ArtSake

This is one in a series of demurely brief interviews with participants in the Commonwealth Reading Series.

Lisa Olstein read in the series two years ago, after receiving a 2006 Poetry Fellowship. But along with being a past fellow (and current wonderful poet), she’s also the associate director of Juniper Initiative for Literary Arts & Action, one of the co-sponsors of this year’s series.

She took time from her duties at Juniper Initiative, the MFA Program for Poets and Writers at University of Massachusetts-Amherst, and the wild and infinitely variant universe of poem-making, to nano-interview with us.

MCC: What’s new and exciting at Juniper Initiative these days?

Lisa: We’re gearing up for this year’s annual literary festival (April 24 & 25) which will celebrate the Massachusetts Review’s 50th anniversary with two days of readings, performances, and a journal and book fair. Readers will include Yusef Komunyakaa, Marilyn Hacker, Christian Hawkey, Lucy Corin, Thomas Glave, and others. And, we’re happily processing applications for this June’s Juniper Summer Writing Institute, a weeklong program (one for adults, one for high school aged writers) of poetry, fiction, and memoir workshops, along with readings and craft sessions. Faculty and writers in residence include Mark Doty, James Tate, Lydia Davis, Dara Wier, Charles D’Ambrosio, Paul Lisicky, and other amazing writers.

MCC: How do you balance your duties at Juniper and the MFA Program with your writing career?

Lisa: Ideally: carefully, and with joy. Realistically: like an amateur circus performer juggling flaming hoops in a tiny car. . .

MCC: What are you working on these days, writing-wise?

Lisa: Poems that, hopefully, will make up my third collection. My second book of poems, Lost Alphabet, will be out this June.

MCC: What writer do you most admire but write nothing like?

Lisa: Li Po (she says with conviction).

MCC: Computer, longhand, or typewriter?

Lisa: Longhand on random slips and scraps to jot down passing phrases, then computer for the real deal, such as it is.

MCC: Do you secretly dream of being a) a pop icon, b) an algebra teacher, and/or c) a crime-solver/writer a la Jessica Fletcher?

Lisa: d) dolphin trainer, of happy, cage-free, entirely fulfilled human- and trick-loving dolphins.

MCC: How many revisions does your work typically go through?

Lisa: Anywhere from none (a rare and delightful occurrence) to dozens.

MCC: Do you ever revise your work on the spot during live readings?

Lisa: I really try not to, but occasionally a word here or there.

MCC: Please revise the following sentence:
Though every muscle in his body urged him not to, Sanderson crept toward the tinted windows of the gray-green Caprice.

Lisa:
Sanderson crept.
Every muscle, urge him
toward caprice. Urge him
forward toward windows
tinted grey-green in the body.
Urge him not to.

The next event in the series takes place Wednesday, February 25, 2009, 7 PM at Forbes Library in Northampton, featuring DM Gordon, Liz Hughey, Bill Peters, and Michael Teig. Event co-sponsored by Mass Humanities. Read about all of the events in the Commonwealth Reading Series.

Lisa Olstein is the author of Radio Crackling, Radio Gone (Copper Canyon Press, 2006), which won the Hayden Carruth Award, and of Lost Alphabet (2009). A recipient of a Pushcart Prize, as well as fellowships from both the Massachusetts Cultural Council and the Centrum Foundation, Olstein has been widely published. She presently serves as associate director of the MFA program at the University of Massachusetts and is a cofounder of the Juniper Initiative for Literary Arts & Action.

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This is one in a series of “less is more”-style interviews with participants in the Commonwealth Reading Series.

The fourth Commonwealth Reading Series event takes place on Tuesday, February 17, 8 PM, at Amherst Books. The reading is co-sponsored with the Juniper Initiative and the literary journal jubilat – whose managing editor, Jessica Fjeld, generously agreed to hit pause on her editing and writing work just long enough to nano-answer a few questions.

MCC: What’s new and exciting at jubilat these days?

Jessica: Our fifteenth issue came out last month, and we’re hard at work on sixteen, which will feature a forum on experimental African-American poetry that everyone here is really excited about. Since issue 14, we’ve been working with guest editors Cathy Park Hong and Evie Shockley, both of whom I admire as poets, and I appreciate what they’ve brought to the magazine’s editorial vision. jubilat is in many ways a collaborative project–that’s the way Rob Casper, the publisher, wants it to be, the product of a conversation rather than an autocrat–and it’s fascinating to watch the magazine quietly shape-shift, issue to issue.

The other thing we’re working on is planning our tenth anniversary year, which will be 2010. There will be a bunch of great events and other exciting (if top-secret at present) stuff.

MCC: What’s the main thing a writer submitting to jubilat needs to keep in mind?

Jessica: It gets said over and over, but please read our magazine before you submit. A sample copy costs less than most sandwiches. You can order it online and I will mail it to your house for free. If you’re engaged by what you find, and feel some commonality with the work we’ve published before, then odds are your work is a good fit for us.

MCC: Who wins the poets vs. prose writers paintball war?
Follow-up: and how would editors fair*?

Jessica: [* as an editor, I have to say: you mean "fare"!] This is a tough one. Prose writers are definitely capable of the long slog, really putting in the hours, but then the poets by contrast would be light on their feet, maybe more adaptive. But the organizational skills that make someone a good editor–following up on all the little details while keeping a bigger picture in mind–probably bode well for paintball too. I think a tight guerilla team of editors could take everyone out.

MCC: How do you balance your duties at jubilat with your writing?

Jessica: Maybe it’s because I read O’Hara’s Lunch Poems at too young an age (if such a thing is possible) but to my mind, the ideal time to write a poem is a lunch break. I like the defined window of time, and also the opportunity to take my brain out of operating at one gear and let it shift thoroughly into another. I also get to read a lot at work, both poems for our magazine, and books and magazines that are sent to the office–it’s part of my job to keep up with independent publishing. So in many ways, being in the office and attending to the magazine’s well-being complements my writing life well. Other days, though, I’m glad I work half-time and that I have long hours to myself at home, at my own desk.

Jessica and jubilat, along with the Juniper Initiative, are co-sponsors of a reading at Amherst Books in Amherst, MA on Tuesday, February 17, 2009, 8 PM, featuring Noy Holland, Caroline Klocksiem, Elizabeth Porto, and Susie Patlove. Read about all of the events in the Commonwealth Reading Series.

Jessica Fjeld is the managing editor of jubilat. Her chapbook, On Animate Life, was selected by Lyn Hejinian to be published by the Poetry Society of America in 2006. She lives in Northampton, Massachusetts.

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This is one in a series of flash interviews with participants in the Commonwealth Reading Series.

So far, we’ve had three superb events in the Commonwealth Reading Series and 12 nano-interviews. And with two more readings to go, poet Caroline Klocksiem makes it lucky 13.

Caroline, who reads at Amherst Books on Tuesday, February 17, 8 PM, is a poet, literary journal editor, and the first artist to appear on this blog (to my knowledge) equally conversant in the criminal and the liminal (with training in forensics and poetry, respectively).

MCC: What are you working on these days?

Caroline: Pretty much what every writer’s working on… creating one manuscript while looking for a publisher for another. I’m also working on my push-up and bowling form.

MCC: What writer do you most admire but write nothing like?

Caroline: There’s probably a ton of correct answers, but right now I’m thinking Miklos Radnoti. He’s long been one of my favorites, but I don’t believe anyone would read my poems and then think, “ah, she’s read Clouded Sky a dozen times!” I’m amazed at his complicated relationship with language–as a means of witnessing and testament, survival, hope, re-making, escape… there’s this wonderful “nothing to lose” quality that makes his work such a privilege to read.

MCC: Whats the most embarrassing sentence/line of poetry youve ever written?

Caroline: I don’t know, but I suspect they are plentiful, and involve words like “cerulean” and “zephyr.”

MCC: Computer, longhand, or typewriter?

Caroline: Hybrid.

MCC: Do you secretly dream of being a) a pop icon, b) an algebra teacher, and/or c) a crime-solver/writer a la Jessica Fletcher?

Caroline: C! In college, I was the only poet in my forensics class.

MCC: Do you ever revise your work on the spot during live readings?

Caroline: Not on purpose.

Caroline joins Noy Holland, Elizabeth Porto, and Susie Patlove for an event at Amherst Books in Amherst on Tuesday, February 17, 2009, 8 PM.. Co-sponsored by jubilatand Juniper Initiative. Read about all of the events in the Commonwealth Reading Series.

Caroline Klocksiem grew up in South Carolina, studied Creative Writing at the University of Tennessee-Chattanooga, and received an MFA from Arizona State University. In addition to a Massachusetts Cultural Council fellowship, she has received a Swarthout Award and a grant from the Arizona Arts and Letters Commission for her writing. She teaches college English and co-edits the online literary magazine 42opus. She thanks Drunken Boat, Spinning Jenny, Hotel Amerika, and Slurve Magazine for publishing her most recent work.

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This is one in a series of hyper-efficient interviews with participants in the Commonwealth Reading Series.

AGNI is co-sponsor of an upcoming reading on Tuesday, February 10, at 7 PM at Porter Square Books in Cambridge. William Pierce (left) is the journal’s senior editor.

Editing, it seems to me, is a generous occupation. As both an editor and a writer himself, Bill is (you’d have to think) too busy to answer even the most nano of questions. But with characteristic generosity, he has.

MCC: What’s new and exciting at AGNI these days?

William: I guess two kinds of “new” dominate the lit mag business: the kind that feeds us as readers and the kind that qualifies as “news.” What keeps us goingwriting that makes us jump to accept it. A story by Valerie Vogrin in the spring issue feels like the best kind of response to the emergency of these bizarre timesit’s proof that imaginative writing is still the answer. Then there’s news. In recent issues we’ve published our first music CD and a film on DVD, and the spring issue sports a color fold-out, which we’ve never tried before.

MCC: What’s the main thing a writer submitting to AGNI needs to keep in mind?

William: Rather than mere competence and polish, we look for sentences that only one person could have written.

MCC: What writer in history would you refuse to publish, were he/she to submit to you today?

William: Frank Norris.

MCC: How do you balance your duties at AGNI with your writing?

William: I reassess and rebalance all the time, trying to keep the magazine from taking over. But editing feeds my writing. For me the conflict is all about schedule, nothing more fundamental than that.

MCC: What’s the most embarrassing sentence/line of poetry you’ve ever written?

William: I wrote once that a character’s tired legs felt like ground meat and rubber bands. I was young, what can I say?

MCC: What are you working on these days?

William: I’m nearly finished with the draft of another novel. My first threeone written in those rubber-band days (senior year of high school)occupy a closet of great distinction.

MCC: What writer do you most admire but write nothing like?

William: Edith Wharton. She has a kind of memory and sensibilityand knowledgethat I would love to have but just plain don’t. Her novels are favorites of mine, especially the oddball Custom of the Country.

MCC: Were President Obama to create a cabinet post in the arts, whom should he appoint as Secretary?

William: Someone dead. Dead writers dont attract envy and can get their programs passed more easily.

MCC: Computer, longhand, or typewriter?

William: Computer and longhand. I go back and forth to avoid the moss of a single posture.

MCC: How many revisions does your work typically go through?

William: How to count revisions? Even my first drafts typically go through seismic upheavals.

MCC: Do you ever revise your work on the spot during live readings?

William: One of my stories I cut a third of just before reading itthe best edit I’ve ever made.

MCC: Please revise the following sentence:
Though every muscle in his body urged him not to, Sanderson crept toward the tinted windows of the gray-green Caprice.

William: Sanderson, helpless, urged his muscle on the tinted windows.

MCC: What’s the worst day job you’ve ever had?

William: I worked as a “light industrial temp” in Ann Arbor. Our worst assignment was to pick thousands of Styrofoam peanuts out of a field of mud.

AGNI is co-sponsoring a reading with Michael Downing, Rebecca Kaiser Gibson, Rachel Kadish, and Joan Wickersham at Porter Square Books in Cambridge, Tuesday, February 10, 7 PM. Read about all of the events in the Commonwealth Reading Series.

William Pierce is senior editor of AGNI and contributes a series of essays called “Crucibles.” His fiction is forthcoming in Granta and has appeared in American Literary Review, The Dos Passos Review, and elsewhere. Other work has appeared in The Cincinnati Review, The Writer’s Chronicle, and Glimmer Train. In 2007 he was editor-in-residence at the Summer Literary Seminars in St. Petersburg, Russia. His first essay for AGNI, “Fabulously Real,” received special mention in the 2006 Pushcart Prize anthology.

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This is one in a series of tantalizingly brief interviews with participants in the Commonwealth Reading Series.

Rebecca Kaiser Gibson reads at Porter Square Books in Cambridge, Tuesday, February 10, 7 PM.

A highly accomplished poet, Rebecca comes strenuously trained to capture big ideas in brief, carefully chosen words!

MCC: What are you working on these days?

Rebecca: Well I had convinced myself this summer that I’d do a series on mushrooms since they seemed to be inhabiting my every downward glance.

I thought I could circumvent my own brain by being orderly, and I got all set up with mushroom identification books and a wild book I found in two libraries that talked about the shamanic source of the bible, based on a hidden mushroom cult. That freaked me out for a few months, since I had also convinced myself, quite without reason, that I’d be the very first to do this. In August, when I was on a bike ride in Provincetown, all alone, I thought, at dusk, a jolly looking man came out of the scrub pine woods with a basket. “Mushrooms?” I asked, monosyllabically. He nodded. “Russian?” I asked, surprising myself.

“Of course,” he said.

Since then, I realize that what I’m working on is a long piece having to do with what is known beneath language, through it. The mushrooms are just a hint to me about what is lurking.

MCC: How many revisions does your work typically go through?

Rebecca: Many many. And often, after a few years, I go back to much of the first draft. Too often my revisions are intellectual ones, responding to some inside pretender who wants me to be someone else.

Rebecca joins Michael Downing, Rachel Kadish, and Joan Wickersham for a reading at Porter Square Books in Cambridge, Tuesday, February 10, 7 PM. Event co-sponsored by AGNI Magazine. Read about all of the events in the Commonwealth Reading Series.

Rebecca Kaiser Gibson has had work published in AGNI, Field, The Harvard Review, The Boston Phoenix, Mothering, The Antigonish Review, Northwest Review and Verse Daily, MARGIE, The Greensboro Review, Slate, The Fossil, and forthcoming in The Antigonish Review and an anthology called Cadence of Hooves. She has written reviews for The Boston Review of Books and Pleiades. She has published two chapbooks of poetry through Roundy Wells Press, Admit the Peacock and Inside the Exhibition. She has been awarded residencies from the MacDowell Colony and The Heinrich Bll Cottage in Achill Island, Ireland. She teaches poetry and writing at Tufts University.

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This is one in a series of drive-through interviews with participants in the Commonwealth Reading Series.

Lisa Nold, who writes terrifically inventive short stories and other forms, reads at Porter Square Books tomorrow – Thursday, February 5, at 7 PM.

Lisa joins the fray with an impressively harrowing worst day job (the worst yet, I think!), and brings the poets vs. prose writers paintball predictions to two votes for poets, one vote for prose writers, and one no-contest.

MCC: What writer do you most admire but write nothing like?

Lisa: Edward P. Jones.

MCC: Who wins the poets vs. prose writers paintball war?

Lisa: Prose writers because they tend to be aggressive and competitive. I imagine that the poets would find a place behind a tree to casually smoke cigarettes while admiring the vermilion and yellow splats accumulating on their clothing. Of course, they would be the ultimate winners.

MCC: How many revisions does your work typically go through?

Lisa: About as many revisions as there are dollars in the current economic stimulus package.

MCC: What’s the worst day job you’ve ever had?

Lisa: I worked as a temporary secretary transcribing tapes at Bellevue. This was in the late 1980s just after a doctor had been stabbed to death in a nearby stairwell. There was also an issue with communicable diseases on my floor and I remember leaning down to take a sip from the water fountain and someone crying out from behind me, “Don’t drink from that fountain!”

Lisa joins Steve Almond, George Rosen, and Tracy Winn for an event at Porter Square Books on Thursday, February 5, 7 PM. Event co-sponsored by Harvard Review. Read about all of the events in the Commonwealth Reading Series.

Lisa Nold earned a MFA from Syracuse University and has published her fiction, non-fiction, and poetry in Guernica Magazine, Fulcrum and Rosebud, among other literary publications. She is a recent fellow at the Santa Fe Art Institute and is former managing editor at Harvard Review and Fulcrum: An Annual of Poetry and Aesthetics. She is currently at work on a collection of short stories.

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This is one in a series of extremely not-long interviews with participants in the Commonwealth Reading Series.

Tracy Winn, author of the soon-to-be released story collection Mrs. Somebody Somebody, reads at Porter Square Books in Cambridge on February 5, at 7 PM.

You may remember Tracy for the fascinating Three Stages piece she wrote for us, a few months back. Now, she has the same candor and terrific humor, just with less screen space.

MCC: What writer do you most admire but write nothing like?

Tracy: I get crushes on writers and I never know whether the infatuation is going to last. Right now, I’m a big fan of Nicole Krauss. I think she’s a keeper. She writes funny and terribly sad paragraphs like this one: “I decided to make a list of all the people I knew who were alive in case I was forgetting someone. I busied myself looking for paper and pencil. Then I sat down, smoothed down the page, and brought the nib to meet it. But. My mind drew a blank.”

MCC: Do you secretly dream of being a) a pop icon b) an algebra teacher, and/or c) a crimesolver/writer a la Jessica Fletcher?

Tracy: None of the above. I have always secretly wanted to be a big bosomy blues singer with a laugh that wraps its arms around you a whiskey-voiced mama who is at home in smoky bars where the drummer’s whisk keeps on whisking til it’s time for coffee and eggs. (A pretty hopeless dream for a scrawny Yankee asthmatic.)

Were President Obama to appoint a cabinet post in the arts, whom should he appoint as Secretary?

Tracy: That would be my friend and fellow 2008 Artist Fellow, Poet Patrick Donnelly, who is qualified by his deep knowledge and appreciation for written, visual, and performing arts, and also because he is always the tallest person in the room. We need an arts czar who can’t be overlooked.

MCC: How many revisions does your work typically go through?

Tracy: I chose this one because it is the most embarrassing question you’ve asked. I revise my stories every time I look at them, and I have to look at them often to make sure I’m still alive.

Tracy joins Steve Almond, Lisa Nold, and George Rosen for an event at Porter Square Books on Thursday, February 5, 7 PM. Event co-sponsored by Harvard Review. Read about all of the events in the Commonwealth Reading Series.

Tracy Winn’s stories have appeared in publications such as Hayden’s Ferry Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, and New Orleans Review. She is the recipient of grants from the Barbara Deming Memorial Trust, the Arch and Bruce Brown Foundation, and of fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and the Millay Colony. She works with Gaining Ground, a local non-profit farm that grows organic produce with the help of volunteers and gives it all to local shelters and meal programs. Mrs. Somebody Somebody, linked stories set in Lowell, is forthcoming (in April 2009) from Southern Methodist University Press.

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This is one in a series of breathtakingly brief interviews with participants in the Commonwealth Reading Series.

Michael Downing reads at Porter Square Books on February 10, at 7 PM.

Michael’s work in fiction and nonfiction, along with being highly acclaimed, has led to awards, a play, a movie, a surprise footwear-related gig–and now, to a miniaturized interview.

MCC: What are you working on these days?

Michael: I am writing a memoir. The title is I’ll Make It Up to You. It’s not exactly the story of my life. It’s about the aftermath of a genetic diagnosis, which has occasioned a lot of confusion about who has the authority to tell the story of my life.

MCC: What’s the most embarrassing sentence/line of poetry you’ve ever written?

Michael: That’s easy: “I am writing a memoir.”

MCC: What’s the best/worst day job you’ve ever had?

Michael: Writing is definitely the best/worst day job I’ve ever had.

MCC: What’s the most surprising reader response you’ve ever received?

Michael: I was asked to be a spokesperson for National Flip-Flop Day. Really. Even more surprisingI accepted.

Michael joins Rebecca Kaiser Gibson, Rachel Kadish, and Joan Wickersham for a reading at Porter Square Books in Cambridge, Tuesday, February 10, 7 PM. Event co-sponsored by AGNI Magazine. Read about all of the events in the Commonwealth Reading Series.

Michael Downing’s novels include the national bestseller Perfect Agreement and Breakfast with Scot, which was adapted as a movie that premiered at the 2007 Toronto International Film Festival. In addition to Shoes Outside the Door: Desire, Devotion, and Excess at San Francisco Zen Center, a narrative history of the first Buddhist monastery outside of Asia, Michael’s nonfiction includes the revised 2009 edition of his history of clocks, Congress, and confusion – Spring Forward: The Annual Madness of Daylight Saving Time, and a memoir, I’ll Make It Up to You, which will be published in October 2009. His essays and reviews appear in the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and other periodicals. He teaches creative writing at Tufts University.

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This is one in a series of brief (yet short) interviews with participants in the Commonwealth Reading Series.

Rachel Kadish reads at Porter Square Books on February 10, at 7 PM.

As a lauded novelist and short story/essay writer, Rachel knows her prose. Which may be why she’s able, here, to make so very little prose so very engaging and interesting.

MCC: What are you working on these days?

Rachel: A novel set in 17th Century London. It’s tremendous fun doing the research — though I often feel this book is as much work as two regular novels.

MCC: What writer do you most admire but write nothing like?

Rachel: Joseph Heller. By the time you’ve read two pages of Catch-22, you understand that nothing will be sacred. The book is an absolutely wild ride.

MCC: Do you secretly dream of being a) a pop icon, b) an algebra teacher, and/or c) a crime-solver/writer a la Jessica Fletcher?

Rachel: d) a gospel singer. Or — barring that — I want to push people’s cars out of the snow for a living. It only takes a few minutes, and the fruits of the labor are immediately visible. The opposite of life as a novelist.

MCC: How many revisions does your work typically go through?

Rachel: Dozens. I’ve come to look forward to the revision-stage. A first draft is fun, but it’s also nerve-wracking, because I’m anxious to get everything down on paper. Revision is the fun part–that’s where I get to tinker, understand the characters more deeply, and try to make things as good as they can be.

Rachel joins Michael Downing, Rebecca Kaiser Gibson, and Joan Wickersham for a reading at Porter Square Books in Cambridge, Tuesday, February 10, 7 PM. Event co-sponsored by AGNI Magazine. Read about all of the events in the Commonwealth Reading Series.

Rachel Kadish is the author of the novels From a Sealed Room (Putnam, 1998) and Tolstoy Lied: a Love Story (Houghton Mifflin, 2006). Her work has been read on NPR and has appeared in publications such as Zoetrope, Tin House, and The Gettysburg Review, in the Pushcart Prize anthology and elsewhere. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, MacDowell, and Yaddo, and has been the Koret writer-in-residence at Stanford University. She teaches creative writing in Lesleys M.F.A. program in Creative Writing and is currently a Visiting Research Associate at the Brandeis Women’s Studies Research Center.

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This is one in a series of exuberantly brief interviews with participants in the Commonwealth Reading Series.

Harvard Review is co-sponsor of an upcoming reading on February 5, at 7 PM at Porter Square Books in Cambridge. Christina Thompson (left) is the journal’s editor.

Along with her editorship, Christina is the lauded author of Come on Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All, part memoir and part exploration of the uneasy history of Maori and European cultures in New Zealand. Unsurprisingly, she’s equally adept at nano-answering from either perspective, editor or writer.

MCC: What’s new and exciting at Harvard Review these days?

Christina: New layout, new cover, new paper, new writers – the question is what isn’t new?

MCC: How do you balance your duties at Harvard Review with your writing career?

Christina: I’m half-time at Harvard but I also teach in the Writing Program at Harvard Extension and I have three kids, so the writing is always giving way to production deadlines or grading or parent-teacher conferences or something. I tell myself that this is why it took me so long to write my first book but it doesn’t make me any happier about it.

MCC: What are you working on these days, writing-wise?

Christina: Right now I’m reviewing a couple of books about Captain Cook, I’m going to write an essay about living with my 90-year-old mother, and then I’m going to start a new book about Polynesian Voyagers.

MCC: What writer in history would you refuse to publish in Harvard Review, were he/she to submit to you today?

Christina: Oh, probably William Burroughs. I have such a low tolerance for vulgarity.

MCC: What’s the most embarrassing sentence/line of poetry you’ve ever written?

Christina: I once said of a young writer whose book I was reviewing that, while most people had an ideal reader, they also had a reader from hell and, unfortunately for him, I was she. I’d take that back if I could. In fact, I’d take back the entire review.

Please revise the following sentence:
Though every muscle in his body urged him not to, Sanderson crept toward the tinted windows of the gray-green Caprice.

MCC: What’s the best/worst day job you’ve ever had?

Christina: Editing Harvard Review is the best job I’ve ever had; the worst job I ever had was as a telemarketer.

MCC: What’s the most surprising reader response you’ve ever received (could be a reader of your own writing or of the journal)?

Christina: Someone on the web once described Harvard Review as “the least experimental journal,” which I thought was so funny I considered having T-shirts printed with it.

Christina and Harvard Review are partnering with MCC to present Steve Almond, Lisa Nold, George Rosen, and Tracy Winn for an event at Porter Square Books on Thursday, February 5, 7 PM. Read about all of the events in the Commonwealth Reading Series.

Christina Thompson is the editor of Harvard Review. Her essays and articles have appeared in numerous journals, including Vogue, American Scholar, the Journal of Pacific History, Australian Literary Studies, and in the 1999, 2000, and 2006 editions of Best Australian Essays. She lives near Boston with her husband and three sons.

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