Fierce, Funny, Beautiful Debuts: My Two Final Interviews at Newfound

Newfound Interviews, Autumn 2021

Chaney Kwak

The Surprise of Survival: An Interview with Chaney Kwak

Chaney Kwak’s compelling and beautiful debut book, The Passenger, (Godine, 2021), flies beyond the classifications of memoir, travel reportage, and marine history to something more intense, wry, and personal. Even the book’s subtitle, “How a Travel Writer Learned to Love Cruises & Other Lies from a Sinking Ship,” might lead one to place the story within a category, but seriously, it’s just not that simple. Kwak’s story of surviving an intense storm at sea off one of Norway’s rockiest coastlines aboard the Viking Sky, a cruise liner carrying nearly 1400 passengers, is one that reaches beyond the fury of 65-meter swells and 75-km winds into the calm, genuine understanding of what is worth living for. “The Passenger” uncovers the surprise of survival and the realization of how life might truly be lived.

Arden Levine

Her Portrait in the Poem: An Interview with Arden Levine 

Arden Levine’s debut poetry collection, Ladies’ Abecedary (Small Harbor Publishing, 2021), reveals a stunning and surprising alphabet of women. From A to Z, these are women and girls who walk with wide steps through the world; who descend and ascend mountains thick with snow, stepping-stones and stories in each stride; who sit alone in rooms, reading, ready to be transformed; who swim through a slipstream of unforgettable language. This chapbook may appear a slim volume, its cover curious, beautiful, unsettling, but the pages within reveal a population that is as feminine as it is fierce. To read these poems is to be unearthed from the typical landscapes where women have been placed, to be spun around and sent toward “unruly asphalt gardens” and into the sleep of “a chrysalis curve.”

An Artist, A Poet, Two Novelists: Four Interviews on Women, Race, Diaspora, Identity, Language, Sexual Violence, Friendship, Fragility, Beauty

Newfound Interviews, Autumn 2020

April Sunami

Black Women, Front and Center: An Interview with April Sunami

April Sunami conveys a warmth and generosity, a depth and brilliance that carry into her art. A visual artist, focused on mixed-media painting and installation, she is attentive to the world around her and to the world within. The palette she draws from is ever-expanding, whether in response to those nearest to her, the art community, or the greater Black Lives Matter movement. Her attention to black femininity and strength, and her use of oil and acrylic paints, textiles, maps, seashells, and shattered auto glass, create powerful and majestic works of art. From life-size canvases to diminutive studies, her paintings have a presence that calls forth, that summons and then demands consideration, reflection, and awe.

Eloisa Amezcua

How I Was Taught to Love: An Interview with Eloisa Amezcua 

Eloisa Amezcua’s debut poetry collection, “From The Inside Quietly” (Shelterbelt Press, 2018), the inaugural winner of the Shelterbelt Poetry Prize selected by Ada Limón, cracks open the concepts of identity, language, perspective, persona, and voice with a blend of observation, confession, reflection, and a fierce gaze on the world. There is a curious lens in these poems that creates distance and, simultaneously, invitation. Observe, but don’t touch. Get closer, but understand, the universal leans toward what is specific, private, cautious.

Hayley Krischer

Somehow We Control the Narrative: An Interview with Hayley Krischer

Hayley Krischer’s debut novel, “Something Happened to Ali Greenleaf” (Razorbill, October 2020), is a phenomenal look inside the minds of two high school girls—Ali, who has been sexually assaulted, and Blythe, who makes her way into Ali’s world with the intent of protecting the assailant. Straightforward and unflinching, the story leaps into emotional territory, traversing a landscape of best friends, high school cliques, crushes, drugs, parties, bullying, and outright sexual violence against young girls. In a voice that is searing, honest, and original, Krischer has arrived inside the world of YA novels with a topic that deserves serious attention.

Leslie Hooton

Finding Beauty and Happiness: An Interview with Leslie Hooton

Leslie Hooton’s debut novel, “Before Anyone Else” (Turner Publishing, 2020) is a story of hope and vision, reimagining spaces where we come together to celebrate meals and each other. At the same time, it is a story of restoring more intimate, fragile worlds where misfortune and happiness exchange places. Surrounded by loving, dynamic, southern men—her father Hank, brother Henry, and “best friend” Griffin—Bailey Ann Edgeworth grows into a young woman able to visualize and transform unrealized spaces into beautiful upscale restaurants, which reveal the owners’ and chefs’ individual stories. Ambition and imagination lead the Atlanta native to New York City, where success and the idea of love lead to trouble. True friends and family help Bailey find her way home, a path that reminds, as well as restores.

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.

One Poet, Two Storytellers, and Three Interviews

Newfound Interviews, Spring 2019

Maggie Smith

Memories and Re-Imagined Myths: An Interview with Maggie Smith

Maggie Smith’s poems speak of the dangers and beauty, the tragedy and sadness, and the unforgiving joys of the world. Her poems recall the past with reflection and nostalgia, while looking through a fierce lens at the present and hoping wildly for a future, with nuance and precision and the kind of rhythmic breath that runs down a spine. And they call for attention, serious attention, to the proximity of perils, hopes, fears, dreams, desperation, lost girls, unclassified stars, motherhood, home, nature, and death. Shaping her collections to deliver warnings and reminders, memories and re-imagined myths and fairy tales, Smith constructs dwellings from her words, spaces originating in nature, in domestic life, and then shakes out their meanings so that we understand so much more than the words ever intended.

Seth Borgen

Love, Word Games, The Danger of the Flame: An Interview with Seth Borgen

The stories of Seth Borgen’s debut collection “If I Die in Ohio” (New American Press, 2019), winner of the 2017 New American Press Fiction Prize, are stretched with strands of humor and sadness that surprise, that leap about, leaving the reader laughing, sighing, nearly crying, and then laughing all over again. One moment J.D. Salinger—humor edged with something quirky, unsettling, even tragic—and the next moment Eudora Welty—precision and sleight of hand balanced with a situation of unease, all lakeside on a summer’s day—the writing calls out and creates compassion and understanding. It becomes clear that no one else but this author could’ve written these characters, assigned their different measures of vulnerability and daring and kindness and confusion, as well as their circumstances. There are stylistic notes here that might recall previous writers, but in the writing they have shifted into a new narrative approach, one that is distinctive and bold. Endings become beginnings; men who have nothing in common have everything in common; borders crossed lead to a love that was there all along; the realization that what is feared lost was lost long ago. With this collection come stories that beckon and tease, that persuade and enlighten. To read them is to be astonished.

Nick White

Every Which Way: An Interview with Nick White

In his short story collection “Sweet and Low” (Blue Rider/Penguin, 2019), Nick White writes of love, trouble, family ties, and queerness, all wrapped in the heartbreak and lyricism of country songs and storytelling. Set mostly in the small towns and farmlands of Mississippi’s hill country and wide-open delta, these tales are layered with the language of the South and its complicated structures of masculinity. The reader finds herself inside a modern version of Southern Gothic, the softness of the stories here turning crystalline and then hard and brittle, as the characters contend with each other, their endings and outcomes always unexpected.

Have Many Rabbit - by Lucie Brock-Broido

On her way to the Louisiana State Penitentiary, Sister Mary Aloysius

Drove past many signs: Earthworms Here. Have Many Rabbit. Calicos

In Burlap Sacks for Free. There were wooden crosses, some upsided

From a weird wind of such flaccid heat

Through miles of nothing much—until a shrewd

Of cottonmouths braided in a knot so vast

Across the asphalt She had to stop the car.

She waited as they wound and ragged and sieged their way across

The two-lane road, and then she traveled on.

For Sale:

Rafters of Slack Turkies. Nurse-Cow’s Pail. Push hoes, malt forks, unrusted

Mangleknifes. Here is the sheriff in his hammock on his clutter-land

Not quite yet woken from his dream of herding

All the Negroes out to anywhere

But here.

Sister Mary Aloysius carried in her pocketbook

A blue transistor radio (with hymns, which lived inside) to the man

Waiting in the heat and soil of the death house in Angola not too far ahead.

The warden would, in short order, confiscate the thing.

Music, it is known, he said Stirs the emotions.

As it stirs my emotions, too.

I cannot bear to hear it anymore.

Myself, I listen now only to the sound

Of right-wing radio at home and on the roads because it quickens me,

Keeping me abroad, awake, and chary by its miscreance and gall.

From time to time a rogue joy overtakes me

And I fall off the wagon of my diagnoses (pernicious melancholias), obtuse

And unappeasable to my own warden and

My pyschopharmacologist alike. A bougainvillea-colored cloud

Stays in one quadrant of the sky.

I’ve come down with

The woolly horribles.

I have fantods, I have rabbit, I have shame, even far from here—

In the Corridor. Where I am safe and warm and white.

I have listened to the Freedom Caucus in our House

Of Lords recite by heart

The full text of Green Eggs and Ham

In the filibuster of the over and the over and the over once again.

In my nightmares all of heat and red, of the Rorshachs of their throats

In the shapes of lumpy garnet yams, I am of

My country, it is not of me.

Image from the gouache on panel painting, “Open Space,” by Larry Moore.