March/April 2004 
Greater than the Sum: How Do Poems Make a Book
Marnie Bullock Dresser
Years ago, an earnest but misguided student of mine interpreted the number 829 preceding Emily Dickinson's poem "Ample Make this Bed" as 8:29, the time showing on a digital clock right next to the ample bed. (She was either a budding postmodernist or had missed the lecture on Thomas John's arranging of Dickinson's poems, as well as, perhaps, the sentence in which I mentioned Dickinson had been dead more than a hundred years. Or perhaps it hadn't occurred to her that digital clocks have not always been with us.)
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An Interview with Timothy Liu
Christopher Hennessy
One of the nation's most prolific poets under forty, Timothy Liu is the author of five books and is the editor of the over 400-page, seminal Word of Mouth: An Anthology of Gay American Poetry (Talisman House, 2000).
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Literature and Fear: The Harrow and Hilarity of the Dark Side
Chloe Bland
Births, weddings, love affairs-life's traditionally joyous occasions-are fantastically riddled with the possibility for humiliation, scandal, and death. The pairing of heartbreak and hilarity is everywhere, profound disturbance often punctuated by eerie affection.
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Staking the Claim of the Title
Nance Van Winckel
I can't recall a day I wasn't on the hunt for a title. When don't I have a poem or story in need of one? My title antennae remain in a permanent up position.
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Translating Ideas: What Scientists Can Teach Fiction Writers About Metaphor
Debra Fitzgerald
This is a quest, an exploration underwritten by curiosity, self-interest, and fear. It begins with the reading of a little novel that opens in Bern, Switzerland, 1905. An unknown, twenty-five-year-old clerk with Biblical hair and baggy trousers waits at his desk in the Swiss patent office for the typist to arrive.
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An Interview with Nora Okja Keller
Sarah Anne Johnson
Nora Okja Keller was born in Seoul, Korea, and grew up in Hawaii, where she attended the University of Hawaii. In 1995 she received the Pushcart Prize for a short story, "Mother Tongue," which later became a part of Comfort Woman, her first novel and winner of a 1998 American Book Award. Fox Girl is her second novel.
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