Tag: Selfie Interview

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.

Michael’s work has appeared in Barrelhouse Magazine, The Canary Press, Bridge Eight, Adelaide Magazine, The Feminist Literary Magazine, and more. He lives with a blind dog above a duck-pin bowling alley in Baltimore. He has written five unpublished novels. 

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

Michael J. Coene: Atmosphere. When I’m writing–or reading–my focus is always on atmosphere. I like a strange mood. I like prose that uses rhythm to paint a weird gloss over ordinary things. I like dialogue that speaks in implications. Honestly, I don’t care what a book is about; I care about how it goes about it.

Eckleburg: What are you working on now?

Michael J. Coene: Currently, I’m sending out query letters for my fifth novel manuscript, THE SLEW RATE, as well as working with a team of illustrators to put together a literary graphic novel about social anxiety. I’m also hard at work on my sixth novel manuscript, but it’s too soon to share anything about that one, just yet.

Eckleburg: Who and what are your artistic influences?

Michael J. Coene: I realized that I was meant to be a writer when I read John Irving’s THE WORLD ACCORDING TO GARP. I picked it up by chance, and as I was reading it, understood exactly how to go about writing that kind of novel. I’ve been at it, obsessively, ever since.

Over the years, plenty of other writers have come along and influenced my style and approach, including Charles Bukowski, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Keri Hulme, Bret Easton Ellis, Stephen Dixon, Anthony Burgess, Don DeLillo, to name a few.

I’m also very influenced by the music of Bjork, who I listen to almost exclusively while writing.

Eckleburg thanks Michael J. Coene. 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.

Originally from New Bern, NC, Cheyenne Autry is a fourth-year fiction student in the MFA program at the University of Arkansas. She likes long walks and short bios.

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

Cheyenne Autry:

I love the strangeness of it. A lot of my writing has this strange or unreal element in it because I feel that those moments capture a feeling or reaction in a way that reality can’t. For me, actually losing one’s head from laughter does more justice to the situation and what Wife is feeling. 

Eckleburg: What are you working on now?

Cheyenne Autry:

I’m starting to put stories together for my thesis, and I have a few new stories in various stages. There’s a ghost story of sorts, and another about these kids living in an old motel. I’m also dabbling in flash fiction.

Eckleburg: Who and what are your artistic influences?

Cheyenne Autry:

Everything, I guess? Every person, book, picture, painting, experience, etc. are fair game for me when it comes to writing. This is a pretty lame answer, I know, but it’s hard for me to pick out these people or objects that influence my work because my mind automatically just goes to writers I like, but I don’t think being a fan equates to artistic influence. The work and experiences I don’t like probably influence me more than those I’m really jazzed about. 

Eckleburg thanks Cheyenne Autry. 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.