Camille Dungy on her garden, writing from the provinces, and the poetry of Anne Spencer. 

Dorothea Lasky on The Shining, writing what you fear, and the ferocity of color.

Merlin Sheldrake on fungi, creativity, and the queerness of nature.

Elisa Gonzalez on bisexuality, humor, and working in finance.

Joyelle McSweeney on sound, style icons, and the Ovidian landscape of her ear canal.

Sara Henning on radical truth, obsessive forms, and letting go of grief. 

Philip Metres on middle age, writer's block, and praying for the people of Palestine.

April Gibson on chronic illness, religion, and being a teenage mother.

Declan Ryan on his father's construction job, tenderness between boxers, and the inevitable tragic end.

Monica Rico on cooking, grunt work, and the heat at General Motors.

Nam Le on commerce, irony vs. sincerity, and being in the Arctic. 

Gregory Pardlo on improv, therapy, and driving around with his father’s ashes.

Caitlin Cowan on rejection, tradwives, and poems from our better self.

Blake Butler on complex mourning, the suicide of his wife Molly Brodak, and finding his way back.

Remembering the lesbian poet and activist Minnie Bruce Pratt, as well as the Palestinian poet and symbol of the resistance, Refaat Alareer.

Steve Zeitlin and Bob Holman on the healing act of writing, small frogs, and politics at the fiddle festival.

Laura Mullen on academia, death threats, and doing the next brave thing.

Daniel Brock Johnson on risk, a T-shirt mantra, and life after the death of his friend James Foley.

Sebastian Merrill on the voice of his former self, the underworld, and laughing during yoga.

 Sahar Muradi on cyclical time, leather butterflies, and saying goodbye to her father.

Sean Cole on loneliness, fear of aging, and what poems can do.

Eric Sneathen on queer utopia, bad writing, and San Francisco in the ’70s.

Irène Mathieu on pediatrics, suburbs without a TV, and our body's unknown terrain.

Natalie Shapero on Wheel of Fortune, babysitting for her landlord, and pretending not to grieve.