The Blog

Interview with Veteran Writers

TIR Staff

Interview with Cole Becher, author of "Charybdis" (43/1)

Interview with Katherine Schifani, author of "Pistol Whip"

Katherine Schifani

In March 2015, TIR intern Erin Marshall interviewed Kate Schifani, whose essay "Pistol Whip" won our 2014 Jeff Sharlet Memorial Award for Veterans.

EM: Could you discuss why you decided to write about your military experiences?

Philip Kobylarz's A MISCELLANY OF DIVERSE THINGS

Kerry Hillis Goff

Years ago, when I read William Carlos Williams’s collection of poems Spring and All (1923), it was the first time I experienced a poet who tried to teach people how to read his poetry in his poetry. “So much depends” is the center argument of his book-length tutorial:

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens

Pretty much, if any one of these objects in his poem were placed in a different scenario, our picture would change. That is why “so much depends.” With Williams, as with many Modernist writers who desperately wanted to be more direct, the objects inhabit a relativity. But being direct isn’t necessarily easy.

TS Eliot played around with Freud in his personas, like Prufrock measuring his life in coffee spoons.

Dejobaan Games and Popcannibal's ELEGY FOR A DEAD WORLD

Ian Faith

If you’ve been paying attention to video games at all over the last decade, you know that writing has become an integral part of the medium. Nearly every game from independent to big budget “triple A” studios, features some type of narrative, if only to justify its own mechanics. Although subject to skepticism by gamer culture, games within the so-called walking simulators genre like Gone Home and Firewatch, as well as Telltale Games’s point-and-click adaptations of The Walking Dead and Game of Thrones, are distinctly literary projects. Whether one conceives of the player as an actor within the drama articulating their desires through movement and dialogue, as a director deciding the outcomes of the plot, as an audience member experiencing the narrative, or all of the above, the literary influences on game development are obvious.

Christine Sneed's THE VIRGINITY OF FAMOUS MEN

Jack Smith

Author of two novels and story collections, Christine Sneed is a master of short as well as long fiction. It’s the inner spaces where Sneed truly excels, with a riveting prose style that captures the depths of her characters’ thoughts, feelings, and conflicted selves. The stories that make up her most recent collection The Virginity of Famous Men reveal an extraordinary range of types. Two stories revisit a theme played out fully in Sneed’s first novel, Little Known Facts: the issue of fame.

Mary Quade Wins Inaugural David Hamilton Prize for Iowa Review Alumni

TIR Staff

We are delighted to announce that Mary Quade’s work has been selected as the winner of the inaugural 2107 David Hamilton Prize for Iowa Review Alumni. This year’s contest was for poetry. As winner, Quade will receive a $1,000 prize, and her work will be published in the Spring 2018 issue of The Iowa Review. Many thanks to all who submitted their work to the prize.

Poet and essayist Mary Quade is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and the author of the poetry collections Guide to Native Beasts (Cleveland State University Poetry Center) and Local Extinctions (Gold Wake). Her work has been awarded an Oregon Literary Fellowship and three Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Awards in both poetry and prose. She is an associate professor of English at Hiram College, where she teaches creative writing, and she lives in Madison, Ohio.