Interviews | The Common

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Am I a Fraud? Are We All? An Interview with Aparna Nancherla

September 19, 2024 Interviews

Jennifer Acker and Aparna Nancherla talking at Amherst College's LitFest.

Photo courtesy of Jesse Gwilliam | Amherst College

APARNA NANCHERLA is in a class of her own. A writer, comedian, actor, and podcast host, Nancherla returned to her alma mater, Amherst College, for a conversation with The Common’s editor-in-chief, JENNIFER ACKER, during LitFest 2024. The two discussed her diverse creative portfolio, standup as a mode of self-expression, and her newest memoir-in-essays, Unreliable Narrator: Me, Myself, and Imposter Syndrome. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. For a recording of their full conversation and more about LitFest, visit the Amherst College website.

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.

Reaching a Pulse Point: Melody Nixon Interviews Rushi Vyas

March 11, 2024 Interviews

Content warning: This interview discusses death by suicide.

MELODY NIXON and RUSHI VYAS first met at a 2020 poetics seminar hosted by the University of Otago, where Vyas is completing a PhD in Poetics. Since that meeting Nixon and Vyas have exchanged thoughts on poetry, grief, and their own experiences of parental death by suicide as they each became new parents themselves.

This conversation distills some of those themes in relation to Vyas’ 2023 chasmic collection When I Reach for Your Pulse (Four Way Books and Otago University Press), which was a two-time finalist for the National Poetry Series and is currently longlisted for New Zealand’s Ockham Book Awards. Vyas is also co-author of the collaborative chapbook Between Us, Not Half a Saint with Rajiv Mohabir (Gasher Press, 2021). Born in Toledo, Ohio, Vyas now lives in Ōtepoti Dunedin, Aotearoa New Zealand, while Nixon lives on another Aotearoa island in Te Whanganui-a-Tara, Wellington.

No One Wore Pearls Anymore: Jennifer Jean interviews Jennifer Martelli

February 12, 2024 Interviews

One day in 2008, after not writing for almost 10 years, JENNIFER MARTELLI searched “poetry workshops on the North Shore of Massachusetts.” She signed up for the first “hit” that came up, a Sacred Poetry workshop led by JENNIFER JEAN at the now-defunct Cornerstone Books in Salem, Massachusetts. Both Jennifers bonded over poetry, parenthood, and publishing—and a great friendship was formed! They continue to write together, travel together (because Jennifer Martelli is afraid to drive over bridges, Jennifer Jean takes the wheel), and share their work.

In this interview, Jennifer Jean asked Martelli about her latest collection, The Queen of Queens, which explores the political and emotional zeitgeist of the present by probing the past in a lyrical, smart, and singular voice. Jennifer Martelli’s poetry is the self-deprecating inheritor of Sylvia Plath and Marie Howe.

Nothing You Expect: Joseph O. Legaspi Interviews January Gill O’Neil

January 8, 2024 Interviews

JANUARY GILL O’NEIL and JOSEPH O. LEGASPI have been friends for almost three decades, since the mid-90s, when they met at orientation in the beat-up lounge of New York University’s creative writing program. The two simply hit it off, bonded over brie, and shared poetics, both starry-eyed on their first venture into New York City.

January is the author of the newly minted collection, Glitter Road, her fourth book published by CavanKerry Press. Her previous titles are Underlife, Misery Islands and Rewilding. She is associate professor at Salem State University and currently serves as board chair of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP). The interview was conducted over Zoom in December 2023. Full transparency: Joseph traveled to visit January outside of Boston for a weekend in September, braving a storm that drenched New York City, and arriving three hours late. But instead of “getting to work,” they hung out as good friends do and enjoyed each other’s company, relishing in nourishment, and sustenance.

Lay It Bare: Joy Baglio Interviews Anders Carlson-Wee

October 9, 2023 Interviews

ANDERS CARLSON-WEE‘s Disease of Kings showcases a mastery of tone and voice, an uncanny ability to talk to you (reader) like a friend and confidant, while telling you the hardest truths— truths that might actually change your life, truths the world doesn’t necessarily want you to know. These poems are urgent without being demanding, confessional without being sensational, and indirectly lead us to reconsider the nuances of relationships, how our lives are structured, and ultimately the big questions of what matters most. Disease of Kings tells a fierce, uncompromising narrative, yet also manages to be deeply vulnerable and do away with pretense and artifice, embracing a primal need to “Lay It Bare,” as one of the poems is aptly titled.

JOY BAGLIO sat down with Anders to discuss Disease of Kings, touching on his impulse toward narrative, crafting vivid imagery, honing voice, and more.

Beyond Their Labor: Manuel Muñoz and Helena María Viramontes on Writing the Lives of Farmworkers

September 25, 2023 Farmworker, Interviews

Photos L-R courtesy of Manuel Muñoz and Lindsay France/Cornell University.

Acclaimed writers MANUEL MUÑOZ and HELENA MARÍA VIRAMONTES met almost three decades ago: Muñoz was obtaining his MFA in Creative Writing from Cornell University, and Viramontes was his mentor. Many novels and story collections later, the pair are still close friends. They sat down recently to talk, for the first time, specifically about their roots in farmwork. They discussed the poor working conditions and hardships, but also the ways that farmworkers find love and joy in their families. As writers, they connected over the desire to honor the wholeness and complexity of these lives in their work.