March/April 2018 
Letting Language Shimmer: An Interview with Margaret Gibson
Edward A. Dougherty
I became uncomfortable with the word God primarily because of resistance to my strict Protestant upbringing. My parents were very literal readers of the Bible, and I found their way of thinking a very small box of a house to be in.
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Sound Thinking in Lyric Poetry
Cynthia Hogue
Words arise from our unconscious knowing (the same territory as our dreams and also as our somatic bodies) when we trust our aural intuition enough to suspend our uncertainties about what we might discover.
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Talking China with Michael Meyer
John Coyne
I always urge my students to apply for any job that interests them; you never know where it might lead, and how it might change your life.
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Lingering in the Mundane: Adjectives and Endings in the Poetry of Barbara Ras
Eric Smith
Her lines are thick with hesitations, but the poems themselves are never hesitant. Instead, they exert an almost pyrotechnic confidence, zooming and sparking the length (and often the breadth) of the page, but typically resist the wallop of one last explosive note.
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Catch and Release: Strategies of Overt and Covert Narratorial Control
Sonya Larson
Today, most authors of literary fiction prefer to imagine themselves at least partially led along by their characters’ unexpected complexities, which neither the narrator nor even the author may fully understand.
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Other Epistolaries: When the Fictive Appropriates a Nonfictive Form
Bayard Godsave
Epistolary typically refers to something that is written in the form of a letter or letters. I like to extend the term’s definition, however, to include anything presented in a written form.
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A Narrative Logic of the Personal Essay
Bruce Ballenger
Unlike many fiction writers who focus on creating stories that render experience, essayists want to both render experience and discover its possible meanings, and this requires a structure that also encourages reasoning.
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