Emma Fricke Nelson on Northwest Review

An Interview with Xuan Juliana Wang

Wed, 07 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000

In her 2019 interview with the editors of Advice to Writers, writer Xuan Juliana Wang shared, “Live an interesting life, walk around, notice things and people and be open to them. Don’t be afraid to be different. Write to what is aching from you at this very moment.” From the fires that raged across the west to quarantine and beyond, there have been countless moments over the last year that have certainly left us reeling, searching for words to describe the unspeakable. In May, she beautifully brought her experience to the pages of Northwest Review, sharing about what it’s like to be a writer living in LA, new motherhood, adapting her short story collection, Home Remedies (Penguin/Random House, 2019) for television, and how she believes in the power of stories to inspire real progress and change.

An Interview with Kate Baer

Fri, 13 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Since her poems “On the Evening of Her Birth” and “Deleted Sentences” went viral in 2019, Kate Baer has created a digital community of loyal readers, deeply empathetic and highly engaged. Writing with frank humor and searing honesty, Kate dives into the beauty and struggle of what it means to be a lover, woman, mother, and poet. We interviewed Kate via Zoom in late August of 2020. She joined us from the parking lot of the coffee shop where she escaped, pre-pandemic, to write. In these times of uncertainty, it is refreshing to connect with someone as open and thoughtful as Kate. We sat down with her to cover all the basics — Amish romance literature, cigarettes, emerging writers that inspire us, aesthetics, and what it means to create art within the voyeuristic world of social media. Kate Baer is the author of What Kind Of Woman, her debut book of poetry, published by HarperCollins, November 2020.

An Interview with J. Nicole Jones

Mon, 15 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Ghosts are whispering to those willing to listen, and writer J. Nicole Jones is listening intently. From the beaches and inlets of her native South Carolina, to railroad apartments and townhouse stoops of New York City, she’s collected the stories of spirits who yearn for reconciliation. In her forthcoming memoir, “Low Country” (Catapult, April 2021), her own family history is inextricable from these ghosts and their haunts. Here, we spoke with Jones about superstition, country music and why she set out to write her ghosts better endings.

An Interview with Sara Nović

Wed, 07 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000

In this interview, author, translator, and creative writing professor Sara Nović discusses how she navigates the agency of form, the inclusion of d/Deaf characters in literature for hearing-centric audiences, and how she is joining with other d/Deaf writers to push publishing gatekeepers toward authentic representation. Sara is the author of Girl at War (Random House, 2015) and America is Immigrants (Random House, 2019). She is also working on a memoir and the forthcoming work, True Biz (Random House).

An Interview with Kate Baer

Fri, 12 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

We spoke with poet Kate Baer in the summer of 2020, mere weeks before the release of her debut book What Kind of Woman was published to immediate critical and commercial success. The book was a #1 New York Times Bestseller. Now, a year later, we connected with Baer again via email less than a month before the publication of her second book, I Hope This Finds You Well, which marks a powerful, dramatic pivot in the poet’s work. The left pages in the text feature unsolicited emails the poet has received in response to her social media presence and subsequent success as an artist. On the right side of the book, Baer has “erased” selective words and phrases leaving only her own creation: spare, evocative poems, drawing exclusively from bigoted, hateful, misogynistic emails people have emailed her “out of the blue.” She has, then, created art of ugliness; she has sublimated expressions of malice into triumphant moments of peace.