MINI INTERVIEW: Twyla Hansen
May 6, 2020
How did you get started writing poetry? In the early 1980s, not long after I began employment at Nebraska Wesleyan University as a horticulturist, I enrolled in a poetry-writing class taught by the late great Nebraska State Poet Bill Kloefkorn. I had never written a poem before, but I’d read K...
MINI INTERVIEW: William Trowbridge
April 29, 2020
How did your interest in poetry begin? I came to poetry late. I was studying to be a fiction specialist. In fact, my dissertation was on Faulkner’s novels. But while studying modern poetry in preparation for my doctoral orals, I came across a Howard Nemerov poem titled “Mousemeal.” I was so...
MINI INTERVIEW: Theodore Wheeler
March 23, 2020
Your latest novel In Our Other Lives was released on March 3, 2020. What do you want potential readers to know about the book? The story is told from the perspective of an NSA/FBI investigation into a Midwestern family whose son has disappeared while working as a missionary in Pakistan and then reem...
MINI INTERVIEW: Mark Sanders
February 19, 2020
How did your latest work In a Good Time come about? Could you talk a little bit about the title? Various pathways led to In a Good Time. While the final push to publication came quickly (the book was published in September 2019), the book took about four or five years to complete. The poems were finis...
MINI INTERVIEW: Marjorie Saiser
December 21, 2019
What is your reason for writing? Or what role does writing play in your life? I write to find out, to stay green, to keep learning. Writing teaches me what I should be paying attention to. Do you have a particular time, place, or routine for writing? Early mornings are good, also at night. Afternoon...
MINI INTERVIEW: Neil Harrison
December 13, 2019
How did you get your start in creative writing? I started classes in creative writing and photography at Northeast Community College back in 1980, after deciding that sorting mail all night, six nights a week, was a pretty fair recipe for going postal. What are some of the challenges you hav...
MINI INTERVIEW: Sarah McKinstry-Brown
May 25, 2019
How did you get into writing? When I was 19 years old, I wandered into a poetry slam team performance at a coffeehouse in Albuquerque, my hometown, and was hooked when I saw the team performing a poem about New Mexico’s history of Spanish colonization, layering their voices as they chanted, “Tel...
MINI INTERVIEW: Greg Kosmicki
May 16, 2019
How has your family inspired your writing? My family didn’t exactly inspire my writing as much as it provided raw material for writing. My writing is usually triggered by or suggested by interactions with people or with other creatures. If I pay attention—and I think that nearly a hundred percen...
MINI INTERVIEW: Ruth Williams
May 6, 2019
What do you find easiest about writing? This is an interesting question since I feel like we writers often focus on the hardest aspects of writing. I suppose for me the easiest part about writing is the part where you simply write and don't edit yourself or consider the quality. Letting the words flo...
MINI INTERVIEW: David Wyatt
April 22, 2019
What inspired you to write Gathering Place? What notions appear in Gathering Place are those which have shown up in most of my writing. The fact that the book, a first, is published quite late in my writing life has for me made it a kind of selected poems, even though it's the length of a standard...
MINI INTERVIEW: Todd Robinson
April 11, 2019
How did your book Mass for Shut-Ins come about? Several years ago, Greg Kosmicki, founder and editor of Backwaters Press, said he’d like to publish my next book. I held him at bay for a time, knowing I didn’t have enough poems of note to hold a collection together, but the last four years have be...
MINI INTERVIEW: JV Brummels
April 1, 2019
How did your book [email protected] come about? I’d had [email protected] in mind for the title early on and couldn’t shake it. It went through a dozen permutations while I wrote and collected the poems but ended up back where it started. I liked the idea that it could serve as an address for me...