TCR Talks With Michele Filgate

July 13, 2019 Interview
By: Felicity Landa

Shortly after Michele Filgate’s deeply personal essay about her relationship with her mother was published on Longreads, it went viral. “Our mothers are our first homes, and that’s why we’re always trying to return to them,” she begins in her poignant and moving piece. In her essay, Filgate breaks her silence to tell the story of why her relationship with her mother is so painful.

“I wrote this essay because I felt like we couldn’t have this conversation in real life,” she tells me during our interview. In doing so, Filgate unearthed a community of people who also had stories about all the things they couldn’t talk about with their mothers. “Knowing that something can speak to a stranger and make them feel less alone, and really resonate with them—that’s the power of words,” she says. The overwhelming response to Filgate’s words gave her the idea to compile an anthology named for her original essay: What My Mother and I Don’t Talk About.

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TCR Talks with Elaine Grogan Luttrull

April 22, 2019 Interview TCR Daily
By Anjali Becker

Elaine Grogan Luttrull is not your average CPA. Through her company, Minerva Financial Arts, Luttrull works to build financial literacy in creative professionals and creative arts organizations, helping people figure out how to make the business side of their creative ventures a financial reality.

Luttrull is also the author of the book Arts & Numbers: A Financial Guide for Artists, Writers, Performers, and Other Members of the Creative Class, a resource for writers (and creative professionals of all stripes) who intellectually understand that financial literacy is important but may not be entirely clear on where to begin.

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TCR Talks with Sirje Kiin

March 19, 2019 Interview Poetry TCR Daily
BY: KAIA Gallagher

Sirje Kiin is an Estonian writer, poet, and journalist currently living in South Dakota, and the biographer of Marie Under, one of Estonia’s best-known poets.

Born in 1883, Marie Under established herself as one of Estonia’s premier poets in the beginning of the twentieth century through her expressionist and neo-romantic poems. Her early poetry explored themes of happiness, joy, and erotic love. Later, during the 1920s, she addressed topics related to justice and death, with lyrics that merged dark, apocalyptic visions with a yearning for happiness and all-embracing love.

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TCR Talks with Helene Stapinski

February 27, 2019 Interview Nonfiction TCR Daily
BY: Lindsay jamieson

 

Helene Stapinski is a best-selling author of three memoirs: Five Finger Discount: A Crooked Family History, which has been made into a documentary; Baby Plays Around: A Love Affair with Music; and her latest, Murder in Matera: A True Story of Passion, Family, and Forgiveness in Southern Italy. Her essays have appeared in several anthologies, including Drinking Diaries: Women Serve Their Stories Straight Up.

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TCR Talks with Karen Bender

January 30, 2019 Interview TCR Daily
BY: A.M. Larks

Karen E. Bender is the award-winning author of Refund, A Town of Empty Rooms, and Like Normal People. Her latest work, The New Order, is a collection of highly political short stories that discuss tragedy, isolation, and terror. The New Order dives headfirst into the current cultural milieu by addressing sexual assault, gun violence, the perils of social media, and the life of Jewish Americans.

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TCR Talks with Abby Geni

January 16, 2019 Fiction Interview TCR Daily
BY: A.e. SANTANA

Abby Geni is the award-winning author of The Lightkeepers and The Last Animal. Her latest novel, The Wildlands, explores the traumatic repercussions of a category five hurricane when it hits Mercy, Oklahoma, and demolishes the home of the McCloud family. Orphaned, the children attempt to go on with their lives but are swept into a world of dangerous, fanatical eco-terrorism that is both frightening and understandable. Through their story, Geni examines the turbulent state of our natural world and plays with the line between saving the planet and destroying ourselves.

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TCR Talks with Min Kahng

December 21, 2018 Interview Plays TCR Daily
By Grace Jasmine

 

Min Kahng is an inspiring and inclusive force in the San Francisco Bay area theater scene. The world premiere of his most recent play, The Four Immigrants (based on the historical, groundbreaking manga panel-drawn comic strip by Henry Kiyama), premiered at the innovative TheatreWorks, Silicon Valley, and won the Theatre Bay Area Award for Outstanding Original Musical, the Edgerton New Play Award, and an NAMT Production Grant. The Four Immigrants chronicles the lives of four Japanese students as they immigrate to the California bay area.  Kahng has also been the recipient of the Titan Award for Playwrights.

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TCR Talks with Ruth Nolan

November 19, 2018 Interview Nonfiction Poetry TCR Daily
BY: Nathania Seales Oh

In a time when the power of a woman’s voice rings louder and clearer than ever, Ruth Nolan is putting her money where her mouth is. From the beautiful ecopoetry in her latest project, Fire and Rain: Ecopoetry of California, where she acted as coeditor and contributor, to her deeply personal poetry collection Ruby Mountain, Nolan is, in a word, an activist. She is a profound advocate for the respect and conservation of the California desert, a landscape she has always called home. She speaks not only to its beauty but also to its transformative power. Nolan tells of our relationship, history, and encroachment upon lands where wildfires have burned for centuries. Yes, it’s true. Wildfires are not a new thing. Our living in the places where they unfold, is. She also reminds her readers, students, and fan base of the importance of speaking your truth. As we witness this watershed moment in time, The Coachella Review is honored to spend time in conversation with the passionate and incomparable Ruth Nolan.

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