We love learning more about our contributors, and an interview seemed like a fun way to hear more about the writers and artists we publish, so we gave them a choice of questions to answer. We hope you also enjoy hearing more about the artists and their works. Read on and check out issue 24 for "Pantoum for a Long Winter" from Thomas Riley.



What was the inspiration for the piece published in the issue?
I wrote Pantoum for a Long Winter for a poetry class taught by the late poet Jeff Oaks. He gave us 3 unexcused absences for the semester to use whenever we needed them, but he warned us to save them for February. February, he said, was the worst time of the year -- the final stretch of blistering cold and early sunsets. He had been teaching for years, and he said every February, without fail, fewer students showed up to class because the month was so mentally taxing. I didn't believe him, but sure enough that February was one of the worst of my life, filled with people I didn't know how to talk to, workloads I didn't know how to tackle, and feelings I didn't know how to process. I wrote an early draft of this poem for an assignment at the end of the month and handed it in with its original title: "Jeff was right."

Who are some of your favorite writers, and what do you like about them?
I really love poetry that leans toward confessional -- very raw, honest, and grounded in their language. Richard Siken and Kaveh Akbar were early favorites of mine, the former of which is probably my greatest poetic influence. I decided to study poetry at school not necessarily to become a poet, but to ensure that any form of writing I choose to pursue will have a poetic tone to it. Garth Greenwell's What Belongs to You and Ocean Vuong's On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous in particular drew me to this concept. These novels have such beautiful and rhythmic language that it's clear they are written by people who studied poetry, and I wanted to have that same quality in my own writing.

What is your creative process? Do you plan pieces out or let them happen as they come?
A lot of my writing, poetry and otherwise, comes from a single line that I happen to like while lost in my thoughts. I have written a lot of poetry that began with me staring into space on an elevator and suddenly thinking, "Hey, I should make a poem out of that." Once I have that foundational line, I sit down in a quiet spot and build a full piece out of it. Sometimes the whole thing just spills out of me -- other times I have to constantly refer back to the one bit that I really like, using it as an anchor to pull me back into the tone I want for my writing.

What do you do in the rest of your life and how does that connect and/or conflict with your creative life?
As of writing this, I'm a senior undergraduate in Pittsburgh with far too little direction for my near future. For now, I write opinion columns for my school paper, comedy sketches for a club late night show, news stories for local outlets, and poetry for literary magazines. It's a scary time being so unsure where I'll be even eight months from now, but what's nice is it means my creative life is also the rest of my life. As a full time student, I have the great fortune of being able to spend a lot of my time pouring these strange 21-year-old emotions into many different creative pursuits.