What are you doing now?
I work in France as a high-school English teacher, I also translate, and spend a lot of time writing poems. Eleven40seven helped me a lot in terms of learning how to work with other people on aesthetic projects, organizational skills, and InDesign.
What position, if any, did you hold in eleven40seven?
I started as a poetry editor, then general editor, and finally became editor in chief.
What was your favorite part about being on staff?
Favorite part of being on staff was reading/looking at submissions and debating which to include — trying to built a coherent “story” or “theme” out of the disparate items we received.
What made you want to join and how did you hear about the magazine?
I found out about eleven40seven back when they were calling TCU Literary Underground. There was a cool poster with a submarine by a water fountain. It happened to be the day of the meeting, it was raining like crazy outside, and I happened to be in the building. Also, there was pizza.
What does “art” mean to you?
It’s difficult to say intelligent things about “art”, so I’ll cite Rimbaud and develop from there: first, “true life is absent”, second, art can “change life”. I am tempted to say, at risk of revealing a bias towards poetry, that art “articulates” life. It is the only activity I know of that consistently values human life, and it does so by allowing new forms of living, by which I mean vitality, emerge into the Real — which is, I think most would agree, a very inhospitable environment.