THOMAS MIRA Y LOPEZ is the author of The Book of Resting Places (Counterpoint 2017). His work has appeared in The Georgia Review, The American Scholar, and The Kenyon Review Online, among others. He is an editor of Territory, a literary journal about maps, and currently the Kenan Visiting Writer at The University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill. Jon Riccio:
Category: Interviews with Writers
What is it about the genre or cross-genre you write in that interests you/draws you in? A lot of poetry can be stuck inside an echo chamber of self-admiration. That doesn’t interest me very much as a reader. But poetry is intensely appealing when it is able to draw in a constellation of multiple disciplines,
What is it about the genre or cross-genre you write in that interests you/draws you in? Fiction is just a quilt of all our own life experiences. It’s the truths we know thinly veiled as someone else’s reality. What I like about writing fiction is the details are malleable; they can be used to frame
What is it about the genre or cross-genre you write in that interests you/draws you in? The way that words have heft and feel and how such heft and feel can be arranged into a little world through a mouth. How does this published piece fit in with the larger thematic concerns that you see
What is it about the genre or cross-genre you write in that interests you/draws you in? I’m drawn to how a poem is an act of compression — that is, how an experience or a statement can be compressed into essential parts. When a poem breathes, all those parts — and only those parts —
