Behind the Masthead: Kevin Lichty
Our new special projects editor, Kevin Lichty, discusses top secret plans, old radios, and Toy Fox Terriers.
Shelby Heinrich: Special projects editor sounds like a very interesting and important title. What exactly does this title entail?
Kevin Lichty: The special projects editor is job made and remade every year. Essentially, any idea that an editor has (as an individual or as a collective "editors") that falls outside of the traditional pages of HFR and everyone loves, it is the special project editors job to make that idea happen.
SH: Are there any “special” projects for HFR in the works right now that you are particularly excited about?
KL: I have two top secret projects I will be working on over the summer that will reach out to our community (both local and digital) and ask for active engagement and participation. I hope everyone will love them.
SH: How would you describe HFR to someone who knows nothing about it?
KL: HFR is a literary magazine that is all about play, but serious play, the kind of play you engage in when you are trying to, say, break the unified field theory, or discover the immortal incandescent light bulb, or develop a new calculus for macroeconomics. That's the kind of serious play HFR's contributors engage in with their language and form and content.
SH: What forms of writing do you personally like to create (fiction, poetry, lyrics, hieroglyphics etc.)? What other forms of creation do you enjoy?
KL: I am a storyteller, which usually means I work in prose, but not always (like 90 percent prose). I was a street musician in South Florida for awhile, which in itself is a form of constant (re)creation. When I was a kid, I used to tape a radio show with my younger brother. We had this old radio that somehow had a microphone built into the speakers and so we'd talk into this old radio and record songs by holding one speaker up to the other and use these old cassette tapes my dad had and gave them out to our friends. It was like an annotated mixed tape but with these horrible conversations and bad skits just sort of wedged in there.
SH: What is your spirit animal?
KL: Right now, it is probably my Toy Fox Terrier, Saydee, because she plants herself on my shoulder when I'm watching TV or reading and watches vigilantly with her giant ears and her giant eyes and snaps at anyone who tries to take her off that perch.