforced the lifeblood of local literature.

On Fighting Back: Jonas Rosenbrück interviews Khuê Phạm

January 13, 2025 Interviews

Vietnamese-German writer KHUÊ PHẠM recently released her first novel Brothers and Ghosts in the US. Following a virtual classroom visit to the German department of Amherst College, she talks to Assistant Professor JONAS ROSENBRUECK about Donald Trump and the role of writers in times of right-wing populism.

Jonas Rosenbrück (JR): Let’s start with the question of whose story gets told. Your novel and other books coming out in German recently seem to challenge the white, male-dominated mainstream of the German literary world. How do you see your position within this development?

Khuê Phạm (KP): In Germany, I’m part of a generation of writers who come from immigrant families and who, through their work, write about the many faces of Germany today. My book was the first German novel from the Vietnamese diaspora over here, and I was unsure how readers would take to it. I was surprised and touched when the book did very well. At the same time, the traditional German literary canon is mainly based on male, white writers who are dead (laughs). Why not move on?

JR: Your novel Brothers and Ghosts is largely set in the US, which reminded me of the many German books that look at America as a place of projection and self-discovery. From Karl May and Franz Kafka to Christa Wolf, there is a long tradition of German authors writing about the US. How do you relate to that?

KP: For Germany, the United States has been a country of hopes and dreams for many years. And it has been for me too. I have relatives in California, whom I’ve been visiting since I was a kid. I was always fascinated by the way that they were living in Little Saigon—it seemed so easy. I wanted to have that longing in the book, I wanted to describe the contrast between the US and Germany as immigration countries. For a long time, I thought that the US was much more open towards people who have a foreign name or an accent, believing that this was the way forward. Now that Donald Trump has been elected for a second time, I’m not so sure anymore.

…the traditional German literary canon is mainly based on male, white writers who are dead. Why not move on?”

JR: The backlash against immigration is building everywhere. How do you see your own role as a writer in light of that?

KP: Like many, I’m deeply disappointed that Donald Trump gets to rule for another four years. It will have a huge impact on the world, weakening those who believe in a liberal, multicultural society. In Germany, we have the AfD on the rise and a government that recently collapsed, so we need to vote again in late February; Italy is governed by Giorgia Meloni, and France is dominated by Marine Le Pen; the list goes on. The populists have in common that they work with clichés and projections of fear. When Trump says “They eat the cats and dogs,” he paints a whole group of people as uncivilized, which is a deeply racist motif. So it is important to take agency and tell your own story to regain your humanity. The more the right is on the rise, the more important it becomes to hear, read, and write those other stories. I’m an author, so this is my way of fighting back.

For a long time, I thought that the US was much more open towards people who have a foreign name or an accent, believing that this was the way forward. Now that Donald Trump has been elected for a second time, I’m not so sure anymore.”

JR: Your novel opens with Kiều, the main character, saying that she’s unable to pronounce her own name, which is why she tells everyone to simply call her Kim. What role do names play in articulating feelings of alienation?

KP: This is a story about a young woman with a Vietnamese background that she’s not 100% comfortable with. Vietnamese names are quite complicated, so if you grow up in a Western country like her, you always encounter problems. When I went to school in Germany, people would wonder how to pronounce Khuê, and they didn’t know if it was my first or last name. It remains a bit of an open wound, so I wanted to put it in the book. It starts with the question of names, and it ends with it. After the novel came out, quite a lot of readers told me that they knew the problem. For me, that was very comforting to hear.

JR: There is an element in your work that feels to me, as a literary scholar, like a reconfiguration of certain elements of the German tradition. It concerns the formal structure of your novel, which as a Generationenroman (novel of generations), tells the story of 30-year-old Kiều, as well as her father Minh, who becomes a communist as a student, while his brother Sơn grows up to be fiercely anti-communist and later becomes a supporter of Donald Trump.

KP: German family sagas like Buddebrooks by Thomas Mann or Eugen Ruge`s In Times of Fading Light have been important inspirations for Brothers and Ghosts because they describe long-term changes through the prism of a family. The Generationenroman is a great way of exploring complex biographies and contrasting them with each other—I wrote my book out of the impulse to describe how ideologies divide two brothers who were once close. Do they manage to bridge the divisions between them? Or do they simply let them fester and harden? The structure of the Generationenroman adds to the dramatic tension: As a reader, you move between very different scenes, characters, and countries, which creates an interesting reading experience.

JR: I noticed that your writing pays a lot of attention to the senses. There are these beautiful descriptions of smells, tastes, colors, and sounds, and you have a funny passage where you write that Americans say, “I love you,” whereas Vietnamese people will say, “Have you eaten yet?”.

KP: The novel is set in three different countries and covers several decades, starting from the late sixties until the present day. I really wanted to give my readers a sense of those times and places, almost as if they were there. Using my background as a journalist, I traveled to Vietnam, the US, and Cambodia, and conducted interviews with my relatives and people who have experienced the war and the following years. They gave me a lot of details, for certain types of food, dress, and even a particular brand of cigarettes used in Cambodia to pay for smugglers. With these details, I created scenes for my readers to immerse themselves in. Hopefully, this helps them understand the world of my novel a bit better—I know that many readers may not be familiar with it.

JR: You recently came to my class and we spoke about how the title of your novel changed from the German original (Wo auch immer ihr seid, literally ´Wherever you are´) to the English edition (Brothers and Ghosts). What was it like to encounter yourself in translation?

KP: It has been an unexpected journey. As we discussed, it’s rare for a German author to be published in English. The two translators of my book, Daryl Lindsey and Charles Hawley, have been working with me for a long time, but this was their first literary translation. We looked closely at the rhythm of the language, the flow of sentences, the sound of the words. We had to find a new voice. After working on it over several months, I felt that even though the English translation is now further away from the German original, it sounds more like the book I would have written in English. The change in the title is a good example: If we had used the literal translation, it would have been a common phrase in English, which would not have worked on the cover of a novel.

JR: Brothers and Ghosts was published in the UK, Australia and the US. What has it been like to see your story travel around the world?

KP: The biggest gift of publishing an English version is that it has connected me with a lot of new people in other countries. The book serves as a bridge, especially to the Asian community in the US. Talking to Vietnamese-American readers and writers made me realize that even though we have grown up in different places, we have a lot of things in common: a drive to explore the trauma of the Vietnam War, a very ambivalent relationship to the generation of our parents. This was quite surprising.

JR: The novel was also adapted to a piece of dance theatre, KIM, which recently toured in Taiwan and Germany. Did your sense of your story change in the process of moving it from the written word onto the stage?

KP: Writing a novel is a bit like giving birth: You create something and then it’s out in the world, and you have limited influence on what happens next. Brothers and Ghosts started with the idea to turn the story of my family into a novel, and after its release, I saw that other people read it through the lens of their own experiences and questions. They made it their own.

Then I was approached by a Taiwanese director, who has been working in Germany doing documentary theater for some time. She brought in five other performers who also have an Asian background and who share their own story of growing up between East and West on stage. And all these experiences are creatively, artistically expressed through dance or rap or video documentary, interwoven with key scenes from the book. So again, it’s a new being.

JR: I’m curious what you think about the genre of autofiction. You’ve spoken in other interviews about admiring, for instance, Annie Ernaux. What does autofictional writing allow you to do and where are its limits? People sometimes worry about a “fetishization” of authenticity.

KP: I also love Tove Ditlevsen, the author of the Copenhagen Trilogy. I never thought about Denmark in the early 20th century before, but the way she describes her own childhood, her rise as a writer, and her addictions, was so powerful. And I admire Édouard Louis’ Change, in which he writes about being a gay man from a working-class background. Again an experience that I don’t know personally, but which I got drawn into through his poetic and unsparing portrayal of himself. I feel that autofiction is particularly powerful in telling stories that we would not read otherwise, stories that are perhaps more on the margins.

In German literary criticism, there are some who say that most of the autofiction from immigrant writers is “only people telling their own story”, implying that this is not “real” literature. I feel that this is a way of talking down stories that would otherwise not be heard.

JR: Tell us what you’re working on now. What’s the next project? Are there connections to Brothers and Ghosts or do you think of it as a separate project?

KP: I’m working on my second novel now, which will be quite different. I’m telling the story of a young woman who returns to the dark place of her childhood as she becomes a mother. It’s set on the outskirts of Berlin, on the border between East and West. It’s a more German story, centering on what it means to be a woman: How does your identity change when you have a child and suddenly find yourself in a new role you never wanted? It’s also an exploration of returning to the place you came from. So it picks up on some of the questions of Brothers and Ghosts, but it’s a different story overall.

JR: We’re excited to read it.

KP: Me, too (both laugh). I’m starting chapter three now.

Khuê Phạm is an award-winning Vietnamese-German journalist and writer. Born in West Berlin, she studied at Goldsmiths College and the London School of Economics. She then worked as a producer for NPR’s Berlin bureau before becoming an editor at the weekly Die Zeit and has also contributed op-eds to The Guardian and USA Today. In 2012, she co-wrote We New Germans, a non-fiction book about second-generation immigrants in Germany. Her debut novel Brothers and Ghosts was adapted to the stage as “Kim” and was published in Britain, Australia, and the US last year. She’s a founding member of PEN Berlin and a juror for the International Literature Prize, a prestigious award for international literature translated into German. Read more at khuepham.de/english

Jonas Rosenbrück is Assistant Professor of German at Amherst College. He recently published his first book, Common Scents (SUNY Press, 2024). His current project is tentatively titled Toward a Critique of Masculinity: Postfascist Bodies in Germany and Austria and investigates writers and artists who attempt to reconstruct, repair, or destroy practices of masculinity after the catastrophe of Nazi Germany’s sexual politics.

Waters of Reclamation: Raychelle Heath Interviews Caroline M. Mar

November 11, 2024 Interviews

RAYCHELLE HEATH sits down with CAROLINE M. MAR to discuss reconciliation, poetic form, and Caroline’s new chapbook, Dream of the Lake.

Raychelle Heath: Dream of the Lake is such a beautiful read, and I have so many questions. Our first encounter with the lake takes us through the stages of drowning. So I’m wondering, how do you see that as an entry point into the world of the book? And why did you want the reader to encounter the lake this way first?

Caroline M. Mar: That’s a good question. I had been trying to write poems about Lake Tahoe for several years and the poems were not working. They were very sentimental, or I couldn’t get beyond “Gosh, it’s so pretty.” Because it is really beautiful. It is spectacular in a way that defies description. It was easy for me to get lost in all of the beauty of it, but I knew that that wasn’t complicated enough. I knew that I was trying to ask some pretty complicated questions of myself, of my reader, and of the landscape.

A New Kind of Campus Novel: Bruna Dantas Lobato on Her Debut Novel

October 15, 2024 Interviews

EMILY EVERETT interviews BRUNA DANTAS LOBATO

Back in 2017, The Common published a debut short story by a young Brazilian-American writer with a beautiful, understated style, and an enormous talent for translating big emotions into quiet gestures, thoughtful moments, and tense, restrained dialogue. Publishing debuts is always meaningful, but the best part comes after: watching those early-career writers go on to greater and greater successes.

Last year, that writer, Bruna Dantas Lobato, was awarded the 2023 National Book Award in Translation for The Words That Remain by Stênio Gardel. And this month, her debut novel is out from Grove Atlantic’s Black Cat imprint. She sat down with TC managing editor Emily Everett via Zoom to talk about that novel, Blue Light Hours. Zoom felt like a fitting medium: Blue Light Hours follows a first-year college student communicating with her mother back in Brazil only via Skype. They also discussed her work translating from Portuguese, and the pleasures and pitfalls of connecting with her home country through writing and translation. Bruna was born and raised in Natal, Brazil, and now lives in Iowa.

It’s a Gift to Be Alive: Jennifer Acker interviews Hannah Gersen

September 9, 2024 Interviews

HANNAH GERSEN is a novelist whose fiction ranges from the strictly realist to the gently speculative. Her first novel, Home Field, is a deeply felt story about family and grief in rural Maryland, described as Friday Night Lights meets My So-Called Life. Her second, most recent novel, We Were Pretending, leaps into today’s most pressing crises–climate change, the creep of technology–through the lens of Leigh Bowers, an at-sea single mom trying to secure a better future for her daughter and a better death for her mother, who is dying of cancer. It’s beautifully written, imaginative, and elegiac with surprising twists and turns.

You Have a Mouth: Rachel Morgenstern-Clarren interviews Ani Gjika

August 12, 2024 Interviews

ANI GJIKA’S An Unruled Body won the 2021 Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing and has been longlisted for the 2024 Mass Book Awards in Nonfiction. In this interview, Ani Gjika and poet and translator RACHEL MORGENSTERN-CLARREN delve into the profound influence of language and literature, particularly in the context of women’s liberation. They explore the pivotal role of books and language in empowering women, and shed light on the transformative and essential nature of literary expression in combating censorship, serving as a form of healing after traumatic experiences, and offering a new language to write about and confront the past.

Violence and Its Other: Toti O’Brien Interviews Dimitris Lyacos

July 8, 2024 Interviews

DIMITRIS LYACOS describes his new book, Until the Victim Becomes our Own, as a prequel to his world-renowned trilogy, Poena Damni—which begins with a fugitive on a train, but never clarifies what, whom, and where from he has fled, hinting at the past only through the traces it left, showing us a mere geography of scars. Until the Victim Becomes our Own reels us back to the pre-fugue universe, mapping both an archeological grid and a bird’s-eye view of our very own Western civilization, founded on Judeo-Christian traditions, then evolved through industrialization and capitalism up to the digitally-global present day.

Though he was bound to Israel when TOTI O’BRIEN reached out to him with her questions, Lyacos agreed to interweave their conversation with his travels, and we are glad he did.

Return to One’s Roots, Return to a Person, Return to Oneself: Vika Mujumdar Interviews Susana Praver-Pérez

June 10, 2024 Interviews

Susana Praver-Pérez’s work, moving fluidly between English and Spanish, from Puerto Rico to California and New York, is a moving meditation on how place shapes our understanding of ourselves and the world. Praver-Pérez’s debut collection Hurricanes, Love Affairs, and Other Disasters, and recent collection, Return Against the Flow, reckon with how we make a place home, considering with care and generosity the landscape of Puerto Rico and its impact on her selfhood. In lyrical, narrative poems, Praver-Pérez examines how geography is defined by its landscape and people. Through the narrativization of lived experience and the intertextual poetry of others, Praver-Pérez’s collection, Return Against the Flow is a necessary documentation of the way language shifts across landscape and time.

In this interview, VIKA MUJUMDAR and SUSANA PRAVER-PÉREZ discuss place and geography, the shifting influences of language, and the transitory nature of diasporic belonging.

Poetry as an Ethnographic Tool: Leah Zani interviews Adrie Kusserow

May 13, 2024 Interviews

ADRIE KUSSEROW and LEAH ZANI are a rare sort: trained cultural anthropologists and poets, anthro-poets. The two met while Adrie was judging the Ethnographic Poetry Prize, the world’s only prize for poetry written by anthropologists. Shortly after, they began working together on the editorial team of Anthropology and Humanism, one of the few peer-reviewed academic journals that accepts poetry.

In this interview, Leah Zani connects with Kusserow about her latest memoir, The Trauma Mantras: A Memoir in Prose Poems (Duke University Press, 2024), a collection of prose poems based on Kusserow’s experiences with refugee communities and humanitarian projects in Nepal, India, Bhutan, Uganda, South Sudan, and the United States. In this conversation, they discuss the lyricism of suffering and the role of poetry in enriching deep anthropological understandings of place.