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;

 

Emily Skaja, Black Lake: poems

 

I let rain trample me flat
as a cluster of ditch lilies
while I breathe in
the recommended exhaust. 

Anesthesia sloughs off my skin
so a forge of white heat
can shine up my skeleton,
making me new. 

As that fucker Ezra Pound insisted. (“Make It New”)

The second full-length collection from Memphis-based poet Emily Skaja, following Brute (Minneapolis MN: Graywolf Press, 2019), is Black Lake: poems (Graywolf Press, 2026), a book-length suite that works through the spectrum of grief through the loss of a child. “You lived & died in one long summer.” she writes, to open the poem “Future Fig,” a poem that also offers, a bit further on: “I once killed three summers of tomato plants / before I found, to my surprise, / a whole uninvited cucumber / shoved up out of a crack in the concrete. // This is the kind of thing, in my era / of grieving, that passes for parable.” Organized across five numbered section-clusters of first-person lyrics, Skaja composes poems almost as short scenes or thought narratives, the collection as a whole providing a narrative through-line of enough grief that one could get entirely lost within it. And yet, she does not, finding the only way past grief is through. As the poem “Black lake, black boat,” early on in the collection, begins: “black fog I can’t find my way / through. Black trees, black / moon. I once knew the sky / from the water. This course / I remember, its narrowing. / How I crept my way down / the ladder like clutching / the gluey rungs of a throat.”

Set in five numbered section-clusters of lyrics, there’s a clear-eyed precision to Skaja’s articulations on and around grief, articulated best, perhaps, through this section of the three-page poem “What’ll It Be, Hon,” that reads: “It wasn’t a black hole of depression / so much as an all-night diner of depression / & I’d been going there as a regular // for months—eating the icebox pie, drinking / the hot-dog coffee, calling everyone Rita— / when suddenly a whole crowd of people // joined me in my spot. It turned out, / depression was on trend.” These poems work through the lengthy and difficult trajectory through grief, a relationship that can’t help but change, over time, and articulated very different than the work of, say, South Bend, Indiana poet Joyelle McSweeney [see my review of her latest here], who has also written extensively across the grief of losing a child. Sometimes the worst part of grief, as she articulates moving through election day, the Bible Belt, poetry and spring, is that it occurs during and across normal life, both seemingly unaffected by the other. Or there is Skaja’s poem “Poetry Makes Nothing Happen,” referencing W.H. Auden’s infamous line from his 1939 poem “In Memory of W.B. Yeats.” As Skaja’s poem reads, in full:

Black lake of sorrow, unholy excess,
to you I confess my shame—I wanted
to draw a line around the violence
of the world, contain it in language,
let cruelty take someone else’s hand
& turn my back on it to save
this single square of tenderness
for myself. For that to be possible.
Such important work, this little art
of divining omens in the fire
only after it swallows everything.
Turning to no one to say, Look—
when I point to blood in a black puddle,
at the way it reflects the stars.

Maggie Burton, a temporary grace: short stories

Brent is at the corner of Prescott and Duckworth. The pin hasn’t moved since around one, when Brent said he’d arrived at the noodle place. Sheryl, let him get off the phone, flushed the toilet, and went back to her cubicle.
            Last night they’d had one of their worst fights ever. Sheryl had thrown a citrus squeezer at Brent’s head, getting lemon juice in his eye. An hour late getting home from work, he’d had the nerve to say it was because his co-worker Nadine wanted to talk about her mom’s cancer. But Sheryl wasn’t stupid. No one cheated on her. While Brent put a cold cloth on his burning eye, Sheryl made him give her his phone so she could turn on location sharing. After all, he said he had nothing to hide. (“location sharing”)

Is there anything that St. John’s, Newfoundland “writer, professional violinist, former municipal politician, and medical student” Maggie Burton can’t do? Following her debut poetry title, Chores (St. John’s NL: Breakwater Books, 2023), a collection awarded the 2024 Canadian First Book Prize by the Griffin Poetry Prize, comes a temporary grace: short stories (Breakwater Books, 2026). What first appear to be rather straightforward narrative stories clearly aren’t, fourteen narratives that each follow a main characters who don’t seem to understand how lost they are. “Outside the coffee shop, Steve is sitting in his car, a vintage Subaru Outback. Wasting time until the last possible minute before going inside to meet a new client.” begins the story “a dog for jennifer,” “In between meetings, he shares a funny video with Corinne, the girl he’s been seeing. She doesn’t respond. He sends it again.” Each of these stories articulate characters that desperately seek connection, but manage to make a mess of things, through a sequence of poor choices, refusal to see what the reader might see, or simply ignoring their own self-preservation for the sake of some kind of grace. Even, one might suggest, a temporary one.

Through clean, sharp prose that knows to hold its own music while propelled by and through narrative action, Burton is very good at establishing characters that don’t know what they don’t know, and perhaps never will (until, perhaps, it is far, far too late), through a collection that, as the back cover offers, “weaves together a series of interconnected stories that navigate the complexities of dating in the post-#MeToo era and through the oppressive forces that trap us in outdated patterns.” She understands conflict really well, and perspective, writing around abusive partners and lost marriages, betting all your chips on the wrong horse, desperately reaching out into the dark. Her stories weave their ways through characters who are abusive but refuse to see it, or are manipulative, completely lacking in self-awareness for their actions. She writes characters and situations remarkably well, articulating characters that often feel trapped, whether through circumstance or the inability to understand their own agency. This is a sharp collection focused not just on character, but on the messiness of relationships, whether through the beginnings of something that doesn’t go far, explodes in a ball of flame, or slowly simmers across years until it finally falls cold. This is a very good collection.