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.

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.

New Voices: The Weight of Words & The World of Aftermath

Newfound Interviews, Spring 2018

C. Morgan Babst

Everything, Even Love, Even Home: An Interview with C. Morgan Babst

Lush with the scents of ligustrum, a fallen magnolia, an evening breeze off the Mississippi River, New Orleans author C. Morgan Babst’s debut novel, “The Floating World,” sings the world of aftermath—of devastation, desire, the city’s dead. Here is the city of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, above and beyond the ruptured levees, inside the psyche of a family wrought with longing and despair at the sight and reek of their drowned home. The five members and three generations of the Boisdoré family reveal this story in ribboning, intersecting storylines, emphasizing the truth of the novel’s epigraph from Virgil’s “Aeneid”: “Each must be his own hope.”

Hilary Zaid

The Weight of Silence, The Weight of Words: An Interview with Hilary Zaid

Bay Area author, alumna of Harvard, Radcliffe, and UC Berkeley, Hilary Zaid surprises, and her debut novel, “Paper is White,” is indeed an astonishing and successful surprise. Balancing weighted subjects with blue skies and beautiful slices of cake, with wedding arrangements and secret encounters, Zaid measures out humor with generosity, hope with passion, even grief with impossible understanding. Through narrative spun in first person, lead character and heroine Ellen Margolis finds her way in late 90s San Francisco, where elderly Holocaust survivors reveal their stories, relationships grow close and become divided, and the past lies like a wedding veil across the future.

Inside Other Worlds: Women Writing of Place, Belonging, and Exile

 Newfound Interviews, Spring 2017 Issue, Other Worlds

Sherrie Flick

Quiet Glory, Crouching Shadows, Little Wish: An Interview with Sherrie Flick

Award-winning fiction writer, food writer, freelance writer, and copy editor, Sherrie Flick is the author most recently of the short story collection “Whiskey, Etc.” (Queen’s Ferry Press, 2016). Gardens, women, and music made wild; places and prospects made uncomfortable, but where one wants to linger; pie and tea and bourbon; cruel women who like men, but prefer solitude; dogs and cats and possums; moments, moods, couples, desire, and loneliness—these and more infuse energy and attitude into the 57 stories of “Whiskey, Etc.”

Margo Orlando Littell

The Quiet Power of Small-Town Stories: An Interview with Margo Orlando Littell

Margo Orlando Littell’s debut novel, “Each Vagabond by Name,” is an Appalachian tale of longing and loss, belonging and isolation, desperation and deliverance. Its characters confess the truth of life in the small coalmining town of Shelk, Pennsylvania, their simple, hardworking existence threatened by a band of thieves who have pitched camp in the nearby hills. Zaccariah Ramsy, Vietnam veteran and local bar owner, and Stella Vale, librarian and Ramsy’s once-and-eventual lover, establish the novel’s tone as townspeople who remain outside the spoken and unspoken rules of what it is to belong and not belong.

Anne Raeff

Landscape of Exile, Imagination, & Memory: An Interview with Anne Raeff

Winner of the 2016 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, Anne Raeff’s “The Jungle around Us” is a collection, honest and rare, its quietude and intimacy leading to unspoken, unforgotten places where insects roar, sirens sound, and “scratchy, old 78s” play. It is clear the author cares deeply about the characters in these stories. To read this collection is to be immersed in their lives, to become caught up in their thoughts and actions, their climates and countries, their memories and dreams.

Swing Time

"When the music changes, so does the dance." - Hausa proverb

The epigraph of Zadie Smith's novel SWING TIME could be describing the present American political climate, especially with the book's release date exactly a week past the 2016 Presidential Election. The music has indeed changed, as has the dance. Unstable, swinging, shifting times are these. Losing oneself in the words of a novel, between bouts of activism, is what many of us are trying. Escapism? Perhaps. But it's really more like delving into further understanding of how race and difference, compassion and understanding, anger and uprising, problems and resolutions are defined in literature. 

There are so many books by authors of beautifully distinctive backgrounds that call us to read and further understand our world: Colson Whitehead's THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD; Viet Thanh Nguyen's forthcoming story collection, THE REFUGEES; Celeste Ng's EVERYTHING I NEVER TOLD YOU; Michael Chabon's MOONGLOW; Louise Erdrich's LaROSE; Ann Patchett's COMMONWEALTH; Edwidge Danticat's CLAIRE OF THE SEA LIGHT; Alexander Chee's THE QUEEN OF THE NIGHT; Helen Oyeyemi's WHAT IS NOT YOURS IS NOT YOURS. And on and on. Read, my friends. The time is now, shifting and swinging beneath us. Ground yourselves in meaningful words and then shout to the heavens all that you have learned.