2019 fiction alum Candace Walsh recently interviewed fiction faculty member Lan Samantha Chang for Craft Literary. Read an excerpt of their conversation below:

CW: What was it like to write an homage to The Brothers Karamazov? I noticed that women characters had a more well-developed presence in The Family Chao. And the perspectives of family members of a Chinese-American family who own a Chinese restaurant in Wisconsin allow readers to notice, firsthand, micro- and macroaggressions white individuals and mass media inflict on the Chaos and other Asian characters.

LSC: I did consult Margot Livesey’s essay on homages in The Hidden Machinery: Essays on Writing. She shared that while writing The Flight of Gemma Hardy, an homage to Jane Eyre, she had to put Jane Eyre aside for years. One of the first serious steps I took was to reread The Brothers Karamazov and take notes on the entire novel, but then I had to put it (and the notes) aside. It’s such a tremendous book; it could have scared me off from working on my own novel for years. In that vacuum I was able to gather the confidence to try to do what I was interested in doing. Pretty quickly, after I started drafting, I realized my book was going to be its own thing, get its own energy from itself. For one, the characters of Katherine, Brenda, and Alice each developed her own concerns that set them apart from their Dostoyevskian prototypes. The setting, subject matter, and characters were also obviously entirely different: an immigrant, restaurant family in the Midwest. As I became interested in their concerns as a family, I was able to bring my project into its own.

Read this interview in its entirety here: https://www.craftliterary.com/2022/02/01/interview-lan-samantha-chang/

Poetry alum Kristen Staby Rembold was recently featured in The Hopper. Read an excerpt of Rembold’s poem “The Sower” below:

The Sower

Since she spent her days as a mother will—
always with a child,

their fingers roots and she the soil—
she did as any woman would,

savored the pitch-dark
before the dawn, or after the bedding-down…

Read this poem in its entirety here: http://www.hoppermag.org/the-sower

2010 poetry alum Laura Van Prooyen was recently featured on the podcast “Poetry For All.” Hear Laura read her poem “Elegy for My Mother’s Mind” at the link below.

https://poetryforall.fireside.fm/38

Chloe Martinez, a 2009 poetry alum, recently had two poems featured in TriQuarterly. Read an excerpt of “At the Prado, Age Eighteen” below:

At the Prado, Age Eighteen

When I finally got there let’s say it didn’t matter
that on the way over as I was crossing the street

a woman offered me flowers, and I didn’t buy,
and she hit me with them, shouting, and the light
changed and I fled; didn’t matter whether Madrid 

felt cold and severe and rainy
or cold and magnificent and rainy;
made no difference, even, that on New Year’s Eve

I lost track of my friends
and wandered rain-slicked streets alone
because I was uninterested in a stranger’s 

hands on me—call me a prude, whatever,
that’s how I felt that night…

Read this poem in its entirety here: https://triquarterly.org/issues/issue-161/prado-age-eighteen