smoke and mold publishes interviews with writers and artists whose work speaks to our mission.
If you would like to pitch an interview or suggest an interview subject, we hope you’ll reach out to us.
Rooting in the Rot: Saskia Nislow on decay, the bodily limits of horror, and the unconscious dialogue between clay and language
Interview by Luke Sutherland
Somewhere in Saskia Nislow’s fridge is a lemon, slowly growing a skin of mold. It rolls around in the crisper, trailing a scum of spores, waiting to be noticed. To be needed.
Of Space, Scale & Diasporic Moons:
Rani Som on comics, trans geographies, and longing for a sense of home that never was
Interview by Luke Sutherland
Rani’s is a body of work with a distinct visual language: the precise lines of a city rub elbows with the delicate texture of watercolor; figures transcend, dance through, and disappear into their landscapes; time moves backwards, or in every direction at once.
Planting Seeds for Other People: noam keim on fragmented narrative, invasive species, and inviting the reader into the shared struggle of the text
Interview by Luke Sutherland
noam doesn’t love a bird as an object; they love the relationship a bird offers, the opportunity for deep observation, for slow understanding. So it is with a bird, and so it is with all things. noam’s patience runs deep.
Ground Lines: Charlie J. Stephens on animism, being a present witness, & running an indie bookstore
Interview by Luke Sutherland
Reading Charlie’s debut novel A Wounded Deer Leaps Highest, though, I was surprised to find a language in kinship with my own. Here was someone else just as captivated by the figure of the animal, the non- or more-than-human, as I am.
The Complex Simplicity of Translation:
Roque Raquel Salas Rivera on Transdecolonial Poetry and the Buchipluma
Interview by Alton Melvar M Dapanas
Sketched by trans feminist scholar Emma Heaney as “the great modern poet of fidelity and treason,” Roque Raquel Salas Rivera is a poet, activist, scholar, and translator from Borikén—or what is colonially known as the unincorporated American Empire territory of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico.
“Scar tissue doesn’t bleed”
Olivia Madeline Abigail on “Therapeutic Phlebotomy,” body horror, and awe
Interview by Cal Angus
When it came time to discuss “Therapeutic Phlebotomy” in our editorial meeting where all editors and readers come together to discuss every piece that’s been submitted for consideration, there was universal excitement and universal unease.
Speak My Name, Break Me Open:
Moncho Ollin Alvarado on the Cihuayollotl
(“Heart of a Woman”)
Interview by Alton Melvar M Dapanas
Poet, novelist, translator, and visual artist Moncho Ollin Alvarado is a Cihuayollotl (a gendered identity which literally means “heart of a woman”) and Xicanx (a gender-neutral term for Mexicans born and raised in the United States).
Walking the Archive: An Interview with Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore
Interview by Cal Angus
It’s an unseasonably warm fall afternoon in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood, and Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore and I are on our knees touching the greenest, bounciest moss I’ve ever felt.