Ten Questions

“Describe your inner vision clearly so that the reader can see exactly what you see.” —Juhea Kim, author of City of Night Birds

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Brynja Hjálmsdóttir and Rachel Britton, the author and translator of A Woman Looks Over Her Shoulder / Kona lítur við.

“Streamline. Outline. Find your center of gravity.” —Mike Fu, author of Masquerade

“You can go with intention, or you can explore where the poem leads you. Where your unconscious leads you.” —Kimiko Hahn, author of The Ghost Forest: New and Selected Poems

“Trust yourself enough to know that you don’t need to do backflips for your readers on the page. Just walk straight ahead.” —Aaron Robertson, author of The Black Utopians: Searching for Paradise and the Promised Land in America

“The orality and intimacy of the lecture bring it closer to some aspects of lyric poetry than the nonfiction essay.” —Srikanth Reddy, author of The Unsignificant

“Now, though, years have passed, and I do have more peace about my past and my process. From afar, I can finally see what I was doing, and why.” —Jay Baron Nicorvo, author of Best Copy Available: A True Crime Memoir 

“I’d love to be the kind of writer who sits down at my desk at a specific and predictable time...and write, but I’ve never been that writer. —torrin a greathouse, author of DEED.

“I treat my life as fodder for literature, so I consider living it (surviving it) as part of writing.” —Ismet Prcic, author of Unspeakable Home

“I wanted to write a book that had the potential to both delight and terrify Philip Roth.” —Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, author of Catalina

“It seems like a necessary step to figure out how to emerge from mess to order.” —Ayşegül Savaş, author of The Anthropologists