March/April 2008 
My Touchstones
Alan Cheuse
The book is A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and I first read it somewhere during that hazy
border-time between boyhood and young manhood, that period when, as Frost remarks in a poem about
the progress of the New England calendar into April, you're sometimes two steps back
in the middle of March.
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An Interview with Roland Merullo
Kristin Willis Halabi
I have always had an interest in mysticism, Eastern and Western, Jewish, Christian, nonsectarian. I had a lot of those books lying around, some of them with passages underlined. I just opened the books, copied out passages onto note cards, and fit them into the chapters.
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An Interview with Robin Becker
Marianne Cotugno
Almost every contemporary poet I admire works as a teaching-poet. What separates "teaching-poets" from other poets? We spend our lives with the young. The intimacy of the creative writing classroom means that we have a unique kind of access to the next generation.
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Conscious Decisions & Unconscious Gifts: An Interview with Sue William Silverman
Cynthia Pike Gaylord
I think the genre is called creative nonfiction for a reason. It's not academic writing or journalism.... The job of memoirists is to discover the right metaphors so that our stories will be interesting in and of themselves without faking material in order to spice things up.
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The Poem as Fitness Display
Charles Harper Webb
Since many of the traits necessary to make art are also necessary to evaluate it, and since artistic ability can't be a useful fitness indicator unless it can be evaluated, the abilities to make art and to appreciate it evolved hand-in-hand.
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Care & Feeding of the Work in Progress
Catherine M. Wallace
I want to begin with a story that was found among other ancient scrolls in a clay jar near the town of Nag Veridas, which is just east of Nag Hamadi in North Africa.
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Writing a Shadowbox: Joseph Cornell & the Lyric Essayists
Harrison Candelaria Fletcher
As a boy, I lived among fragments. Pottery shards. Skeleton keys. Strands of rusty barbed wire. Artifacts covered every surface of my Albuquerque home. My mother, an artist, collector, and dreamer, spent weekends exploring the back roads and second-hand shops of New Mexico seeking treasures others had overlooked. She'd load them in the trunk of our faded green '67 Comet, wipe away the dust, and nail them to our walls.
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The Reader & Gary Snyder's Wild Craft
Ian Haight
Snyder sees a very specific equivalency between poetry and the wild. The relationship is born from words, because words signify how people encounter the wild. Poetry, as an art, can closely interpret an encounter with the wild because it utilizes refined language.
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