SELFIE INTERVIEW | Kia Alice Groom

Kia Alice Groom is founding editor of Quaint Magazine. The recipient of an Academy of American Poets award, the runner-up for the 2014 Judith Wright Poetry Prize, and a pushcart nominee, Kia’s work has been published in Cordite, Going Down Swinging, The Australian Book Review, Westerly, Permafrost and others. Her work has been anthologized in the Hunter Anthology of Contemporary Australian Feminist Poetry and is forthcoming in various other collections. She divides her time between New Orleans, Louisiana and wherever she goes when she falls asleep. 

Eckleburg: What captures your interest most in your work, now, as a reader of your work?

Kia Alice Groom:

I’m interested in work that mixes the surreal with the everyday – that tension between very, very bland and superficial and the genuinely weird, unsettling, and horrifying. 

Eckleburg: What are you working on now?

Kia Alice Groom:

I’ve been working on a project that I thought would eventually become a book or a chapbook. And then somewhere along the line I got so disheartened with conventional publishing, at least when it came to this project in particular. I wanted it to feel alive and immediate and episodic, and to mix in text and images and music and make it a really immersive experience. So now it lives on Livejournal (appropriate, since it’s set in the 90s) and is updated periodically. It’s a love story, but also a murder story, but also a meditation on recovering from abuse and trauma. It’s called Highway Hymns and I’d be thrilled if you checked it out: http://highwayhymns.livejournal.com 

Eckleburg: Who and what are your artistic influences?

Kia Alice Groom:

Oh gosh, there are too many. I owe a great debt to Shirley Jackson, H.P. Lovecraft, and Lewis Carroll. Also to Lara Glenum, Anne Sexton, and Margaret Atwood. I draw things from a lot of kooky, weird sources and I’m a big fan of pop culture, TV, that sort of thing. I owe such a creative debt to Bryan Fuller and David Slade, whose artistic direction and work on Hannibal, in particular, have really shaped my obsessions and poetic lexicon over the past few years. 

Eckleburg thanks Kia Alice Groom. Do you have new work published here at Eckleburg or elsewhere? Add your Selfie Interview and share the news with our 10,000+ reading and writing community. If you have a new book out or upcoming, join our Eckleburg Book Club and let our readers know about it.

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Kia Groom
Kia Alice Groom is an Australian writer living in New Orleans. Her poetry, fiction, non-fiction, and essays have appeared in numerous publications in the US and overseas. She is publishing a mixed-media narrative at highwayhymns.livejournal.com.