carte blanche Q&A with Guillaume Morissette

I often use humour as a mechanism to encourage the reader to keep reading, but humour is like Sriracha for me, it has a very strong taste. If you’re not careful, it can drown everything else out. I want humour to be just one mechanism inside a bigger thing, like, it’s funny but it’s not only funny.

carte blanche Q&A with Jonathan Goldstein

I think the writing that interests me most these days is the writing that pushes past the persona rather than leaning on it. And when I do that kind of thing, like write from a more emotional, less jokey place, it isn’t like people are jarred so there must be a shared feeling to it, one source from which it all comes.

carte blanche Q&A with David McGimpsey

Every aspect of life is “poetic”. Each day wasted to Facebook, each sip of Starbucks, each trip to Wilkes-Barre-Scranton. But, the cultural things that are not poetry which inform my poetry are, in order, literature that is not poetry (fiction, history, etc etc), music, art, television, movies, the internet, texting, sports, tourism, politics, dining, and shopping. The artists who are not poets who have influenced my work the most are Alice Cooper and David Letterman.

carte blanche Q & A with Gillian Sze

In general, I like leaps between forms and genres. In my final year in high school, my calculus teacher allowed us to do a final project where we approached any math topic of our choice in any way we chose. So I went down to the art room and worked on a painting of the Archimedean spiral. But an interest in the combination between the textual and visual started, I would say, as early as children’s books. It’s a visible engagement with language that I think gets lost when we grow up and start reading novels that have no pictures. The visual seems to be a natural place to turn in poetry.

carte blanche Q&A with Kathleen Winter

I guess I like the idea of blurring the lines between what we call genre and what we don’t. I always find it strange, for instance, to see a writer like Neil Gaiman or Ursula K. LeGuin ghettoized on their own “science fiction” shelf in bookstores. The whole question of what is or is not “literary” also entertains me. I read all kinds of fiction and nonfiction, both within and outside supposed “genres”.