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Mieke's Ladder
Gabriel Ricard reviews the book by A. R. Lamb and interviews the author, January 2009
"From an early age I felt that manual work would be the best accompaniment to developing an individual style as a writer (influenced no doubt by archetypes such as peasant-poet and noble savage.) So, after dropping out of university, where I'd quickly become even more disillusioned with the notion of literary criticism, I went to work as a farm-labourer, then spent a few years in the building-trade before ending up in a bronze-foundry."
CPR for Dummies
Gabriel Ricard reviews the book by Mickey Z. and interviews the author, October 2008
"I'd say every 'real' human has a secret of some kind, and it tends to gravitate towards behaviors or events you wouldn't expect them to be associated with. I'm often surprised to learn something about a fellow human that shakes my perception of them. So, I guess I'm just doing the whole art imitates life thing."
Tilting at Windmills: A Discussion with Tim Barrus and Mary Scriver
by Eavan O'Callaghan, August 2008
"Most of my work is buried. I go underground. I don't know how you can continue to look forward and create new work at the same time you're always defending your existence from people who are literally — no metaphor — going after your life from three steps back in the past. You call it tilting at windmills. I call it survival. I'm embattled. The people in my life are embattled."
Tatterdemalion
Gabriel Ricard reviews the book by Ray Succre and interviews the author, June 2008
"I always start blank, in the sense that I don't begin with an outline. I let that take form in the early portions of the book. Like all of my writing, I started mingling a few ideas to see what would happen. Things happened. By the third chapter, I had the book outlined in my head. After the initial draft, I went back and rewrote the beginning. I have a similar process with poetry, which I write from the inside out, never from beginning to end."
Poetry and Politics at Guantánamo: An Interview with Marc Falkoff
by Andy Worthington, June 2008
"Thought up by the Council on Foreign Relations, and by some hyper-Conservative opinion-makers, 'lawfare' theorists suggest that terrorists get lawyers to tie up military commanders with lawsuits, invoking international law and forcing soldiers to second-guess the manner in which they engage with the enemy, for example. But in fact 'lawfare' is what the US military is doing at Guantánamo, tying lawyers up in endless knots by filing frivolous motions..."
An Interview with Ānanda Selah Ösel
by Ali N. Marcus, April 2008
"Ösel has been hyper-critical of light verse poetry and spoken word alike and seems to have a general dislike for much of the literary world if not the general population. These critical tendencies are reflected in Ösel's poetry and as more and more people begin to read his work you have to ask yourself if he's the next poetry genius or just a nutcase with a pencil."
Bizarro Is My God-Baby: An Interview with Tom Bradley
by Barry Katz, April 2008
"Your female cop does swagger through Lemur, doesn't she? Tossing around epithets like "sister-boy" and "prissy pants," bashing male suspects' heads out of shape with her billy club while shrieking, "How many quarts of spooge are we gonna find when we pump your stomach today, Nancy?""
An Interview with Gregory Sams
by Andrew P., reprinted March 2008
"Much of the clientele came from the new psychedelic trance party scene in the UK. Musicians, dj's and promoters were coming in and getting blown away by seeing, in print, the patterns and colours that they had been experiencing in some of their travels as psychonauts. I made friends with many of them, and when they all disappeared to Goa for the winter I ended up joining them and became very involved in that whole Goa party scene..."
The Outsiders of New Orleans: Loujon Press
Gabriel Ricard reviews the DVD by Wayne Ewing and interviews the director, January 2008
"In 2005, a friend of mine from Hunter Thompson's kitchen circle —Curtis Robinson, who became my co-Producer— asked me to shoot an interview with "Gypsy Lou" Webb since his friend Professor Jeff Weddle was writing a book about the Webbs (Bohemian New Orleans: the Story of The Outsider and Loujon Press) just to preserve her memories on camera since she was in her nineties."
The Portable Obituary
Gabriel Ricard reviews the book by Michael Largo and interviews the author, October 2007
"I was in first grade I think, when we had drills to get under the desk in the case of a nuclear war with Cuba and Russia during the Kennedy years. They showed us films how a nuclear holocaust turned people into instant skeletons—I had nightmares about that for years."
Notable: An Interview with Alan Lastufka and Kate Sandler of ZineWiki
by Gabriel Ricard, May 2007
'I added an entry to Wikipedia for Alex Wrekk, who publishes Brainscan zine and the book about zines, Stolen Sharpie Revolution...Wikipedia deleted that entry claiming she was "non-notable." For someone who had given so much to the zine community, it was ridiculous that she didn't deserve an entry based on their standards. So I decided to start a site dedicated to cataloging every zine published, with historical information on each entry and a cover scan, etc.'
An Interview with Ellaraine Lockie
by Pablo Teasdale, April 2007
"First of all, pen names no matter what gender, are great fun, and they have a way of becoming alter egos. For instance, I often use mine in public. Everyone at the local Starbucks where I write every morning knows me as the first name of one of my pen names."
An Interview with The Poet Spiel
by Charles P. Ries, April 2007
'Any number of pieces in my books might be interpreted as graphic "this" or "that"—all in the mind's eye, isn't it. An old friend interprets my incest piece as a beautiful revelation of flesh between mother and child. For me, it's one of my most horrifying poems. I'm an adventurous writer who takes the stance that there're no limits to what good poetry can be about, nor how it can be expressed.'
An Interview with Carol Novack
by Charles P. Ries, June 2006
"...it's not a matter of one e-zine rising to the top like la crème de la crème (a tired phrase I find absurd). There's no big Olympics for artsy e-zines, thank the cybergods. There are quite a few excellent online magazines, and hundreds or maybe thousands of mediocre ones, and worse, and far worse."
An Interview with Rania Zada
by Jonathan Penton, June 2006
"So when we came down, and I was getting ready to leave, the guy said to give him his money, since I wasn't willing to do any more with him. And he took a gun, and put it in my face. So I gave him part of the money. Looking back on it now, keeping part of the money was a really stupid thing to do. But at the time, I wasn't willing to spend all those hours with those people and not get any money."
An Interview with Oasis
by Gabriel Ricard, November 2005
"...since I've started doing this I've found the entire industry very empowering for women, particularly in the amateur market. For instance, I do what (or who) I want to do, when and how I want to do it. I am in charge of how it is marketed and distributed. I'm in complete charge of the image that I want to project to the world. That is extremely empowering."
Afghan Myths: An Interview with Anssi Kullberg
by Sam Vaknin, September 2005
'Al-Qaida is not only fortifying itself physically, but also socially. At the same time their cells and countless collaborating agencies - some of whom are clearly non-Islamist, and some of which are government agencies of certain hostile states - are hoping to escalate this "war against terrorism" and to exploit it for their own purposes.'
We Ain't No Fancy Nerds!: The Pablo Teasdale Interview
by Christopher Robin and Brian Morrisey, July 2005
"That’s my advice to everyone that wants to be happy. Throw a brick through your TV. I did it once. It wasn’t on. I’ve always wanted to do it to one that was on. It was still really nice, the implosion, because of the vacuum tubes, a cool noise. My fantasy is to go into a major department store that has rows and rows of televisions with a machine gun."
An Interview with Utah Phillips
by Gabriel Ricard, June 2005
'I don't really have any plans for it. I've made my living for thirty-six years being alive in front of people. That's consistent with something I feel very strongly about, that Joseph Campbell once said. "All we want is to be completely human and in each others' company. And we are in each others' company less and less." I wanna get away from the machines, and I wanna keep moving, keep traveling, keep singing, and keep talking to people and being alive.'
An Interview with Avalon Frost
by Danielle Grilli, March 2005
"Most producers have thousands of beats, some of them more complete than others, so we talk it out and then start listening to what they have to choose from. I am very involved and will usually make suggestions about the melody, timing, keys, additional instrumentation, etc. and we build it together from there. Other producers will have pretty much everything finished, but are looking for the right voice to make it complete."
An Interview with Joe Bageant
by Andrew P., February 2005
"I took classes along the way, but never cared about any kind of serious program. I just studied what I wanted, painting, history, writing, comparative religion, and journalism. It was the Sixties and I didn't give a fuck about degrees or jobs. I wanted to design my own intellectual life."
An Interview with Henry Rollins
by Gabriel Ricard, December 2004
"I don't think that any band needs to be able to live like shit in a van for years. I think they need to play with total commitment and passion. How does Ashley Simpson fit into that? The bland music trotted out so crassly to young people is often so tame to me. I wonder, why is an old man like me more pissed off and wanting a band to fuck shit up more than some 18 year-old?"
An Interview with Sketta Lee
by Avalon Frost, November 2004
"Something everywhere in the air is inspiring if you know how to catch it right. This interview right here is actually inspiring me to make a song about a guy that just always wanted to be famous and tries his whole life and sees with determination, anything comes!"
An Interview with Thokozani Mthiyane
by Aryan Kaganof, November 2004
"as much as a lot of good is attributed to books in the history of human beings so much pain also is a consequence of books and ma experience with books has been both a pleasurable and an agonising one - as long as i've read history, philosophy, poetry and certain novels ma life has been very uneasy and burdened with questions about the authenticity of our contemporary existence"
An Interview with Elisha Porat
by Gilmana Bushati, September 2004
"Oh yes, my real life is not my writing, and my writing definitely is not my real life. The commitment an author makes to writing is like an another existence, a second life. I know it sounds like a pat explanation, but I think it's the reality that writers encounter. Authors whose private lives mimic their writing, and vice versa, suffer greatly. To live your life as you write is to accept a certain agony. The separation between art and reality is essential."
An Interview with August Highland
by Aryan Kaganof, June 2004
"The transgender bartenders kept flirting with me and I was still pretty naive and almost found myself in an awkward situation from which I was rescued by a very lovely Tahitian girl to whom I lost my virginity on the same secluded strip of beach where I spent my days studying my Joyce and my Latin grammar."