One poetry collection, one novel. Debuts of inheritance, survival, and love.

Newfound Interviews, Autumn 2019

Diannely Antigua

A Music Plucked Out of Happiness: An Interview with Diannely Antigua

In Dominican American poet Diannely Antigua’s debut collection “Ugly Music” (YesYes Books, 2019), winner of the Pamet River Prize, one finds sources of despair, ecstasy, and sheer honesty cracked and threaded with lyrics, breath, and tears. Mothers, grandmothers, stepfathers, and lovers enter and exit the pages, while the poems’ speaker sings and shouts and whispers words of violence and love, sex and loss, grief and drowning, miraculous surrender and rescue, forgiveness and faith. Structured as a song, with verse and chorus leading to bridge and ending in outro, the collection is shaped from memory, family, and diary entries and layered with distant islands, children lost, backseats and pregnancy tests, self-love and God’s work.

Maurice Carlos Ruffin

The Dystopia is Now: An Interview with Maurice Carlos Ruffin

In New Orleans’ author Maurice Carlos Ruffin’s much acclaimed debut novel, “We Cast a Shadow,” we find ourselves in a near-future southern city, where white supremacy reigns and the process of “demelanization”—a medical procedure to remove all characteristics of blackness—has become popular. Our unnamed Narrator, a black lawyer at a white-glove firm, is obsessed with the possibility of advancement in order to afford this procedure for his biracial son. In his desperation, he strives to protect his son from racial violence, and yet, it becomes clear that he has fallen into the trap of this very same violence by pushing this “protection” onto his son… Sweeping ideas of inheritance, pride, injustice, humanity standing back-to-back with inhumanity, survival, and devotion swarm and abound in these pages. Language that flies, whip-smart and stunning, uncovers a cracked and unjust society and calls up moments of magnified family love.

Three Writers & Their Compassionate, Startling Worlds of Poetry, Essay, & Story

Newfound Interviews, Autumn 2018

Hanif Abdurraqib

One Clear and Clean Surface on Which to Dance: An Interview with Hanif Abdurraqib

Poet, essayist, and cultural critic, Hanif Abdurraqib has produced two celebrated volumes in recent years—“The Crown Ain’t Worth Much” (Button Poetry, 2016) and “They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us” (Two Dollar Radio, 2017). Collections, respectively, of poetry and essays, both walk the territory of family, friendship, and community with compassion, depth, and clarity. There is no shying away from the disparity and death that crack open these worlds; instead, there is facing them, staring right through them to what truly is and what could be. Broken bodies, broken glass, mothers’ arms, closed caskets, hunger, jukeboxes, brothers, ghosts, bullets, grieving, missing those gone and those gone missing. And inside of all this is the thought: What would it be like to look up into the stars instead of fleeing “midnight and questions that come with it”?

Nafissa Thompson-Spires

What Is a Sketch but a Chalk Outline Done in Pencil or Words? An Interview with Nafissa Thompson-Spires

Nafissa Thompson-Spires’s debut story collection, “Heads of the Colored People,” selected for the 2018 National Book Awards Longlist for Fiction, strides into the worlds of black women and men, black girls and boys, upending stereotypes and straining against the limits of the expected through a dark, provocative humor. With a Ph.D. in English from Vanderbilt and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Illinois, and as a Callaloo fellow, Tin House alum, and Sewanee scholar, Thompson-Spires infuses her writing with scholarly works, 90s pop culture, and contemporary concerns. Black culture and identity in conversation with the tensions and politics of race are angled in ways that refuse definition. Through the unique cast of characters in twelve exquisitely startling, hilarious, and at times poignant stories, questions are asked about connection, collaboration, assimilation, resistance, and vulnerability. 

Jamel Brinkley

Light, Love, and Luck: An Interview with Jamel Brinkley

In the stories of Jamel Brinkley’s expansively beautiful collection, “A Lucky Man” (Graywolf Press/A Public Space Books, 2018), selected for the 2018 National Book Awards Longlist for Fiction, fathers and sons of the Bronx and beyond try to make their way, to negotiate and understand their world. The language here is at times lyrical, always honest, revealing the reach and fascination and discomfort of the places—of the city, of the mind—in which the characters dwell. As Robert Hunsberger (Duende) writes: “Told in nine vivid short stories, Jamel Brinkley’s debut collection, “A Lucky Man,” tugs sharply at the tender threads of intimacy, race, and masculinity. Brinkley’s prose, as fierce in its vigilance as it is in its empathy, casts new light on the delicate and heartbreaking truisms of American manhood.”

Because these days we need an ANSWER...

Answer

Connie Constance

Hothouse Anniversary Album – From Sugar to the Mountain

“So take a day. Call it day one.”

These are the first lines of my first post for HOTHOUSE. Twelve months gone by, and suddenly it’s March again. In that time “The Poppy: An Interview Series” has grown into a true HOTHOUSE flower. My reason for creating an interview series – to promote writers and artists via conversation and in terms of where their artistic lives are leading – has become a reality. The plural WE of the interview, and the lone I, pouring over a collection of poetry, stories, essays or a script, a set of images, a succession of movements, thinking things through. And then the connection made when we exchange questions and responses, ideas and thoughts, discovering more than we’d imagined. Add to that another dimension, in which the interviews focus on, circle around, or flat out dive into the idea of PLACE: the spaces we occupy in our minds and art; in dreams and visions, in actuality; and geographically, where we have been, where we are going.

And inside this enormous year so much has happened. So many surprises, so much sadness, so much happiness, and some serious sigh-filled moments in between. Friends’ successful artistic endeavors; good-byes; finishing a novel-in-stories; too-good-to-be-true cocktail concoctions; a bitter-cold winter with bluebird skies; and yes, any day now, any day now… that moment of almost-spring when the forsythia buds and frost comes three more times.

And so, here we are. Again.

So let’s begin. Again.

“Take a year. Call it year one.”

Open your eyes and recall one large, laughing, amazing year! Serious celebration is called for. An open-your-mouth-wide-and-insert-cake kind of celebration! Because March 8th marks my one-year anniversary with HOTHOUSE MAGAZINE!

Since first reporting for HOTHOUSE from Boston’s snow-covered AWP 2013, I’ve posted nineteen interviews with fiction writers, poets, filmmakers, visual artists, and dancers.  Of those interviewed, all were open to and inspired by the questions and the possibilities the responses presented. They discussed endless ways of seeing and understanding the world, whether in description and dialogue, momentum and motion, from mountaintop and coastline, in multiple voices on the dismantling of DOMA, and solo on language and memory, sadness and bliss. And inside the conversations, we always came back to place, for place is where we begin, where we find our muse. And so, I wanted to recognize and thank those writers and artists for accepting my invitations and then playing along.

Every celebration needs music and so the playlist follows – the thus-far collected hits of “The Poppy: An Interview Series” – each matched with a song. I call it “From Sugar to the Mountain,” thinking of my first interview with Natalie Young of SUGAR HOUSE REVIEW and the latest with Augusta Thomson of “Nine-Story Mountain.” Turn it up loud, laugh, go ahead, have another glass, stay a while. It’s still snowing outside. Where else do you have to go?

FROM SUGAR TO THE MOUNTAIN 

– The Collected Hits of “The Poppy: An Interview Series”

AWP13: Interview with Natalie Young of Sugar House – Def Leppard – “Pour Some Sugar on Me”

An Interview with Yolanda J. Franklin – Sheila E. – “The Glamorous Life”

Andrew Lam: Language, Memory, Bliss / Andrew Lam: A Voice from the Heart –  James Taylor – “You’ve Got a Friend”

Jennifer Genest’s Worlds and Words – John Mellencamp – “Small Town”

Brooklyn’s Jamel Brinkley – Floetry – “Say Yes”

Tim Watson: A New Orleanian Now – James Booker – “Black Night”

DOMA and the Arts Revisited – with Marlene Robbins – Sister Sledge – “We Are Family” – and with David Covey – David Bowie – “Heroes”

Matthew Draughter: Vision and Voice – Stevie Wonder – “All I Do”

Sharon Millar: from Caribbean to Commonwealth – Ella Andall – “Bring Down the Power”

Brad Richard: from Aubade to Bacchae – James Booker – “Classified”

Amy Wright: In the Garden – Doug Paisley – “Wide Open Plain”

Surrealist A.W. Sprague II – Amethystium  – “Exultation”

The Gaze of Emilie Staat – Karen Choi – “Tangled”

The Coastal Concerns of JoeAnn Hart – Steve Earle and the Dukes – “The Rain Came Down”

NONTRADITIONAL: The Landscape of Homecoming – with Brian J. Hauser and Christina Xydias –Bach – “Cello Suite No. 6 v-Gavotte”

Fort Starlight: A Florida Story – with Claudia Zuluaga – Duran Duran – “Lonely in Your Nightmare”

NINE-STORY MOUNTAIN – with Augusta Thomson – Rusted Root – “Send Me on My Way”

BONUS TRACKS – with thanks to and inspiration from all those interviewed – James Taylor – “Blossom” & Pete Seeger – “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?”

Since we spoke, many of the writers and artists interviewed have received all kinds of recognition for their work. Congratulations to all! And so I asked what they felt were their greatest artistic achievements of the past year. And here is that playlist as well.

• Natalie Young comments: “Hmmm… Not shutting the magazine [SUGAR HOUSE REVIEW] down. Just kidding! I guess I feel the most accomplished about sticking to the series of poems I’m working on and getting a number of them accepted for publication. I have commitment issues – that’s why I’m a poet.”

• Yolanda J. Franklin has had two readings, one at AWP and the other at FSU for their warehouse reading series, and a publication in African American Review.

• Andrew Lam’s short story collection, “Birds of Paradise Lost” (RED HEN PRESS, 2013) won a Pen Award.

• Matthew Draughter was nominated as an American Voice in the Scholastic Young Art and Writing Competition.

• Sharon Millar writes, “My greatest artistic achievement was co-winning the Commonwealth Short Story Prize.”

• Brad Richard on artistic success: “Stumbling upon the perfect title for my next book, the title I didn’t even know I was looking for. Like the titles of my last two books, it scans as trochaic dimeter.”

• Jennifer Genest’s biggest artistic success this year: finally writing a personal essay – and having it published! And in THE DOCTOR T.J. ECKLEBERG REVIEW!

• Jamel Brinkley placed a story for the first time and what a venue! A PUBLIC SPACE!

• Tim Watson says, “Artistic success? Finishing Booker film ["Bayou Maharajah"], finding a deeper story in another film that is in progress, and unshelving another film project that has been on the shelf for 8 years.”

• Marlene Robbins was awarded an Ohio Dance Award for outstanding contributions to the advancement of dance education.

• David Covey calls his artistic achievement from this past year “surviving the renovation of Sullivant Hall [Ohio State’s Dance Department] and all the rest of the BS in the world.”

• Amy Wright had three essays accepted by journals she’s long admired – BREVITY, DIAGRAM, and KENYON REVIEW!

• A.W. Sprague II, an incredibly talented surrealist artist, and very humble, says his greatest success this past year was being interviewed by me. Thanks, Bill!

• Emilie Staat tells me that her Faulkner-Wisdom award-winning essay, “Tango Face,” was recently published in THE DOUBLE DEALER. And it’s exciting to see everyone going mad over HBO’s “True Detective,” which she worked on as the Script Coordinator.

• JoeAnn Hart says, “My greatest success would have to be the publication of my second novel, “Float“.”

• Brian J. Hauser and Christina Xydias think their greatest success of the past year was securing two tenure-track jobs in the same place, while their greatest artistic success was finishing “Nontraditional” and getting it accepted to the 2014 Bare Bones International Film and Music Festival!

• Claudia Zuluaga writes: “After eight years of revising and finally publishing a new novel ["Fort Starlight" (ENGINE BOOKS, 2013)], even with a new baby and full-time job, I’ve built enough momentum to get deep into a second novel.”

• Augusta Thomson’s biggest artistic success was completing a full-length film about Mount Kailash, Tibet – “Nine-Story Mountain.”

• And mine is, of course, this glorious collection of interviews, the music heard and stories read, and low and behold, the completion of my novel-in-stories!

*

The Poppy: An Interview Series

Four to six questions begin as pods, then burst open with answers, bright lapis, 

black-stamened, conspicuous—ornament, remembrance, opiate.

*

First posted in the ARTS section of Hothouse Magazine.

Back in September

The sky may 

be falling

but we've got

parasols. 

Go ahead, 

rain nonsense

and 

accordions.