TCR Talks with Mag Gabbert, Author of SEX DEPRESSION ANIMALS

By Dannah Elizabeth In her first full-length poetry collection, SEX DEPRESSION ANIMALS, UC Riverside-Palm Desert alum Mag Gabbert explores the fragmented meanings of language. With striking imagery, she transports readers into a dreamy world where words might be mistaken, misused, or reduced. Drawing from etymological research, Mag Gabbert uses experience and associations to create new portraits of relationships and sex. Playfully weaving myths and research, she challenges readers to examine their own word histories. We spoke to Gabbert about the power of language, her journey to getting the collection published, and how the collection’s title came to be. THE COACHELLA…

TCR Talks with Belinda Huijuan Tang, Author of A Map for the Missing

By Betty-Jo Tilley Belinda Huijuan Tang’s A Map for the Missing journeys back and forth from the 1970s through the ’90s in the US and China. Protagonist Tang Yitian—his surname given in honor of the author’s family—has spent fifteen years in the United States as a college math professor. In the opening pages, he receives a frantic call from his mother, begging him to return to the small rural village he has not seen since he left home, because his father has gone missing. Outside this mystery, the book is also a tale of brotherhood, featuring Yitian’s older brother, Yishou,…

TCR Talks with Paul Tremblay, Author of The Pallbearers Club

By Rebecca Lauer Paul Tremblay has been speaking to so many interviewers lately that when I started our interview, he responded by discussing the wrong book: after I asked my first question, he answered by mentioning the point of view of Wen, the little girl in his novel The Cabin at the End of the World, which was adapted by M. Night Shyamalan into the movie Knock at the Cabin, which premiered earlier this month. “Oh,” I interrupted him. “I mean for The Pallbearers Club.” He was happy to change the subject. In The Pallbearers Club, the book’s fictional author,…

TCR Talks with Max Gee, Screenwriter of Standing Woman

By Shelbi Glover Adaptations are a daunting specter for a screenwriter. When done well, a film adaptation can cement itself as equally important as its literary counterpart; The Godfather, No Country for Old Men, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Rashomon all come to mind. Then there are the adaptations that, for one reason or another, sour on screen and eventually fade into obscurity. But Max Gee, a UC Riverside-Palm Desert alum, rose to the challenge with her recent short film, Standing Woman. Based on Yasutaka Tsutsui’s short story by the same name, Standing Woman is the harrowing and heartbreaking tale…

TCR Talks with Ryan Dusick, Author of Harder to Breathe

By Yennie Cheung When drummer Ryan Dusick left Maroon 5 in 2006, his public statement explained that the nerve damage in his shoulder, sustained from incessant touring, had grown too severe to perform. In reality, the physical pain wasn’t his only hindrance. He’d also grappled with anxiety and alcoholism—an addiction that worsened as he grieved the loss of a band he’d founded in high school. After years of struggle and recovery, Dusick reveals his truth in the memoir Harder to Breathe: A Memoir of Making Maroon 5, Losing It All, and Finding Recovery. With a forward by frontman Adam Levine,…

TCR Talks with Margaret Elysia Garcia, Author of Graft

By Maxamina Muro In Graft, a collection of short stories set in Whittier, just outside of Los Angeles, Margaret Elysia Garcia explores Mexican goth, serial killers, saints, sexuality, and David Bowie. Garcia captures elements of Los Angeles County that are familiar to everyone who lives here, namely that suburbs just outside of the city can feel like another world. Most of the characters in these stories exhibit their own version of Hollywood glamour, whether that means trying to find a way in front of the camera, risking their lives in the process, or dressing in homage to pop stars who…

TCR Talks with Author and Translator Kianny N. Antigua

by Maxamina Muro In our daily lives, we can communicate with people who speak and read entirely different languages with the aid of translation software, though it works best with brief pronouncements. To communicate entire stories, whether a novel, short story, or poem, we need human translators like Kianny N. Antigua. Antigua uses the Spanish language to communicate the complexities of human interactions and is able to translate not just the words on the page but their meaning. Antigua’s translation work connects cultures. It pulls back a curtain that allows a writer working in English to reveal stories for those…

TCR Talks with Pete Hsu, Author of If I Were the Ocean, I’d Carry You Home

Interviewed by Luree Scott In Pete Hsu’s short story collection If I Were the Ocean, I’d Carry You Home, the struggles and sorrows of childhood are brought to light with a fully compassionate view. Family, friends, and strangers change the trajectory of one another’s lives in small ways that are rarely noticed, but Hsu has a way of enlarging moments of intense emotional conflict to show how sometimes it really is the little things that develop so largely in our hearts. While the first six stories are more focused on the perspective of children and how their emotions develop as…

TCR Talks with Shifting Earth’s Cecil Castellucci

Interviewed by Michael Medina Cecil Castellucci does it all. In addition to writing for DC Comics (Batgirl; Shade, the Changing Girl; Female Furies), she pens music, opera librettos, novels, and everything in between. With her new graphic novel, Shifting Earth (illustrated by Flavia Biondi and colored by Fabiana Mascolo), the award-winning and New York Times bestselling author brings a “hope punk” take on climate change. In the book, a dangerous particle storm (based on true global events) brings Maeve, a botanist, and Zuzi, an astronomer, on parallel journeys to save their respective universes from impending climate doom. Through Castellucci’s careful…

TCR Interviews Erika Krouse

By Kaia Gallagher   An award-winning novelist and short story writer, Erika Krouse published her first book of nonfiction, Tell Me Everything: The Story of a Private Investigation, in March of 2022. Described by The Washington Post as masterful and mesmerizing, Tell Me Everything recounts Krouse’s role as a private investigator who gathered evidence during a five-year investigation into a culture of sexual assault within a university football program. Krouse’s efforts to interview witnesses who were victims of sexual violence and gang rape were complicated by her own history of childhood sexual abuse. As a result of the compelling testimony…