RW: The story focuses on food and household items rather than people, is there a specific value you are trying to place on objects in household routines, maybe more so than the actual people?
DA: I was trying to prioritize objects over people, but couldn’t manage it. After the idea for SoBT was born I stuck with revising it for a couple years because I wanted to write a story without people that was still interesting for the reader.
Read MoreJohn Williams’s Stoner — which this month is celebrating its 50th anniversary with a tastefully geometric hardback edition from New York Review Books — is a quiet novel; a portrait painted in sober tones of the life of a somber, unremarkable man, a story that unfolds softly and with grace. The book treads along with William Stoner, from his birth and childhood on a small family farm in rural Missouri, to university where he is awakened to his inner life, on through World War I and the Great Depression, his years as an instructor, his marriage, the birth of his family, the destruction of it, and finally, inevitably, his death. It’s the stuff of Russian literature, and a novel that has become more necessary today than ever before.
Read MoreA surprising take on the dance of continents, Trever Ketner's poem Erode is one you're not soon to forget. He is forthcoming in Best New Poets 2015, we're just happy we got to him first.
Check out the interview between Kyle Bassett and Ketner below, then head over to The Dock for a fresh catch.
“A Man in a Monkey Suit Believes in Himself” has two settings, at least two settings, as many poems do, as stories do, and in fact as people do.
Don’t we?
It’s set in the vastness of space, of course, and it’s set on some monkey bars. But it’s also set in two different parks, two different playgrounds, and in the dreams where the night-grass and the darkened swing-sets in those parks and playgrounds mix and mingle. They swap details like lined-up chromosomes. They fail to tell themselves apart. They insist that all the crushes you’ve ever had in your life are one and the same. (They aren’t?)
Here's a mini Q and A with our poetry editor, Jackie, and Angela to get you excited. Read the piece here.
JB: The poem is based on a real event which I heard about from someone, who had heard from someone, who had heard from someone else. Some details, such as the setting, are factual: I knew what the weather was like that day and I was familiar with the creek and the dam. The omniscient speaker, I think, was born of my struggle to imagine what everyone in this unimaginable situation was feeling. Mortality and weakness were both the inevitable conclusion and discovered through the process. I think that’s why that line, “you see where this is going,” got in there—there was no other conclusion, no other way for the story to go.
Read MoreWe'll be opening submissions again on September 15th for our Spring Issue (58). The issue will not be themed so give us everything and anything with draw, kick, and quality. As always, we'll be accepting prose, poetry, translations, and visual art. The only way to submit to HFR is through Submittable (just follow the link on our "Submit" page). The staff can't wait to dig in!
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