Bay Area native Patricia Bidar’s stories have been published in Invisible City, SmokeLong Quarterly, Wigleaf, Sou’wester, The Pinch, Pidgeonholes, and elsewhere. Invisible City editor Tanya Žilinskas talked to Patricia about her Pushcart-nominated story “The Little Jenny,” which appeared in Invisible City’s Issue 3. Spoilers follow; you can read “The Little Jenny” here. Q: How did "The Little Jenny" come about? What was the inciting idea? A: The inciting image was that of the moth …
Q: In some of Dear Memory’s sections, there are quotations by other writers that your writing responds to. What’s your process for collecting these ideas or quotes? A: Honestly, I am disorganized. Sometimes I'd just open random books around me and see something and it might spur something in my mind or I would slot it into the text I was working on. I'd like to say that I take notes in a notebook and it's organized, but there's actually a randomness about the quotes (and my life!). Q: How …
This interview took place on March 13, 2021. Randy James is the author of a debut chapbook, Shifters, published by Nomadic Press and is a recent graduate of the MFA Program in Writing at the University of San Francisco. His poetry has been published in Myriad, Westwind, Red Cedar Review, Palette, and Fem Newsmagazine. Randy has performed in venues across Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area. His work is featured in Hayat Hyatt’s “Villanelle,” which has been archived by Collectif …
Paul Beatty is the author of two books of poetry and four novels, including The Sellout (2015), for which he became the first American author to win the prestigious Man Booker Prize in 2016. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Brooklyn College. Since graduating MFA, Beatty has built a career in writing that has traversed genres of poetry, nonfiction, and fiction alike. Through unrivaled observation and understanding of both place and identity, the characters and worlds he builds are …
This interview took place on September 30th, 2020. Piñata Theory by Alan Chazaro won the 2018 Hudson Prize and is available through Black Lawrence Press. Alan is also the author of This Is Not a Frank Ocean Cover Album, an adjunct professor at the University of San Francisco, a columnist at Palette Poetry, and raising money for NBA arena workers during Covid-19. We linked up through zoom and kicked off the interview talking about baseball and basketball—their respective playoffs and the …
Only after speaking with Elena Passarello for an hour do I remember that in an earlier incarnation she was an actor. Perhaps that’s why she’s so at ease being interviewed. She seems to possess none of the stilted seriousness that so many writers like to put on when talking about their work. Tellingly, her show business past is given all the attention of a footnote in her first essay collection Let Me Clear My Throat—a scientifically girded exploration into the oddities and impacts of the …