Editor Interview

Edith Krone Interview

Dearest dogs of the yard, today is a great day. 6 months ago, Mar Prax and I met for lunch and talked about things we wish we could do. Today, we do one of those things. In the past six months, we have worked diligently to turn this idea into something concrete and I am so blessed for you. We've done a lot of great work, read a lot of great work, and had a lot of great people help us along the way. The dogyard, like all of us, is starving for something in these trying times. We're scrappy, we're new, we're showing our teeth, we're here, and it is so fucking cool.

Today, I am grateful to answer questions from one of my favorite people in the world, Mariya Kurbatova. Bless Mariya and how she asked me over 60 questions. I am giving excerpts but feel free to check in when the entire thing is eventually uploaded here.

Thank you for being here with us, and the list of gratitude extends to all of our editors and mutts. Thank you to Jace, Grace, Mariya, Nicolle, and Laurie for those early conversations to identify what the yard even was. Thank you to our mutts and our editors for forging this landscape with us. Over the next week, we'll be having a bit of fun across Bluesky and Instagram. We hope you find something to love here and hope you can contribute to the yard by submitting your fiction, nonfiction, poetry, essay, and visual art/graphic narrative! If you're more of a reader only, we deeply love and appreciate you and hope your stay in the yard is bountiful.

Want to join our small writing contest? Look here ₍ᐢ.  ̫.ᐢ₎

What’s your name? 

Edith Krone  

Where are you writing/calling/interviewing from? 

<Edith’s full address has been redacted> 

What's keeping you busy these days? 

I am currently knee-deep in three different projects. I have a poetry book that keeps growing, even when I think it's finished. I have a form book that keeps pushing me and is so fun, as well as trying my hand at CNF for the first time. A teacher recently put me in contact with a writer from Stanford who sent me a big book on learning poetic meter and I’m trying to force myself into that as well. 

What is something that recently moved you? 

I go to poetry readings often. I think one thing I’m constantly trying to grapple with is the fact that poetry isn’t commonly consumed by the lay-person. I want everyone to read poetry—I want poetry to take over the world. However, the group that was reading and the audience... Not a single person there wasn’t an MFA that is obnoxiously dedicated to the craft. I think poetry exists in this weird sphere where it is both hard to attract readers because of decades of “wrong thought” and the so-called contemporary is still two hundred years old in most classes. The other side of the coin is people don’t read but they love writing. It is where a lot of writers start! These platforms and spaces require you to be in constant conversation with one another. Poetry is a very alive mushroom, constantly soaking in and sharing different nutrients. It may be parasitic or it may be fulfilling, that is not for me to decide. I just know I love how we can communicate through roundabout ways.

What's the first thing you do when you get an idea for a poem? 

Oh I pop off. No matter what or where, I start writing. I have written in public bathrooms, waiting lines, on the side of the road, really anywhere. 

What's your poem writing process? 

I am a cross-stitch poet. I usually have a few lines or ideas I am working toward and these are my little anchors across the poem. Everything is built on or held down by those notes. 

What poem took you the least amount of time to write? 

There are a few poems that were one-sitting ideas. I think maybe it was this dumb, obnoxiously long poem lamenting a break-up that I was definitely not prepared for but inevitably the best for the both of us. I regret writing that poem in so many ways but it is something that felt required for the reader to understand the larger project and the sheer amount of grief I was going through and how it affected not only me, but the ones I loved as well.  

Which one took you the longest? 

I have been working on one poem for eleven months now? It is a sequence poem that eventually got up to fifteen-pages before I toned it down to nine. I'm around 30 drafts in and no closer to being finished than I was ten months ago, haha. (It is now 12 pages again. 38 drafts in, yeesh.) 

Who is your favorite teacher? 

Bless Emily Skaja, who taught me how to be a writer in a way which was real rather than just a business person. I also praise Rebecca Gayle Howell, a current professor who will inevitably join the ranks of some of the greatest. Bless Geffrey Davis and the ways he can calm my over abundance and has given me so much direction in ways that no one else can. In other ways, Crane, torrin a greathouse, Whitman, Ginsburg, Ovid. So many in my literary heritage. 

Why do you think you're the most popular girl in our MFA program? 

The University of Arkansas has been desperate for a mean girl. We’re all very active and forcing people to go dancing or to random readings, no one does it like us. I always wanted to be a prom queen or cheerleader but I was either just too man or just too lame. Now we’re in my element. 

If you have a superpower, what would it be? 

Shape shifting or transformation-type stuff. You get all the great things of invisibility (being too small to be seen) and somewhat superstrength and flight! This is also me soft-launching my entire career where I spend the next sixty years writing Ovid fanfic. 

What's something you can't do? 

So much. I’m a very incomplete person. I can’t do my taxes. I can’t not eat the same meal thirty times a week. I am a creature of habit. 

What's the best compliment you've ever received? 

No matter what group I write in, I often get the note “I can’t explain why it's working. It probably shouldn’t, but you made it work.” Davis McCombs said this to me last semester, followed by “I’ve not seen language used in that way, very interesting.” and I wear that with pride. 

How many cat breeds can you name in 10 seconds? 

Calico, turquoise, Persian, sphynx, orange, tuxedo, uh. Uh. Maine Coon. Bobcat. Are these breeds or colors? (Correction: turquoise is not a cat breed. Tortoise shell is.) 

What did you want to do with your life at age 5? 

I wanted to be a singer/songwriter! I wrote my first poem at that age and it was really a love song for this girl in kindergarten. It, like most of the subsequent love poems later, did not work. 

What's one goal you are determined to achieve in your life time? 

Up until recently it was to rewrite the southern narrative, but I am reidentifying my identity at the moment. I’m hopeful to have 25 books. I don't know if the number looks big or small for others. I mean real substantive individual books. I have so many ideas and I will be heartbroken to not give my all before I clock out for good. 

Interview Questions by Mariya Kurbatova

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