In our final contributor interview from Issue One, we spoke with one of our own, Carissa Halston, about her short story, Hurricane Light. 1/ Several of your stories, including Hurricane Light, deal directly or indirectly with science or math. Is this based on a personal interest in either subject or an interest in scientists and mathematicians, [...]

1/You often meld science with personal recollections in your poems. Is it natural for you to apply these learned applications to the everyday? Do you think that will change your work moving forward (i.e., will your poetry eventually make reference to technological advances as they appear)? I’m an inveterate reader. A reader of pretty much [...]

1/Your artwork in the first print issue apt is comprised of old photographs and new and your piece online is called A Reverse Chronology. Does time play a factor in how you render your work or is it just a theme for this set? Time, or at least the idea of time, tends to be [...]

1/Hungry for Color involves, obviously, a great amount of color: “all wine and iris; indigo, charcoal, and sage” However, there’s just as much color in the lines devoid of exact hues: “Flung paint slashes the surface in welts” Do you find that your poems occupy the spaces between words (that is, can “welts” stand for [...]

1/You put punctuation to novel use in both your poems, choosing to open a line with a hyphenated suffix in Cave Woman and ending with an ellipsis in Sweet Vine Bitter Grape. One lends a specific cadence to your verse, the other elongation. Tell us a bit about your choice to include these facets in [...]

1/In The Affair, your stanzas are broken up by subject: us, you, her, I. But in the final stanza, the narrator has distanced himself from the reader in choosing “the legs” as the active participant. Can you tell us a bit about this choice? It is important for a writer to be prismatic about whatever’s [...]

1/The house where we had family reunions, The fragile skin of an old woman, and A Quiet Pandemonium share similar imagery–mouths, red, references to nature and rebirth. Do you envision them as a triptych? Are there specific qualities that you hope a reader takes from each standing alone? I didn’t intend for the three poems [...]

1/Many of your poems involve purging of some refuse: inadvertent littering, sifting “through garbage,” “small pellets / thrown into the bay.” Do you choose this theme because of society’s leaning toward material excess? I think that’s very close to the mark. It’s something I’ve always been hyper-aware of in myself and society, although I didn’t [...]

1/In Were We Wireless, you employ mimicked gestures and repeated imagery–a flower stem stands in place of a cigarette, a vase becomes a dim lantern, three separate people read possibly the same book at different times. Was your intention merely to mirror settings or are these orbits insinuations that we all participate in the same [...]

1/Your protagonist, Sam, has had three fiances. Would you describe her as practical or impulsive? I know this sounds like a cop-out, but I would say both. She tends to be really impulsive about the decisions she makes but then approaches the aftermath of these decisions in a really calculated way. She agrees to marry [...]