The guiding principle of Six Ridiculous Questions is that life is filled with ridiculousness. And questions. That only by giving in to these truths may we hope to slip the surly bonds of reality and attain the higher consciousness we all crave. (Eh, not really, but it sounded good there for a minute.) It’s just. Who knows? The ridiculousness and question bits, I guess. Why six? Assonance, baby, assonance.
I met Rebe Huntman last year when we were both in Ohio for the Youngstown Fall Literary Festival. In the months that followed, I read her debut memoir My Mother in Havana, about a fateful trip Huntman made to Cuba. Throughout the book, Huntman asks big questions about belief, mortality, and human connection; throw in an unconventional structure and you have a deeply compelling read. I spoke with Huntman about her book’s origin, her connection to Cuba, and how her experience in other creative fields informed her memoir.
Immersion, the duo of Malka Spigel and Colin Newman, have been making acclaimed music for a while, both as a duo and through their work in Minimal Compact and Wire, respectively. Their latest album, Nanocluster Vol. 3, is (as its title suggests) the third installment in a series of collaborations. This one teams them with New York’s stunning “ambient country” band SUSS; the result is an atmospheric, textured collection of music. I spoke with Spigel and Newman to learn more about this new album and their overall approach to the project.
Poet and scholar (and anime enthusiast) Steven Leyva believes we – the human “we” – have been malformed by cruelty in ways that make it hard to recognize the beauty that moves through our lives and through each other.
For most of the 1990s, Tsunami combined deft lyrics and charged music to create some of that decade’s most enduring work. Now, the group’s discography has been collected by Numero Group as the collection Loud Is As, and the band is heading back on the road with longtime friends Ida. I spoke with Tsunami co-founder Kristin Thomson about the group’s return, the process of assembling the new collection, and the questions of art and ethics that they navigated then and now.
The work of Ursula Villarreal-Moura abounds with appealing qualities, from formal innovation to a penchant for reckoning with big ethical questions. Her debut novel Like Happiness tells the story of Tatum, a young woman who forms a connection with a writer she’s long admired — and later comes to question certain things she’d long taken for granted about that relationship. I talked with Villarreal-Moura about the genesis of that novel, writing about feeling at home, and finding the right structure to tell this story.
The title of Paula Whyman’s Bad Naturalist says a lot. It’s a memoir by a person bonded with plants and animals who wants to restore a meadow on recently acquired property in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. What could go wrong? Just about everything. What could go right? Just about everything. The book embraces “failure” with abundant, self-deprecating humor. Along the way, readers get an education in all kinds of natural phenomena, replete with strange facts and curious discoveries. Whyman weaves her personal story in with the history of the region, and the indigenous people whose footprints long preceded white settlers. Through tragedy, mishap, and triumph, Whyman covers the gamut in delightful prose. I caught up with her by email.
The guiding principle of Six Ridiculous Questions is that life is filled with ridiculousness. And questions. That only by giving in to these truths may we hope to slip the surly bonds of reality and attain the higher consciousness we all crave. (Eh, not really, but it sounded good there for a minute.) It’s just. Who knows? The ridiculousness and question bits, I guess. Why six? Assonance, baby, assonance.