12 or 20 (second series) questions with Lisa López Smith

Born in British Columbia, raised in Kelowna, Lisa López Smith has lived and worked in Italy, Uganda, China, the USA, Ireland and Brazil. Along with her Tapatío husband and kids, she raises livestock on their small biodynamic farm in Jalisco, Mexico, which is an endless source of inspiration for her poetry and fiction and where she practices slow living, contemplation and everyday revolution. She has a BA from the University of Calgary and an MA from Royal Roads University in subjects unrelated to writing or farming. Her poems and essays have appeared in over sixty literary journals and have been nominated for the Pushcart, Best New Poets, and Best of the Net.

How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

My poetry chapbook, Grace Notes, came out in 2021 after I won a chapbook contest. We were mostly still in pandemic mode then. There’s no English-speaking literary community where I live; we probably had a cake to celebrate, but that was mostly the end of it. Even with some really kind blurbs, the chapbook still felt like a lucky accident.

This book feels completely different! It still feels like a lucky accident that it is getting published, but I’m just leaning into the idea that feeling like a fraud is a part of my writing journey. This time, however, the publisher and publicist have been really supportive, and they're pushing me out of my comfort zone—I’ll travel to Canada to promote it (but also to visit friends and family!), so it will be a completely different experience!

How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

Actually, I wrote and published creative non-fiction before I began writing poetry and fiction—mostly writing about raising kids, and occasionally about working with migrants in downtown Guadalajara.

However, after the US election in 2016, it seemed like poetry was the only container that could handle the immensity of all the feelings. The difference with poetry was that it seemed like a homecoming—I was the weird kid who used to read and memorize poetry even though I never wrote it when I was young. Also, since my kids were really small then, finishing a poem was more achievable than chapters or essays, so all my recent publications have been in poetry.

Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

Poems often come to me while I’m out and about, working or driving or doing things. Sometimes they’re fragments, sometimes they’re more complete. I usually work with pen and paper for a first draft, so other times poems just come out of the pages of scribbles.

The project often comes out of all these short pieces; in the case of Hallelujah Anyhow, I compiled poems that had been published in literary journals into one document and began revising them. Since I write a lot about overlapping themes, much of the work fit together reasonably well, and revising was at the line level from there. I also try to have the poems work in conversation with each other in interesting ways.

Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

 I live in a rural part of Mexico, so a literary community is something that I just don’t have here, especially writing in English. Although Guadalajara hosts the largest book festival in Latin America every year, and there are little enclaves of English-speaking communities around the country, public readings for me so far have been super limited!

I like to imagine reading as an enjoyable, life-giving part of the creative process, but I have a good imagination—in real life, I’m definitely an introvert and try to avoid public speaking, but I’m being pulled into some reading events for my book. I have launches planned in Vancouver, Calgary and Kelowna, so I’ll keep practicing and imagining!

Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

I write a lot about migrants and immigration, the natural world and farming. Hallelujah Anyhow is definitely making the attempt to hold the heaviness in the world, and boldly make space for the beauty of the world at the same time. Especially in these moments—with fascism and oppression and extreme wealth inequalities and climate change—I hope it helps. Yes, these awful things exist. Also, the wild cosmos flowers are starting to blossom in my back pasture this week.

What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

There’s a reason that in political systems of oppression, the writers and the artists are targeted. Writers have the job of translating situations into whatever their preferred medium is: journalism or comedy, cartoons or poems, symphonies or paintings, and also how important it is to have fiction that reflects life or gives us a moment of escape from it. All of these things are important, and dangerous and powerful! So whether someone is on the frontline taking photographs of war, or writing something escapist so we don’t have to think endlessly about war, this is important work. Or, maybe it is insignificant—but it is still vital that we do it!

Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

Essential! I love working with editors, and I’ve been incredibly lucky to work with editors who have been instrumental in helping both the individual poems and the whole project. My practice is to simply accept all the changes because an editor offers valuable insight and a second pair of eyes can be helpful. When I go back to revisions by line, if the suggestion grates, then I go back to my original words and try to find the true direction of the revision from there, which quite often is still the editor’s version.

What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

I heard somewhere that the opposite of compassion is busyness. It rang so true for me because I had seen in myself how, when I was rushing, I missed the really important moments of connection with people. I try to keep myself from being too busy, or at least have a busyness with spaciousness so there is room for compassion. Also this: your work is not your salary. Your work is the essential, spiritual calling to the things you need to do while on this mortal coil. Sometimes we confuse our income with that, and it is easy to get lost in the material world. Fortunately, the work of poetry— and most writing and art— tends to be pretty safe from great income, so we sometimes get to miss that trap!

What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

I was actually just asked about my process and I ended up writing a response in a day-log Susan Sontag-style:

My Process: How to Write a Poem

1.     Alarm at 5:20

1 go to bed early the night before. It helps.

2.     Up at 5:30. Put on the kettle. Put on music—loud, perhaps Julieta Venegas or Natalia Lafourcade. Or maybe something in English today. Go outside—Stuart and Zapote are howling at the door for breakfast, and the rest of the cats come running when you call them. Pick bitter herbs from the garden. Venus is still bright at dawn.

3.     Bitter tea, then make espresso for LG and me, while he makes breakfast for the boys

4.     6:20 Boys to school. Start chores: feed horses, birds. Check for new calves

5.     8 AM breakfast with LG. We wonder what we are going to do with our house problem. Maybe cry, maybe not.

6.     9 AM get distracted with hundreds of things that are not on the to-do list, or distracted with what is on it, or talking or observing or bringing a calf down from the cerro or making yogurt or teaching a kid how to communicate with the horses or school meetings or gardening.

7.     Forget to do some things that should be done

8.     12:14 PM sit down to write. Feel like a fraud. Write a paragraph of nonsense. Give up.

9.     12:56 hang up a load of laundry

10.  12:58 there are swallows and clouds crisscrossing the sky like the clotheslines

11.  1:10 something terrible in the news. Make lunch.

12.  2:50 kids home. Eat lunch with them and whoever else shows up. We laugh, talk about all the things of the day. Beautiful.

13.  4:33 Do dishes and other things that no one else notices. Something terrible on the news. Write another line.

14.  7:35 boys come in from chores, playing, etc., sit on the couch and listen to their chatter or silence. Make something for dinner. Close the gate, accompanied by 6.5 dogs. Stargaze for a moment. Call the cats. Check on the horses.

15.  8:58 Sudoku in bed with help from SK. M tells me about the birds and his homework. Maybe write a poem tomorrow. Or maybe this life is one already.

What fragrance reminds you of home?

Pine trees, VapoRub, cold mountain air on fallen leaves, stammpot or Beppe soup remind me of Canada.

It’s a little cliché, but the petrichor of the first rain on the soil after eight months of dry season is something I first experienced in Mexico. The wild cempesuchil (marigold) in the fall is also so evocative of Mexico for me.

David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

Absolutely. The natural world is a big player in my poetry. I work a lot outside, so there is always plenty of material just in observing what is around me: the garden, the highway, the neighbours, small-town life, and my dogs/cows/sheep, etc. There’s always the ugly and complicated things, but also so much wonder!

What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

One consequence of losing my dad when I was a child—and he was just 37 years old when he died— is that when I want to do something, I don’t wait to do the things I really want to do. We truly don’t know how much time we get on this earth; we may as well do what we want to do. This is probably not advice you’d get from your accountant (or lawyer?!), but I’m not waiting until conditions are perfect for me to imagine and live out my dreams. However, if money was no object, I’d definitely visit Vava’u to see the humpback whales, or Palau’s shark sanctuaries.

If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

I don’t know that writing is my occupation, and is unlikely to ever be the income generator that goes with “occupation.” But it is an essential part of what I do in a day, besides all the other things that are essential! A teacher once told me, What is essential never imposes itself; the non-essentials always do. Writing is like that. Essential, but easy to skip when everyday life imposes all the schedules and lists and meetings and grocery shopping.

What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

Sometimes I feel like I didn’t pick life in Mexico; somehow that Mexico picked me. There’s that oft-quoted line from Chavela Vargas, an icon of Mexican music—who was actually from Costa Rica: «Los mexicanos nacemos donde nos da la rechingada gana »(Mexicans are born wherever the f** they feel like). Writing feels like that too. I didn’t decide to write; writing picked me, and there’s nothing I can do about it except give my calling the time and respect that it needs from me.

Fortunately, writing also feeds off all the interesting things in life, and Mexico and rural life are full of them. I think Mary Oliver’s theory on writing was on point, so as long as I occasionally am out doing what the soft animal of my body loves, paying attention, and looking out for the spiritual weight that is being asked of us in these moments, I definitely find themes to write about.

What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

I loved The Hours by Michael Cunningham and just finished rereading it. I also recently read Motorcycles and Sweetgrass by Drew Hayden Taylor, which was such a fun book. Also, Correctional by Ravi Shankar was so beautiful and well-written! I’m usually a few decades behind everyone else in movie-watching since I rarely watch anything recent. Even if the inspirational-teacher-changes-student-lives genre is a little formulaic, I still adored Radical (2023) for its Mexicanness—and because it was based on a real story of change in one of the worst-performing primary schools in the country.

What are you currently working on?

I just finished workshopping another poetry manuscript, and I’m very excited about that project! In other creative veins, I’ve also got some pottery on the go, and a series of paintings that I’m working on that are based on the style of the Spanish artist Joaquin Sorolla—the master of light!

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Pádraig Ó Tuama, LOVE BETWEEN MEN

 

Makebelieve

And on the first day
God made
something up.
Then everything came along: 

Seconds, sex and
beasts and breath and rabies;
hunger, healing,
lust and lust’s rejections;
swarming things that swarm
inside the dirt;
girth and grind
and grit and shit and all shit’s functions;
rings inside the tree trunk
and branches broken by the snow;
pigs’ hearts and stars,
mystery, suspense and stingrays;
insects, blood
and interests and death;
eventually, us
with all our viruses, laments, and curiosities;
all our songs and stories;
and our songs about the stories we’ve forgotten;
and all that we’ve forgotten we’ve forgotten. 

God looked for something
to hold it all together. Nothing
came to mind.

The latest from Irish poet, theologian and conflict mediator Pádraig Ó Tuama is LOVE BETWEEN MEN (Copper Canyon Press, 2026), a collection of lyric narratives around queer love, Old Testament figures, desire and “his own experiences of exorcisms and gay reparation therapies, exploring desire with its promise and fear of fulfillment.” Threading rage and love, sex and trauma, Ó Tuama’s narrative layerings rewriting the possibilities of what love might be and might offer, beyond the fear of those who choose to call homosexuality a sin, or whitewash the damage caused through conversion therapy. “I share my secret with a man who wants to be / my mentor.” Ó Tuama writes, to close the poem “Adam & Eve not Adam & Steve,” “We arrange to meet twice weekly // for accountability and chat. He says I must have been / abused, that dudes don’t turn out queer without // traumatic pasts. He grabs my balls, slaps my ass, / laughs it off, says all straight lads do this.” I’m fascinated by how Ó Tuama’s background and work as a theologian (including the fact that he currently teaches at Yale Divinity School) informs his work, as he composes poems around Adam and Eve, God and other Old Testament threads, offering a conversation around queer love and Biblical narratives far different from the book-length suites of Maryland poet Patrick Kindig’s Agape (Broomall PA: Saturnalia Books, 2026) [see my review of such here] or Ottawa writer Emily Austin’s Gay Girl Prayers (Kingston ON: Brick Books, 2024) [see my review of such here]. As Ó Tuama writes, to open the poem “Second Time Round”: “After the first failure, God tried again. / Okay, he said, Let there be Being / and there was Being. But No / Serpents, he added, and a world / filled with No Serpents made itself, / but God still saw them everywhere— / from the way the clouds / would round the mountains / to the ripples on the sand. / No, no, he said, undoing everything again. / Another go. New World. Only Flying Tings. / And behold! a world / with only flying things unfurled.”

Whereas Ó Tuama’s collection is set at the intersection of queer love and theology (through the positive and negative elements that accompany), he also offers pieces that lean separately into either of these subjects, and the collection is organized into five separate themed and structural cluster-sections of lyrics: “The Book of Confusions,” “There Is No Such Thing as the Past,” “Seven Deadly Sonnets,” “Love Between Men” and “Our Lady of Desire.” There is such weight in Ó Tuama’s lines, even across such a lightness of lyric. “Most didn’t know one another from the / outside world,” he writes, mid-way through “The Weight of Time,” “though one recognized / the new guy from an app.” A few pages further, to open “The End of the World,” as he begins: “The end of the world happened yesterday. / A man told a man he was in love with him, / but that man didn’t love him back. // Buildings crumbled. The avenue / cracked, then split apart, swallowing the / beach on which they sat, the trees, / the birds in the trees, the library, the sun.” Or even further, as part of “Our Lady of the Apocalypse,” that includes: “You see your dad / —as limited as he said he was—asking for / compassion for having had to make do with blunt tools.” Across the length and breath of his poems, Ó Tuama works elements of the lyric prose line and the sonnet, clipped line and breath take, narrating intimacies and rage and alternate possibilities with a clear sense of narrative lyric and a sequence of underplayed formal inventivenessess. This is a hefty, intimate collection, and Ó Tuama is clearly a fine thinker. One might wonder where a conversation like this might eventually lead, certainly, whether through poems or even non-fiction. I would be curious to see him explore further.

 

Ongoing notes: The Fisher Small + Fine Press Fair (part three, : Amanda Earl/Matthew Walsh + Ambrose Albert,

See part one here, of course. And part two. And my report on the event. And we will see you at the ottawa small press book fair on November 14, yes? And the reading the night prior? And, I suppose you might wonder, why am I only covering two publishers across this range of notes? There weren’t any other chapbooks I managed to pick up! I mean, I can’t review what I don’t see.

Ottawa/Toronto ON: I’m always intrigued to see collaborations, especially from poets of whose work I am already fond, so was pleased to see Amanda Earl [see my review of Earl’s latest here] and Matthew Walsh’s [see my 2025 interview with Walsh here] call-and-response collaboration Slutflowers (Toronto ON: knife fork book, 2026). “I have this concern with my own death / that I feel in my bones,” begins the poem “Scythe and Fate,” “especially it has / taken up a spot in my ilium bone, placed / above my acetabulum. I feel that it’s / a poet’s job to think of the existential, mark / down that what confuses me into a notebook which / I can burn before my death or not.” Slutflowers is an assemblage of short poems composed via a technique borrowed from American poet Terrence Hayes, “a technique of using words from an existing work for end words of a poem.” Gestural, performative and sly, these are poems riddled with self-conscious desire composed via constraint and resistance, even as they allow themselves to not follow their own rules. “I am missing some of the lines on my hands / for palmistry. I drink out of them,” begins “Palmars,” “cupped / below the faucet, from the heart and life over / and over ad nauseum.” As Earl offers in the acknowledgments, writing: “Matthew approached me with this method as a way of writing our collaborative chapbook. I suggested we use as our source, Jean Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers (1963), one of my favourite deviant resources. We assigned each other ten random pages. If we felt like it, we responded, in some way, to each other’s poems.” And while one might speculate on which poet composed which piece or pieces, as a straight back-and-forth between the two, I think there is something to be said for refusing to place any poem with one over the other.

Scattered

Tonight dear reader, I am tired of being wooden.
A man I met writes to me of dude books which are effigies
I’d like to burn because how often I feel other
by my lack of inclusion and am just one of the masses
of women disappeared by the canon as if we are the same
nothings not as sweet as these dudebros want us to be but
fundamental
to their nonsense is all of this resentment.
We don’t have the luxury of being contemplative.
They relegate us to quietism.
I wish them the same.

Toronto ON/Fredericton NB: The latest from poet Ambrose Albert is the chapbook cross/faded (Toronto ON: Anstruther Press, 2026), a collection of twelve sharp-edged first person lyrics. “they call the phenomenon ‘the brain zaps.’” begins the short poem-burst, “coup de foudre,” “I call it the air before a thunderstorm. / metal on your tongue. scent more / ozone than petrichor. harsher. / you’re all sweat and dizzy / from the buzz. the crackle of it.” Albert’s lyrics hold the tone and tenor of monologues, quietly performed, but performed nonetheless, holding gesture and truth across carved lines of syntax and angles, including the poem “top surgery and it’s completely different but also still / top surgery,” that includes:

it’s theorized the missing appendages from Greco-Roman statues
were a result of censorship. everyday wear and tear. trans ancestors
entrust me a chisel, there’s an angel in the marble to be freed.

 

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Alta Ifland

Alta Ifland was born and grew up in communist Romania. She came to the US as a political refugee in 1991 and, after a PhD in French language and literature (University of Florida) and a DEA at the University of Strasbourg, she taught for a brief period in academia, then worked as a book reviewer, a writer in her third language (English) and a literary translator from/into Romanian, French and English. She is the author of two collections of prose poems (Voix de glace/Voice of ice, bilingual, self-translated from French, 2008 Louis Guillaume Prize, reissued in an improved edition by Punctum Books in 2025; and The Snail’s Song) and two books of short stories (Elegy for a Fabulous World, 2010 finalist, Northern California Book Award, and Death-in-a-Box, 2010 Subito Press Fiction Prize of the University of Colorado). Ifland’s novels, The Wife Who Wasn’t and Speaking to No. 4, were published by New Europe Books in 2021 and 2022, respectively. Ifland’s latest novel, Two Queens and a Chronicler, was published in 2025 by Open Ends Press and Elegy for a Fabulous World came out in France this year in her own translation. Ifland represented Romania at "The Nights of Literature" in 2021 (New York) and 2026 (Paris). After 30 years of life in the US, Ifland now lives in France.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

            My first book (Voix de glace/Voice of ice, prose poems, first edition 2007) is bilingual, French/English, written in my second language (learned in school) and translated into my third (learned as an immigrant adult). Even though it received an important French prize, my life wasn’t changed in any way by it; only my CV. Since I self-translate myself, my translations are part of my creative work. My most recent work in English is an atypical historical novel, Two Queens and a Chronicler (New York, Open Ends Press, 2025) written as a dialogue between a Romanian-born American writer and two of Romania’s queens. My latest translation is the translation into French of my first collection of short stories written in English, Elegy for a Fabulous World (English edition, 2009; French edition, 2026). To compare these works would be like comparing two different identities. On the other hand, it would be interesting to compare the first edition of Voice of ice to its 2025 edition because the changes I made reflect major changes in my own life and mindset. I will give you only one example: the line from the poem “Mourning the country” (first edition), “What is a country? A fiction for the brainless” becomes “What is a country? An impossible land” (second edition).

2 - How did you come to prose poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

At the time, I was more inclined toward lyricism than today, and poetry is more open to lyricism than prose. The longer the form, the less lyrical. Also, English being my third language, it was easier to start with a shorter form.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

            The only one of my books that came out of copious notes is my first novel (as yet unpublished). Prior to this, I had written prose poems and short stories, and it wasn’t easy to move from them to a larger form with a coherent structure. Structurally speaking, there is a greater difference between a short story and a novel than between a prose poem and a short story. My other works (short stories, novels) are written without notes and with only a few changes. The only work standing apart in the way it was created is the first one (Voice of ice). I created the short pieces in French in my head, and only after several versions (all memorized and unwritten), I committed pen to paper, which meant that the written (final) version is different that the original (unwritten) one. That’s why I claim that this is a bilingual book without an original.

4 - Where does a prose poem or work of fiction usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

            Often, a prose poem or a short story comes to me from a specific rhythm or phrase that I’ve read somewhere. I write when I am inspired, even when I write novels—that is, I don’t suffer of “writer’s block” because I never force myself to write. When I start working on a novel, I don’t know all that will happen in it. Part of the pleasure of creating resides for me in discovering the form and the content of the work as it develops. While I have an idea about the work from the beginning, its manifestation always “betrays” the initial concept. I like to surprise myself.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

            I enjoy doing public readings, but they are certainly not part of my creative process. Like Proust, I distinguish between a public/social persona and a creative self.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

            I studied philosophy in France in the 90s and wrote my dissertation on the most “difficult” 20^th century French philosopher, Maurice Blanchot, so “theoretical concerns” are very much part of my writing. My non-fiction book (part memoir, part theoretical inquiry), Comment peut-on être Américain?/How Can One Be an American?, the result of a 30-year reflection on differences between American society and Europe, is scheduled for publication next year in France. It is a very complex work with a thesis about the creation of American identity linked to the creation of the country as a gradual conquest of land and of nature, which has triggered a subliminal desire to control nature and replace it with artifice and technology. Likewise, most of my novels address questions of cultural differences between the US and (Eastern) Europe, the construction of reality through language, and the different structures of thinking articulated in/through the language we speak.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

            A writer is someone who works primarily with language and offers a description of society or vision of the world through his/her work. Whatever the content of a writer’s work, what counts is the interplay between his/her inherently subjective selfhood and its objectification in/through writing. It seems to me that this vision of the writer is threatened in many Western societies and in particular in North America where a writer is now expected to regurgitate certain ideological dogmas and even use a ready-made language that reminds me of what we used to call “wooden language” under communism. While in communist Romania, this language was enforced by a dictator and a unique political party, in North America, this expectation comes from the cultural institutions, the academics and the writers themselves (not all, obviously, but those who occupy key institutional positions). It is a mystery to me how such writers don’t find this language repugnant and how they can imagine that by using it they are “fighting oppression.” If your language is made of slogans, ready-made formulas, academic jargon and ideological kitsch, no matter how well-intentioned, you cannot free anyone else because you are yourself unfree.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

            My experience in working with American editors was extremely negative because they attempt to rewrite your/one’s work according to their own vision of literature and what “good writing” is supposed to be, or worse, according to what they imagine readers want. I believe there are two main causes for this attitude: 1. creative writing programs and the culture of the workshop. I am aware that there are as many teachers as classes, and they are not all the same, but generally speaking, these programs and workshops have created a type of student that no longer regards a work of literature as the incarnation of a unique mind and sensibility, but rather, as a product that can be manipulated (made “better”) throughs some kind of collective or third-party input, whereby the latter is made of people who are there by chance and may have nothing in common with the author of the respective piece; 2. A hypercapitalist vision of literature and of the publishing industry, where said work is treated, as I said, as a product, and not as the materialization of a Subject’s mind and imagination. In the process of rewriting done by many editors, this Subject is utterly annihilated, which is even more ironic if said Subject happens to be an immigrant and the editors make a big deal of their “support” of immigrants. Usually, they support an essentialized abstraction called “immigrant,” but have no respect for the individual. It goes without saying that I don’t object to minor and necessary corrections of grammar and orthograph, but rather, to changes of style and vision. So far, my experience with French editors has been better (knock on wood!), though the younger ones are increasingly similar to their American counterparts.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

            I hate advice when it comes to literary writing because it’s based on the presumption that there is a “good” way of writing and in order to achieve it, one needs to take a class or listen to the best advice. In reality, what is good for one writer is bad for another. Therefore, I neither take nor give advice.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (prose poems to short stories to novels)? What do you see as the appeal?

            It has been a natural, organic process of moving from a “smaller,” more emotional genre to a “bigger,” more analytical one. Almost all my novels are satire or social criticism, while my short stories are absurdist and fable-like, and my prose poems have been described as “surrealist.” The longer I lived in the US, the more I had something (critical) to say about society, which could only be said in the discursive form of the novel in the tradition of realism.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

            I have no “typical” day because I suffer of severe insomnia, and when my day starts depends on how I sleep. But I generally start late and very slowly. I have coffee and read for about half an hour; I only write late at night. Sometimes I go to bed at 4 am.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

            I always return for inspiration to classics and writers I love. To which writers, it depends on the language in which I write at the time. If I write in French, my model is Proust. If in English, it depends on my mood.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

            Baked or grilled eggplant, which in late summer fills all the Romanian neighborhoods.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

            Many of the poems in Voice of ice were inspired by Northern California nature and its wild beauty. Some of the prose poems in The Snail’s Song are playful descriptions of small animals (snails, porcupines, turtles). As for visual art, I am sometimes inspired by film scenes, more rarely by paintings, though my first-published novel, The Wife Who Wasn’t, a satirical comedy about Moldovan immigrants in California, includes two characters who are painters of Orthodox icons (an art with specific rules that I describe in detail) and the theft of a painting by Egon Schiele. My second novel, Speaking to No 4, discusses architecture, more specifically, differences between French monasteries and Japanese temples.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

            I have been shaped emotionally by 19^th century Anglophone novels, and intellectually by 20^th century French writers and philosophers. But underneath them all are hidden Romanian and world folktales, which are the primary structure sustaining all the others.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

            Not much. I don’t have a bucket list, and I hate extreme sports and similar adventures. I have mostly bourgeois dreams: to travel. I lived for 30 years in the States, so I haven’t seen much of Europe, and I would like to see as much of it as possible. I haven’t even seen most of Romania, my country of birth. Outside of Europe, I would like to go back to Japan, a country whose culture I find fascinating and whose language I once attempted to learn. Learn Japanese, I suppose this could be a goal for the future.

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

            My dream was to be a figure ice-skater or a classical ballerina, but my parents were not the kind to encourage such ideas, and, alas, it is too late now. But I wrote a novel (as yet unpublished) in which the main character is an ice skater—fiction is the best revenge against life.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

            Maybe the fact that as a child and a teenager, my biggest pleasure was reading. Or maybe the fact that my first-grade instructor told me in front of everybody else that I wrote like a writer. Ever since, I’ve wanted to be a writer.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

I haven’t read a “great” book in a long time, but the most recent good book I read is Le Jardin des rochers by the celebrated Greek writer Nikos Kazantzakis, who wrote this fascinating novel about China and Japan in 1936 in French. The last great film: Que la bête meure (May the Beast Die), 1969, by French director Claude Chabrol.

20 - What are you currently working on?

            I am translating into French my second novel, Speaking to No 4, which will be published early next year in France.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;