Category: Interviews

Searching for Answers in the Archives of Violence: An Interview with Julija Šukys

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Buy Artifact : Encounters with the Campus Shooting Archives at wvupress.com

Interview by Justin Hargett

Sadly, mass shootings touch every aspect of our modern life, but your book specifically focuses on educational institutions. As someone who started high school the year of the Columbine shooting, and who was enrolled at a major public university during the Virginia Tech shooting, these specific tragedies still carry such a visceral, emotional weight for me. I’m curious how your own experiences in Montreal weighed on you as you researched the L’École Polytechnique shooting?

I was seventeen when the Montreal Massacre took place. I remember learning about it from the television news at home in the suburbs of Toronto. I moved to Montreal about eighteen months later to study at McGill University. Canadian culture and politics were deeply affected by those events, though, as I write in the book, diverse communities and regions had different responses to that terrible event. My generation of young anglophone (i.e., English-speaking) women understood the attack to be rooted in misogyny. We sounded the alarm about gendered violence and took part in (by then, longstanding) movements like Take Back the Night. In my first year at McGill, I joined a campus student group called “Walk Safe.” It was less political than Take Back the Night—quieter. Once a week, a friend and I made ourselves available to accompany anyone who felt unsafe walking home from campus in the dark, whether from the library or the campus bar. The idea was for students to look out for one another and to take responsibility for each other’s safety. Only in retrospect have I understood that this initiative, too, was a response to the Montreal Massacre. We young women wanted to claim our space on campus, our right to professional and intellectual ambitions, and to be safe regardless of how we looked or dressed.

Working in the archives for the Polytechnique chapter was difficult. It was, by far, the most challenging chapter to write, because I identified and continue to identify so strongly with the young women who were killed there. We were so close in age and in temperament. Like them, I too was a driven, ambitious student, exhausted by early December after a long semester of work. I remember in my bones how it felt to trudge to campus (even if it was a different campus in the same city; even if we studied in different languages) through snow, ice, and frigid winds. Reading the Montreal coroner’s report affected me deeply, as did reading Colleen Murphy’s beautiful and devastating play, The December Man.Read More »

Violence, longing, magic and loss: Claire Jimenez and Megan Howell in conversation

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Claire Jimenez—teacher, archivist, and award-winning author of the short story collection Staten Island Stories (Johns Hopkins Press, 2019) and the novel What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez (Grand Central, 2023)—caught up with Megan Howell earlier this month. 

First, Megan, congratulations on your debut collection. I love the strangeness of these stories, and how you defamiliarize violence that is often normalized by the day-to-day grind of the world: the violence between parents and children, teachers and students, between lovers, and between best friends. I want to begin with the title. So many of these stories deal directly with cruelty, and yet the collection is entitled Softie. How did you come to name this book? When did you realize that you were straddling a tension between vulnerability and brutality?

Thanks! Super grateful to see that Softie is finally out in the world.

Cruelty is definitely a huge theme in the collection. Initially, it was called “Make a Home with Sadness,” but the title’s length and abstractness made me fall out of love with it. I wanted something pithy and cute that also conveyed emotional vulnerability. When I think of the word “softie,” I imagine something malleable and sweet like soft-serve ice cream but also a lot of my characters who, because of their softness, struggle not to be consumed by cynicism.Read More »

The author of Indigenous Ecocinema describes new ways to approach Indigenous responses to climate issues

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Stephanie Foote’s Salvaging the Anthropocene series is one of our most active and provocative, offering scholarly but accessible books about daily intellectual, artistic, social, and aesthetic responses to global environmental degradation.

Introducing the concepts of d-ecocinema and d-ecocinema criticism, Salma Monani’s Indigenous Ecocinema expands the purview of ecocinema studies and not only brings attention to a thriving Indigenous cinema archive but also argues for a methodological approach that ushers Indigenous intellectual voices front and center in how we theorize this archive. Its case-study focus on Canada, particularly the work emanating from the imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival in Toronto—a nationally and internationally recognized hub in Indigenous cinema networks—provides insights into pan-Indigenous and Nation-specific contexts of Indigenous ecocinema.

This absorbing text is the first book-length exploration foregrounding the environmental dimensions of cinema made by Indigenous peoples, including a particularly fascinating discussion on how Indigenous cinema’s ecological entanglements are a crucial and complementary aspect of its agenda of decolonialism.

What inspired you to explore the intersection of Indigenous cinema and ecological issues in this book?

When I was a PhD student examining the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) controversy that had once again erupted in U.S. politics, I was struck by how little attention was being given to Indigenous voices and relatedly, film expressions, in mainstream media. Despite the fact that there were such vibrant and complex ways in which Indigenous communities were sharing their perspectives onscreen, I also noticed there was little ecocritical scholarship on Indigenous cinema. These early engagements with Indigenous cinema speaking to environmental concerns started my journey into Indigenous cinema’s intersections with ecological issues.Read More »

Sejal Shah on time, place, memory, gender, genre—and mixtapes

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Sejal Shah’s debut collection of short stories, How To Make Your Mother Cry continues the rich tradition of innovative feminist work by Claudia Rankine, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Maxine Hong Kingston. These astonishing stories about friendship and love, resilience and survival establish Shah as an exciting new voice in contemporary fiction. Jeremy Wang-Iverson and Justin Hargett asked Sejal a few questions about her work.

 The book is dedicated to the memory of five important people in your life – can you tell us a little bit about them and why you want to honor them with this book?

While working on How to Make Your Mother Cry, I mourned the passing of my uncle, Kirit N. Shah, a writer and poet who also loved to dance, and who died of COVID-19 on February 12, 2021. My uncle inspired me and always supported my interest in and love of writing. I am indebted to him for that. Exactly one year later, on February 12, 2022, my friend and former editor (she edited my first book, This Is One Way to Dance: Essays), Valerie Boyd died. As I wrote about in an essay for Literary Hub, she was the mentor I had been looking for. I interviewed Valerie for Creative Nonfiction magazine: reading this interview, “Tracing Literary Lineage,” is an excellent way to learn more about her life, work, and influences.

In one of the essays in This Is One Way to Dance, I noted, “To say their names–this is the way to keep the people you love alive.” Themes in my book include love and friendship, memory and memorials. James Wright Foley, my friend Jim, was a talented fiction writer and my graduate school classmate during the years of 1999-2002. His presence and friendship made any classroom or party better and an unsafe workshop situation more tolerable. I thought about Jim a lot while working on this book and included two of his workshop letters to me in the book itself. Jim died too soon, the first American hostage murdered by ISIS in Syria. Urvashi Vaid, the fourth person to whom I dedicated my book, was a civil rights and gay and lesbian rights activist whose life and work affected my generation and beyond. She also died at a relatively young age, in 2022. I met her many years ago and was inspired by her activism, outspokenness, and advocacy.

And finally, I was moved by the life story of Rana Zoe Mungin, a Black Afro-Latina writer and fellow alumna of Wellesley College and the MFA program at UMass Amherst. Zoe died at age thirty of COVID-19 in 2020 after having been turned away from hospitals and refused treatment twice. She is the youngest of all those to whom I dedicated my book. I was especially angered to learn that Zoe had also found our MFA program to be a toxic environment for writers of color–to know that it had continued to be this way well after my time there. Zoe was a talented fiction writer and I included her in my book, because I wanted, as with the other people to whom I dedicated the book–I wanted their names to be out there once more, for others to know their names, to say their names and to learn their stories. I hope that Zoe’s story continues to be known and that more of her words and fiction writing will eventually be published posthumously.

In your first book, the essay collection This Is One Way to Dance, your writing was described as having “a style that rejects the notion of fixed genres.” Now you have followed that up with short fiction that also defies traditional conventions. What is it that excites you about pushing the boundaries of story and genre?

I think walking alongside boundaries in liminal spaces is where I feel most comfortable. I wrote about this in This Is One Way to Dance–about boundaries and sparks: “At heart, I’m interested in self-definition and invention. I worry the boundaries and borders to see where sparks arise: they look like fireflies. We occupy space. I spin and twirl. I dwell and revel in the spaces between.” I think I’ve always been fascinated by sparks–by the edges of where one can go within a genre.

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A Conversation with Isaac Yuen

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We are thrilled to be publishing this captivating debut essay collection by Isaac Yuen ­– a celebration, through wordplay and earthplay, of our planet’s riotous wonders. Utter, Earth features odes to sloths, tributes to trilobites, and ringing endorsements for lichen. For animal lovers and readers of Brian Doyle, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, and Amy Leach, each essay of this one-of-a-kind collection combines joyous language, whimsical tangents, and scientific findings to remind us of and reconnect us with those to whom we are inextricably bound. Caitlin Solano recently spoke with the author for this Q&A for Booktimist.

How did some of your essays that were previously published end up coming together as a book?

I think there is a common voice running through the essays in the collection. The narrator who’s mulling over which creatures to invite to their next party is the one who’s trying to justify why sometimes it’s good to give up on dreams is also the one figuring out how to write stories with animal verbiage.

There’s an odd, rambling, flighty mind at work behind it all—a mind that is me but also not me—attempting to chart some type of internal cartography (or a menagerie, as they might put it) through a tangle of creature contacts and connections.

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A conversation with Terese Svoboda

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Out February 1, 2024, this fantastic new novel chronicles the sisters Roxy and Coco, two glamorous harpies—mythical bird women—attempting to outrun extinction and fix the planet by preventing child abuse, one child at a time. Action figure–worthy, for readers of Neil Gaiman and Karen Russell, this modern take on these fabled women touches on mental illness, racism, animal rights, and the rights of children. Justin Hargett recently caught up briefly with the author.

WVUP: The novel’s protagonists, Roxy and Coco, are a pair of harpies—mythical bird-women—and sisters, living in the modern world and taking revenge on child abusers. What drew you to that particular Greek and Roman myth?

TS: The origins of my obsession are over twenty years old, given that I published a poem titled “Harpies” in Treason, my fourth book of poetry, in 2002, and have a short story in draft from about the same time. The epigraph of both quote the Aeneid that mentions harpies befouling the food of Phineus, a Greek soothsayer, because he abused his children. Always looking for female muses, I was curious about these powerful creatures who were always said to be ugly and frightening and concluded that such denigration was the result of Greek patriarchy, men frightened of vengeful women.Read More »

Kristen Gentry discusses her new collection, inspiration, influences, and more

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We are pleased to publish Kristen Gentry’s debut short story collection Mama Said this week. The linked stories in Mama Said are set in Louisville, Kentucky, a city with a rich history steeped in tobacco, bourbon, and gambling, indulgences that can quickly become gripping and destructive vices. Set amid the tail end of the crack epidemic and the rise of the opioid crisis, Mama Said evokes Black family life in all its complexity. Maggie Henriksen from Carmichael’s Bookstore said about the book, “The characters contain a depth not often seen in a collection of stories, and readers are sure to be thinking about their lives and relationships long after finishing the last (tear-jerking!) page.” In this Q&A below, Gentry talks with Holly Mitchell of Vesto PR.

 What drew you to short fiction?

I gained an appreciation for short fiction in undergrad creative writing classes where I was introduced to stories by ZZ Packer, Junot Diaz, Jamaica Kincaid. That appreciation grew during my graduate study at Indiana University. I love the way characters in a short story can be sharply drawn and feel known, but the form and its economy (of language, plot, setting) create just enough mystery to leave readers wondering about the characters, the motivation for and effect of their choices, and the world they inhabit long after the story ends.

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A conversation with Erik Reece

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We are pleased to publish Erik Reece’s latest book Clear Creek: Toward a Natural Philosophy this week. This wide-ranging and boundary-defying work calls us out of our frenzied, digitized world to a slower, more contemplative way of being. Joe Wilkins called Clear Creek, “A wise, rambling book that is equal parts memoir, natural history, and philosophical investigation. . . . Readers of Barry Lopez and Wendell Berry will find much to admire here.” In this Q&A below, Reece talks with Caitlin Solano of Vesto PR.

The book takes place over the course of a year. Did your journals and notebooks come together naturally, or did you have to revise certain aspects?

The journaling down by the creek occurred pretty organically. But though the book takes the form of “a year in the life,” I actually spent ten years writing it! Not continuously, but rather when some observation or idea came to me. So there was time for some pretty extensive revision, editing, shaping.

You’ve written about your religious upbringing and thoughts on Christianity before in your book, An American Gospel. What was different about your approach for writing about it this time?

In American Gospel, I was settling scores, in a way, with family ghosts. Which I don’t really recommend. But I was also working through some mental anguish that I’d carried around for a long time. There’s really none of that in Clear Creek. Though I’m always, in some sense, writing about religion (I guess I’m a God-drunk agnostic, as someone said about Spinoza), I now very much think of Clear Creek as an unroofed church, where I’m a congregation of one.Read More »

“I hope [readers] walk away with questions—about our world, about themselves”: A conversation with Matthieu Chapman

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Matthieu Chapman’s Shattered: Fragments of a Black Life—stories from the life of a black man that offer a riveting and heart-wrenching examination of how antiblackness infiltrates every aspect of black life in America—will be published by West Virginia University Press on August 1. (Available now through our website!) Here Chapman talked with his editor at the press, Sarah Munroe.

I’m going to say up front that Shattered is not an easy read. The prose itself is fluid and accessible, but many of the experiences you relate are difficult and even traumatic, and the slivers of social and structural history and analysis you include, particularly your lens of Afropessimism, will be challenging for some (though your book helped me understand it much better). Some may consider the memoir polemical or too political, and one of the absences quotes a white editor—in an email two days after the murder of George Floyd—calling it “an angry book” that places too much import on “rage and resentment.” What is your response to that? Has it changed over the past three years? Do you see your writing, the telling of your own story, in the context of our nation, as being angry, rageful, resentful? Why is your telling necessary?

My initial response to that email was laughter. I mean, what else can you do? I don’t think the book is angry. I think it’s honest. I think it’s funny at times. I think it’s painful at times. I think it’s happy at times. But I also think it engages with topics and perspectives that white people never have to engage with unless they choose to. So when I got this comment from this white woman editor, I couldn’t help but laugh. Why did she focus on anger?Read More »

“Tenacity and persistence are requirements in writing”: Kelley Shinn talks with Kristine Langley Mahler

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Kelley Shinn’s The Wounds That Bind Us—the improbable true story of an orphan at birth who loses her legs, becomes an avid off-road racer and, as a single mother, attempts to drive around the globe in a Land Rover—will be published by West Virginia University Press on June 1. Here Shinn talks with Kristine Langley Mahler, author of Curing Season, also published by WVU Press.

Mahler: Could you talk about the importance of disability representation in literature and also the pressures that might come along with it?

Shinn: I’m a nonfiction writer, so representing the fullest scope of a human experience is an obvious goal. If what the reader reads is true about how a character thinks, reacts, is propelled through a situation, then there is an opportunity for connection.

I read The Color Purple when I was twelve. I have no obvious similarities with the protagonist, Celie, who is a traumatized slave in the American south. However, her drive and tenacity and hope under such cruel conditions were riveting to me as an adolescent. I felt her heart within my own. I thought then that if I ever had a daughter, I would name her after the brave, vulnerable, and triumphant Celie; now, decades later, my daughter, Celie, is part of the heartbeat of my debut, The Wounds that Bind Us.

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