Magdalena Ball Ball has an English Literature honors degree from the City University of New York, studied at Oxford, and has business and marketing degrees. Her editorials, short stories, poetry, articles, and reviews, have appeared in many journals and anthologies, winning several awards. Her poetry books include Unmaking Atoms, Repulsion Thrust, and Quark Soup; her novels include Black Cow and Sleep Before Evening. (The Art of Assessment is nonfiction.) She collaborated with Carolyn Howard-Johnson in several poetry books and has a radio show and a review site. Finally, Magdalena is a research support lead for a multinational company.
Tell us about your highly successful review site, Compulsive Reader:
I started Compulsive Reader nearly 20 years ago (!), after a website I’d been writing reviews for folded. …
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In the aftermath of my father’s terminal cancer diagnosis, I “repatriated” myself into small town life in my hometown in rural Minnesota.
Among the major cultural differences between life in downtown Chicago and a prairie town of 1,500 people (population, ethnic food, lack of diversity, etc.) lie a few more insignificant quirks. Everybody knows each other. The same woman has been working at the grocery store since I was a child, my best friends’ parents run many of the businesses in town, people I don’t even recognize call me by name when I see them at the library. And because of this connectedness, one cannot simply mail a package or buy the newspaper or stop in to the butcher for a round tip steak without answering a line of questioning that always began with:
“How is your Dad doing?”…
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1.
There is a joyful terror to writing, to scratching an itch that doesn’t want to be scratched but must be if any comfort is to be sort. Writing is an abject feeling that, before the act, leaves one hollow-mouthed and begging.
2.
What lies in the undergrowth of our lives can be felt without words, in emotions that appear more like atmospheres superimposed upon the world than anything factual or real.
3.
Words have a pleasure that’s hard to deny. A putting down that solidifies on one side while opening up on the other. And what’s on the other side but endless interpretation, a hinterland of fragments and dreams left up to readers to stitch together with the resources of their minds.
4.
What is so terrifying is the fact that one’s words may appear faulty, lack-luster, or clichéd; that your innermost world is riddled with soap-opera fantasies whose presence on the page expose one’s own faulty mechanisms of imagination.…
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C.M. Crockford is a Philadelphia writer with poetry, genre fiction, and criticism published in No Recess Magazine, Oddball Magazine, and Dead Gothic Resurrected, among other zines and journals. His work has also appeared in Nasty Women & Bad Hombres: A Poetry Anthology.
In this episode of Cover to Cover with . . ., Editor-in-Chief Jordan Blum speaks with Crockford about the intersectionality of being a Philadelphia, creative writer, and music critic, as well as current pop culture hot topics like the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the controversy surrounding Channel Awesome, and more!
– C.M. Crockford…
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When I made the decision to move from Chicago, my residence of eleven years, to my parents’ farm in rural, southwestern Minnesota for an undefined period of time, anchoring was not my main goal. I wasn’t anticipating a revival in spirit, a broadened understanding of love, a fullness of opportunity, an infatuation with the horizontal expanse. I was expecting a few months of quality time with my parents, some time to develop my pottery skills, and space to think about the next thing.
Of the lessons learned in these seven weeks, including awareness and space, my latest is the role of scarcity in rural life. Out here on the prairie, the sky is everything–it’s all horizon. To quote Naomi Shihab Nye, “There is a therapy in fields.…
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The first work of Sheila Heti’s that I read was her book How Should a Person Be?, a novel about being an artist—or, more specifically, a novel about being a woman and an artist, and how those two things inform and sometimes resist one another. The book was extremely polarizing; some reviewers found it riveting in its experimentation, while others found its content indulgent and its lack of form irritating. I was enamored by it, as Heti has an extraordinary ability to capture the convergence of creativity and self-doubt while voicing thoughts most people believe are unsayable.
Like How Should a Person Be?, Heti’s latest novel, Motherhood, isn’t for everyone. For people who turn to books primarily for their plots, this is not the one (or the writer) for you.…
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Ana Maria Spagna lives with her wife, Laurie, in a remote community in the North Cascades accessible only by foot or boat. She is the author of several books, such as Reclaimers (stories of people reclaiming sacred land and water), the memoir/history Test Ride on the Sunnyland Bus (winner of the River Teeth literary nonfiction prize), The Luckiest Scar on Earth (a novel about a 14-year-old snowboarder), and three collections of essays: Potluck, Now Go Home, and Uplake: Restless Essays of Coming and Going. Her writing on nature, civil rights, LGBTQ issues, and life in a small community has appeared in many journals and magazines, including, Orion, Ecotone, Hotel Amerika, the Normal School, Creative Nonfiction, and Brevity.
In this episode of Cover to Cover with .…
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