March 5, 2018 At Work An Interview with Julián Herbert and Christina MacSweeney By Lily Meyer Julián Herbert began the book that made him famous while he was sitting in his mother’s hospital room. She was dying of leukemia, and as he cared for her, he wrote what became one of the most heralded literary experiments in the Spanish language in decades, Canción de tumba (2014). An English translation of the book, Tomb Song—an exceptional work of metafiction and autofiction—is out this week from Graywolf Press. There is, certainly, no way for a reader to know how to divide fact from fiction. A tender conversation between the narrator and his pregnant wife could be invented; a wild hallucination in Havana could be the truth. There’s no way to know. Fiction or not, Tomb Song is clearly a work of self-examination. As the narrator describes his itinerant childhood, his mother’s work as a prostitute, and the fracturing of his atypical family, he seems to be looking in the mirror. And yet Tomb Song is more like “a hall of mirrors,” as Herbert said to me. Once you start seeking facts, you’ll be looking forever. I came to Tomb Song through its translator, Christina MacSweeney, whose work I began seeking out after I read her translations of another great Mexican experimentalist, Valeria Luiselli. Like Herbert, MacSweeney is devoted to voice. When I spoke with them, both told me how vital it is for them to read their work aloud. I conducted these interviews over email. Julián Herbert’s answers to me were in Spanish, which I’ve translated into English below. Read More
February 22, 2018 At Work Every Poem Is a Love Poem to Something: An Interview with Nicole Sealey By Lauren Kane Nicole Sealey’s debut collection, Ordinary Beast, is a stunning compendium of poems in which she reveals herself to be a poet who can move from the deeply personal to the mythic and historic without losing the impact of either. Her poetry belies passionate dedication, executed with grace and a quiet, simmering power. Sealey was born in Saint Thomas, of the United States Virgin Islands, and raised in Apopka, Florida. She decided to commit to a career as a poet at age thirty-two, when she began an M.F.A. at NYU. While one should not understate the achievement of Sealey’s first full-length collection with a major publisher, her presence as a formidable poetic voice has been percolating for some time. Her chapbook, The Animal After Whom Other Animals Are Named, won the 2015 Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize, and her accolades beyond that are many. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, the New York Times, and others. I met Sealey at her office in Brooklyn, where she works as the Executive Director of the Cave Canem Foundation, a nonprofit organization that has for over two decades been committed to supporting African American poets through fellowships, workshops, and a national community hundreds strong. When I arrived, the clean, modern office space was mostly cleared in preparation to host an event the next night, Walking the Walk: Poetry, Equity & Anti-Racism in the Literary Arts, as a part of their ongoing antiracism workshop series. Warm and graceful, she offered me water and we found a quiet conference room to delve into the nuances of Ordinary Beast. Over the course of an hour, we discussed sonnets, love, and how buying an orchid can sometimes be just the thing to complete a poem. She showed me photos of her dining-room table covered in clippings of poetry that she had used to construct one piece in her collection, “Cento for the Night I Said, ‘I Love You.’ ” As the pictures suggest, Nicole Sealey is a poet ardently devoted to the craft of poetry, as committed to the organization of a workshop series as she is to the literal construction a masterful cento. Read More
February 16, 2018 At Work Different Forms of Illumination: An Interview with Hermione Hoby By Emma Cline I ran into Hermione Hoby recently at a studio party in an old Greenwich Village brownstone. It was the last party before the occupants had to move out, the building already sold to its new owner. The windows were open to the January air, prosecco sloshed in plastic cups, everyone kept getting too hot so they’d go out to stand in the hallway. People seemed a little sad, a little manic, after a strange winter. There had been a vintage-clothing sale earlier that day, the unsold stock still in the studio. Hoby disappeared to try on a green silk dress in the bathroom. She emerged in the dress, looking uncertain—there was no full-length mirror, she said, so she didn’t know how it looked. We told her the dress looked great. I don’t know if Hoby did, in fact, get the green dress, but the party—someone trying on someone else’s silk dress, a strange elegiac ripple in the air—felt like a scene from Hoby’s own novel, a kind of New York night that seems to happen less and less often the longer you stay here. There are so many moments like that in Neon in Daylight, so many acutely observed interactions that kept reminding me of the dizzying stretch of time after I first moved to the city—how the streets, familiar to me only from movies, seemed to call forth a strange self-consciousness, how every interaction was colored with an intensity that was almost physically exhausting. Hoby is acutely aware of the way lives and desires overlap in this city, how selves are tried on and discarded, and she tracks the minutest shifts of feeling and mood with intelligence and hypersensitivity. Her novel follows Kate, a grad student newly arrived from England, and her relationships with Bill, a washed-up writer still coasting on the success of his first book, and his daughter, Inez, a brash nineteen-year-old who hustles odd jobs off the miscellaneous-romance section of Craigslist. It takes place over the summer and fall of 2012, though the passing of time, as filtered through the consciousness of Kate, takes on the quality of a fever. Life in the city is a kind of welcome sickness. This interview took place over email. Read More
February 8, 2018 At Work If I Can’t Cry, Nobody Cries: An Interview with Tayari Jones By Abigail Bereola Tayari Jones is the author of four novels; An American Marriage is her latest. I first came to her work through her novel Silver Sparrow, about a man and his two families—one public, one private. Jones writes about people and the trauma they carry. She unpacks what it took to get them to their current moment and what it might take for them to be able to let go of the past. I found myself enthralled by how deftly she captures the emotions of her characters. In An American Marriage, Jones introduces us to a man who has been wrongfully incarcerated and examines how he, his wife, and their families deal with the ensuing fallout. Jones renders her characters humanely, and none of them are above reproach. In conversation, it is clear that Jones thinks deeply about who her characters are and how they appear on the page, as well as how they would exist in the real world and not just her fictional ones. “Look at you, just right on time!” she exclaims when I call her. The same can be said about An American Marriage. Read More
January 25, 2018 At Work Owning Brooklyn: An Interview with Naima Coster By Carina del Valle Schorske Naima Coster Naima Coster and I met in passing in college at Yale. We had people in common, but I knew her first onstage. I remember watching Naima perform on the step team: her long braid was like flashes of lightning, but I sensed that even as she was moving, she would not be moved. This is a kind of torque I now recognize in her writing. Her debut novel, Halsey Street, remains true to the stubbornly slow pace of psychological change and to the centuries that bind us to others and to the street, to the body, and to the earth itself. But her writing also registers the sudden speed with which an event can snatch us up and set us spinning. Her craft is polyrhythmic, like the jazz she is named for. Halsey Street chronicles all the ways the machinery of gentrification gets jammed by unruly human lives. The time and place is mostly Bed-Stuy circa 2010, where Penelope Grand, an art-school dropout, has returned to care for her sick father. She’s rented a room in the renovated brownstone of a wealthy white family new to Brooklyn. Her father’s beloved record store, a neighborhood icon, has been priced out of business. His wife, Mirella, has left him, returning to the Dominican Republic, where she was born, in an overdue bid for independence. In Halsey Street, losses intersect and ramify like cracks in ice, and underneath rushes a reckoning: cold, bracing, hard to bear, yet still the sign of a new season. But calling Halsey Street “a novel about gentrification” somehow, ironically, gentrifies it via quick taxonomy. So much of what I remember from my reading doesn’t register in that description. I remember Penelope’s view from the attic window, and the obsessive sketches she makes of it in a frustrated effort to render the world as one she can desire. I remember all the ways she styles her hair. And most keenly, I remember the letter Mirella writes to Penelope: “I have learned that to be a mother is to be left behind. I did it to Ramona; you have done it to me. When you were a girl, you used to follow me around, and I did not like it. I was not fit to be followed.” Naima has taught me, in life as in fiction, that we don’t have to be “fit to be followed” in order to make way for one another. Sometimes candor is more loving than comfort. We text a lot or email, and I’m grounded by this communication and restored to my human dimensions. Cardi B would say “regular regular shmegular.” I think writing to Naima helps me feel regular about even my wildest fantasies, ambitions, refusals, and ambivalences as an artist. She reminds me that we all have them, along with blood, breath, vision. This call was taped on a Saturday morning in January between New York City and Durham, North Carolina. We were drawn together by a snap of blistering cold. Read More
January 17, 2018 At Work Sappho Eating Her Heart Out: An Interview with Megan Levad By Anthony Madrid In Karl Shapiro’s best book, The Bourgeois Poet (1964), there’s an excellent poem to Randall Jarrell. The last line of that poem goes, “I rush to read you, whatever you print.” That’s how I feel about Megan Levad. That’s how I feel, and that’s what I do. We became acquaintances years ago in Ann Arbor. She described to me the manuscript she was working on, and I remember thinking it sounded like not at all my kind of thing. I don’t remember the details, but I know it was gonna be a set of connected lyrics, orbiting some dramatic historical incident. Years later, her first full-length work came out, and it had nothing in common with the book she had described. It was a bunch of thoroughly droll and inventive prose pieces, wherein she set out to explain (reverently, discreetly, advisedly, soberly) various complex processes and ideas—without doing a dot of research. Instead, she just used her own reasoning powers and whatever information one picks up from TV and high school. The resulting humor was so much to my taste that I renewed with her on Facebook or whatever it was, and we’ve been poetry friends ever since. Now her second book is out, and it’s a complete surprise once again. But it is not merely different from the other book. It’s more like the poet has grown a new head. What Have I to Say to You (Tavern Books, 2017) is, in my judgment, one of the actually good poetry books of the last fifteen years. Best in terms of memorable lines and bold vision, and best in terms of being the kind of book one happily reads over and over. It took me twenty-nine minutes and five seconds to read the whole thing into a voice recorder. I have listened to that recording six times in the last week. I decided to ask Megan some questions about the book. Read More