David Bowen: Your novel, Challenger, is centered on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, named by the 9/11 Commission Report as “the principal architect of the 9/11 attacks.” Why this story? What drew you to approach this novel from his perspective? M. C. Armstrong: I think the novelist needs to find that thin line between “sympathy for the devil” […]
Interviews
Alan Heathcock interviewed by Okla Elliott: Never Not a Writer
Alan Heathcock’s fiction has been published in many of America’s top magazines and journals, including Zoetrope: All-Story, Kenyon Review, VQR, Five Chapters, Storyville, and The Harvard Review. His stories have won the National Magazine Award in fiction, and have been selected for inclusion in The Best American Mystery Stories anthology. VOLT, a collection of stories published by Graywolf Press, was […]
Helen DeWitt interviewed by S. P. MacIntyre: Experimental, Interstitial, and Hybrid
My father once told me that movies like Blazing Saddles or The Producers just simply could not be made anymore. Try pitching something like “Springtime for Hitler” for the first time to a movie exec and see how well it goes, even if they are willing to do a remake of The Producers. Might as well call your pitch “The […]
Jorge Volpi interviewed by Okla Elliott: WAYS OF EXPLORING THE WORLD (english/spanish)
The following interview took place in Spanish via email between April and June 2010. English translation: Jorge Luis Volpi Escalante was born in the tumultuous year of 1968, in Mexico City. He studied law and literature at the National Autonomous University of Mexico and received a PhD in Spanish philology from The University of Salamanca […]
CLOUD CULT interviewed by Raul Clement:TEN QUESTIONS
Interviewer’s note: the following interview is the first in a series I will conduct with various indie rock bands of political, artistic, and literary merit. “Ten Questions” will be the series title, as I hope to keep these interviews suitably brief for an online format. Based out of Minneapolis, Cloud Cult formed in 1995 as the […]
Christopher Spranger interviewed by Randall Radic: SPRINGING INTO SPRANGER
Christopher Spranger aphorizes. And he does it quite well. A few of the more famous dead aphorists are E.M. Cioran, Joseph Joubert and Karl Krauss. Christopher is their equal, and, in my humble opinion, their better. Cioran can be depressingly morbid, Joubert often verges on the flighty and Krauss gets bitterly snarky. On his part, Christopher […]
Dan Venne interviewed by David Bowen: AFTER COUGAR’S LAW an interview with Cougar’s epic-emergency post-rock guitarist
The jamchild of guitarists Dan Venne and Trent Johnson, drummer David Skogen, bass player Todd Hill, and electronicist Aaron Slater, Cougar crawled out of a cold Madison, Wisconsin, basement in 2003. The band’s epic-emergency post-rock stylings have since traveled across the country and overseas. In 2007, they toured the US and Europe with their debut […]
Craig Nova interviewed by Raul Clement: A SORT OF OFFICIAL SILENCE
The author of eleven novels, Craig Nova has been lauded by critics and fellow writers and has received numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship. His writing is remarkable for its linguistic precision and attention to structure. But he is far more than a writer’s writer—his plots are engaging and often employ elements of genre to […]
GNOMIC SAVIORS: EDITORS ON EDITING – HOW CAN LIT MAGS INCREASE READERSHIP?
Okla Elliott: Since one of my goals for doing this editors forum is to promote literary journals and hopefully garner subscriptions for the journals involved here and others, could you discuss what you think editors and writers could be doing to increase readership of literary journals? For example, one tactic I’ve used is to require workshop […]
GNOMIC SAVIORS: EDITORS ON EDITING – WHAT IS THE PLACE OF POLITICS IN LIT MAGS?
Okla Elliott: Since we’ve hit economics and corrective missions, it might be appropriate to talk about the place of politics in literature. It strikes me that American authors are so often unwilling to engage with anything political, whereas European, Latin American, and African authors do so almost constantly. I’ve even gotten the sense from many writers […]
