Interviews & Reviews

DAVE FITZGERALD RECOMMENDS: Mike Corrao’s ‘Smut-Maker’ and Mike Kleine’s ‘Third World Magicks’

September 12, 2024

I was cruising down I-70 aimed at Lawrence, Kansas when I got the email offering me a regular feature here at X-R-A-Y – part of a new “Recommends” series inviting me to draw on the deep backlog of reviews I’d already contributed to Goodreads, and pair them with new pieces exclusive to this site. Naturally I was flattered, and accepted right away from my fake-fancy hotel in the heart of the KU campus, already thinking about the pleasant symmetry of the timing. That is, I was in Kansas for the Inside the Castle 10th anniversary celebration, and as fate would have it,

MIRACULOUS AND UNPREDICTABLE AND PERVERSE AND UNKNOWABLE: An Interview with Shannon Robinson by Rebecca Gransden

September 10, 2024

Primeval forces threaten to invade the worlds of Shannon Robinson’s short stories. Wild presences haunt suburbia, and folkloric figures surface as manifestations of deep-seated anxieties. For the collection The Ill-Fitting Skin (Press 53, 2024) Robinson presents normal life in all its complexity and confusion, where Mother Nature shows her claws and mythic creatures bare their teeth. This skin is pregnant with dread, imbued with the surreal, and, like a serpent, ready to shed and transform. I spoke to Shannon about the book. Rebecca Gransden: What is the story behind The Ill-Fitting Skin? When did you conceive the collection and

JESSE HILSON RECOMMENDS: David Kuhnlein

September 5, 2024

Jesse Hilson recommends…David Kuhnlein Decay Never Came (Maximus Books, 2023) The text of this chapbook is less than forty pages long but it can’t be read in a hurry. It can’t be gobbled up like a small package of black licorice. Slow down and take in each line one by one. You are now reading at the slowest setting of the necro-metronome. The book’s title is Decay Never Came, suggesting that a jump into a different, longer timescale is required to get what the poems are doing, with the risk that even then this could not be possible. A

EIGHT QUESTIONS FOR MIKE TOPP by Sabrina Small

September 3, 2024

A memory of my interview with Mike Topp, which I forgot to record, and then turned into a pseudo-transcript, at which point I solicited interjections from the artist. The first thing I tell Mike Topp is that I didn’t realize who he was. That I hadn’t done any homework beyond reading his tweets and a few poems on Hobart. I tell him his name is so gay it approaches drag, so I was picturing a young gay dude who had watched a lot of Warhol films and revered Peter Sellers in Being There, a practicing naif, a retro naif even.

TRANSMISSIONS: The Collidescope Podcast

August 30, 2024

Welcome to Transmissions, an interview feature in which X-R-A-Y profiles podcasts. Rebecca Gransden: Does the podcast have a mission or manifesto? George Salis: The Collidescope Podcast has the same mission as my online literary publication The Collidescope. The goal is to shine a light on neglected literature and celebrate uninhibited creativity. Art for art’s sake rather than something commodified and packaged for mass consumption. To quote from my site, “We love to see the mental fireworks of a writer wrestling with their imagination, with language itself.” A good deal of the stories, books, and authors on the show are those

JUSTIN ISIS RECOMMENDS – Neo-Decadence: A Wardrobe Tour

August 28, 2024

Relax, for the moment. Your enduring boredom with contemporary art, writing and poetry results not from the sirenic tug of allegedly competing media, but from the soporific stupidity/sincerity to which most artists, writers and poets have willingly reduced themselves. Is there a solution? One often wishes to fall at the foot of AI and implore: “PLEASE, dear statistical large language model, with saintly expeditiousness, render these arriviste mediocrities obsolete, financially and culturally! We’re sick of hearing their ‘raw’ and ‘authentic’ thoughts as they froth themselves into a lather of cliché over representation, compassion, empathy and all other vanities worshiped by

THROUGH DISRUPTION AND DISSOLUTION: An Interview with Daisuke Shen

August 26, 2024

The burden of foresight. With Vague Predictions & Prophecies (CLASH Books, 2024) Daisuke Shen mainlines a generation’s insecurities into fiction that is at once ephemeral and psychically probing. These are stories that present longing, whether that be for a sense of solidity, a chance at connection, or a reprieve from aimlessness. Daydreams of lost days and nightmares of days lost. Shen explores how technology melds with the human, and speculates on where consciousness might reside. I spoke with Daisuke about the book. Rebecca Gransden: The book shares its title with one of the short stories you’ve included, “Vague Predictions

I WOULD LIKE TO STARTLE THE READER: An Interview with Mike Topp

August 20, 2024

I was reading my bad poems and in between bad poems I was telling some stories and Steve said I should quit writing poems and instead tell funny stories. So I followed his advice.

CHASING THE MONSTER: An Interview with Matt Lee

August 13, 2024

Where lives the creature? The Backwards Hand: A Memoir (Curbstone Books, 2024) chronicles Matt Lee’s experience of growing up and into adulthood. Matt’s hand marked him out as different, and it is the nature of this difference, where it resides, that comes to the fore. Out from the unconscious arises the monster, but once unleashed, even a monster must live in the world. As the monster is seen, is reflected, perhaps even reconciled with, it remains powerful but also hard to pin down. In whose eyes, in what skin, does the monster live? I asked Matt if he’s any closer

TRANSMISSIONS: Writing The Rapids

August 6, 2024

Welcome to Transmissions, an interview feature in which X-R-A-Y profiles podcasts. Joe bielecki is the host of the podcast Writing the Rapids, the author of the novel Tired from Alien Buddha Press, as well as several pieces of flash fiction that may or may not still be on the internet. He currently lives with his family in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Writing the Rapids can be found at the website, Spotify, Patreon, Instagram, Youtube and X. Rebecca Gransden: How would you describe the podcast to someone who is unfamiliar with what you do? Joe bielecki: Writing the Rapids is a podcast where