Issue #33

I seem to always find myself thinking and writing about people who are confronted by the gap, the terrible gap, between who they really are and who they wish they could be, who they thought they would be at a point in their lives.—Mark Salzman, interviewed by Linda B. Swanson-Davies

All of these things, and many others, feed into my writing. You read, you think, you stare out the window, things happen.—Beverly Lowry, interviewed by Stephanie Gordon

I want my work to have an organic organization, to feel and appear to the reader as if it opens out of itself like an organic thing, like a flower or a piece of fruit. So, I don’t make decisions about it at the outset. I try to take my cues from the work itself, because if I make decisions, I’m going to limit what I can do.—Jayne Anne Phillips, interviewed by Sarah Anne Johnson

I like sentences that have their own contradiction—not just qualification—but sentences that may begin in one place and seem to be saying one thing, but they go on to discover quite the opposite. That’s the way the world works.—David Malouf, interviewed by Kevin Rabalais.