Managing Editor Eric Smith spoke to Will Schutt about Italian-Swiss poet Fabio Pusterla, whose poems, translated by Schutt, appeared in our Spring 2019 issue. Schutt, author of the 2012 Yale Series of Younger Poets award-winning collection Westerly, discusses Pusterla’s poetic lineage, ambulation in poetry, and the effect of translation on his own work.

Once Miriam Toews—a Canadian novelist raised in the small Mennonite town of Steinbach, Manitoba—heard that in an ultraconservative Mennonite colony in Bolivia, women and girls as young as three were being brutally violated in their own homes, waking with little to no memory of what had happened, she couldn’t shake the story.

I am convinced that the magic of AWP is the persistent and necessary reminder that there are so many of us, and so many others writing and reading; the most unexpected and fun literary conversations—spanning in subject from Homer to Patricia Pollaco’s and Allen Say’s children’s books—I had were with my Uber drivers.

I love literary magazines and journals. I love the variety, the diversity, and the doors that have opened because of technology. To me, literary journals are the grass roots of publishing, and the Submittable system has helped make the life of literary journals more viable.

Our staff is gearing up to trek from Tennessee to Portland, Oregon next week for the annual Association of Writers and Writing Programs' Conference and Bookfair. AWP is our chance to catch up with contributors and friends, sometimes meeting for the first time writers whose work we have published. We'd love it if you came and said hello at Booth T7028.

The Spring 2019 issue of the Sewanee Review publishes online on March 18, and the print version will begin arriving in mailboxes later that same week. The issue took shape nearly a year ago.

If you see the sonnet’s architecture underneath my poem, then that architecture, its foundation, is what makes the poem possible. The architecture inaugurates something to speak. How could I possibly want to dismantle that?

My only rule to myself with these stories was that something needed to happen. No fair just throwing pretty language at the page. They had to do the usual heavy lifting of storytelling that is, by my lights, fiction’s job.

I was happy. I slept in their bed,
I read the mysteries on their shelves.
 
Always something precious gone,
someone hot on the trail.