Interviews - Vilnius Review

Details: Interviews; 04 July 2019

So my text grows like an infant – rocked and carried around. It’s a really pleasant and delicate sensation. When I sit down to write, everything is already done and clear to me. All that’s left is the technical bit.

Details: Interviews; 07 June 2019

The idea of freedom is very important to me – the freedom to choose, to make mistakes, to make decisions and thereby live an authentic life, as much as that is even possible. Perhaps that’s what some readers of Malalietka found to be abnormal: the narrator behaves as she sees fit, not caring about the opinions of others, seeking to test every “truth“ herself.

Details: Interviews; 21 March 2019

And anyone who wants to write poetry should be reading contemporary poetry, and they should be asking themselves if the language they are using is right for their experience, or are they just re-hashing old themes with the same old linguistic devices?

Details: Interviews; 22 January 2019

Interview by Saulius Vasiliauskas

One of the most active translators of Lithuanian literature into English is Romas Kinka.

Details: Interviews; 21 December 2018

Interview by Saulius Vasiliauskas

But mature understanding of one’s past only comes later. To change the image, the past is clay and memory and memoir are sculptures that have been fired and made permanent by the imagination. Giving form to the past fixes it, perhaps fictionalizes it, perhaps puts a gravestone upon it. It is also a way reconciling oneself to the past, of looking back, in my case not in anger, because I have so little to be angry about, but with wry amusement at the callow youth I was at that time.

Photo by Monika Požerskytė, courtesy of Lithuanian Culture Institute

Details: Interviews; 07 March 2018

Interview by Jurga Tumasonytė

My family’s story about the decline in status of my great-grandparents always sounds very sad and very funny at the same time. This humorously sorrowful story can be read in its entirety in the prologue of the book Blue Blood. And when I took on the historical material, I was overcome with different emotions entirely. It was a great surprise and horror.

Details: Interviews; 15 November 2017

Interview by Saulius Vasiliauskas

Domestic, undomestic, creativity—all of this is merely one huge buzzing lump of life, and as I said before, I like living very, very much, amen.

Details: Interviews; 29 June 2017

Interview by Saulius Vasiliauskas

I understand memory as an organ of the human psyche that is capable of resisting the indifference of historical time. It seems to me that attention to and love for certain places, such as, for instance, one’s space of residence in the city, enhances this organ. Then we also begin to feel the natural connections with the fates, thoughts, and texts of people who used to live in that place.

Details: Interviews; 12 June 2017

Interview by Birutė Grašytė

Words come from the lump in the solar plexus. Then, assisted by the hand and a ball-point pen, they are laid down on paper. (Vytautas Stankus).

Details: Interviews; 24 May 2017

Interview by Erika Lastovskytė

Lawrence Schimel is an award-winning writer, translator, and publisher at A Midsummer Night’s Press. As a publisher he passionately looks for voices that need to be heard to make this world a culturally and socially rich place.