Interviews

Interview with Ottessa Moshfegh

Mon, 08/10/2015 - 9:49am

James Yu

Ottessa Moshfegh's allergy toward self-promotion makes her rise all the more impressive. The recipient of the Stegner Fellowship, a National Endowment of the Arts grant, and the Fence Modern Prize in Prose, she has in the last few years become something of a house writer for The Paris Review.

Before she deleted her Twitter account, her avatar was not a professionally burnished headshot of the kind gracing the dust jackets of debut novelists but a medical illustration of three pairs of eyes, each depicting a condition known informally as lazy eye. It is a nonstandard choice for an avatar and seems to capture the forthrightness of Moshfegh's work, in which characters use colostomy bags and have genitals swollen due to pituitary situations, who think mean thoughts and make morally ambiguous decisions.

A Conversation with Kerry Howley, author of Thrown

Thu, 04/02/2015 - 9:20am

Alea Adigweme

Kerry Howley is the author of Thrown, a book-length essay recounting three years she spent following a pair of Midwestern mixed martial artists. A graduate of the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa—where she was also the Provost’s Visiting Writer in Nonfiction in 2012 (and my colleague)—her work can be found in Harper’s, The Paris Review, The New York Times and Bookforum. Howley, who teaches creative writing at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, will head to Iowa City for Mission Creek.

Z Is for Zombies: A Conversation with Bennett Sims

Tue, 08/13/2013 - 12:00am

Derek Heckman

Bennett Sims was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and received his MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His stories have appeared in A Public Space, Tin House, and Zoetrope: All-Story.

His debut novel, A Questionable Shape (Two Dollar Radio), has been called “addictively engaging” by Benjamin Hale and was said to announce “a literary talent of genre-wrecking brilliance” by Wells Tower.

Bennett was my fiction teacher this past spring, and when I finished reading his novel, I invited him to stop by the Iowa Review office to talk books, movies, and undeath.

 

HECKMAN: To get all the uninspired preliminary questions out of the way, I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about yourself as a writer, your history with writing, influences, etc.

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