BRIAN ALAN ELLIS runs House of Vlad Press, and is the author of several books, including Sad Laughter (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2018) and Hobbies You Enjoy (serialized daily on Instagram: @hobbiesyouenjoy). His writing has appeared at Juked, Hobart, Fanzine, Monkeybicycle, Electric Literature, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, X-R-A-Y, Heavy Feather Review, and Yes Poetry, among other places. He lives in Florida.
The guiding principle of Six Ridiculous Questions is that life is filled with ridiculousness. And questions. That only by giving in to these truths may we hope to slip the surly bonds of reality and attain the higher consciousness we all crave. (Eh, not really, but it sounded good there for a minute.) It’s just. Who knows? The ridiculousness and question bits, I guess. Why six? Assonance, baby, assonance.
JILLIAN LUFT is a Florida native currently residing in Brooklyn. Her writing has appeared in X-R-A-Y, Hobart, Expat Press, Rejection Letters, Booth and other publications. She’s currently working on a novel about Florida dirtbag romance. You can find her on Twitter @JillianLuft.
A lot of writers were in bands when they were young, but what about making music after you’ve published a few novels and are old enough for the romance of late night shows in dive bars to have dimmed? Is it something most people outgrow for a reason? A compulsion related to arrested development or midlife crisis? Or is performance intimately related to the act of writing in ways that are slow to reveal themselves?
Some books about online communities venture into the science fictional to appropriately describe the goings-on there. Others, from Dennis Cooper’s The Sluts to Elle Nash’s Gag Reflex, adopt the styles and formats of certain online spaces. Cat Fitzpatrick’s novel The Call-Out also wrangles with questions of online discourse, but is likely the only novel to do so while also being written in verse. I spoke with Fitzpatrick on an autumn morning to discuss her novel, art forms, and the excellence of New Jersey.
AMY LONG is the author of Codependence (2019), selected by Brian Blanchfield as the winner of CSU Poetry Center’s Essay Collection Prize. Her work has appeared in Diagram, Ninth Letter, Hayden’s Ferry Review and elsewhere, including as a Notable Essay in Best American Essays 2019. She also runs the popular Instagram account Taylor Swift as Books.
To read Death and Exes, the new collection of poetry from Sarah Bridgins, is to grapple with emotions that don’t often come in such close proximity. As its title suggests, the poems within wrangle with questions of mortality and relationships, but they also abound with unlikely pop culture references and dizzying shifts in mood. I spoke with Bridgins to learn more about the collection’s origins and to zero in on some of the imagery that she uses in her work.
The guiding principle of Six Ridiculous Questions is that life is filled with ridiculousness. And questions. That only by giving in to these truths may we hope to slip the surly bonds of reality and attain the higher consciousness we all crave. (Eh, not really, but it sounded good there for a minute.) It’s just. Who knows? The ridiculousness and question bits, I guess. Why six? Assonance, baby, assonance.