Amazing Stories: Interview: Amal El-Mohtar

For this fortnight on Amazing Stories I had the pleasure of interviewing the amazing Amal El-Mohtar. She is an author, poet and publisher (Goblin Fruit Poetry Journal) who just oozes beauty of expression in everything she does. Here's a snippet of the interview:

Diane Severson Mori for Amazing Stories Magazine (ASM): Tell us a little about yourself, how you came to poetry and about /writing and about the genesis of Goblin Fruit. 

Amal El-Mohtar (AE-M): When I was about seven years old or thereabouts, I was living in Beirut and reading anything with pages. I loved the italicised bits in The Hobbit, and the language in my children's version of A Midsummer Night's Dream, so I wrote a poem to the moon full of thees and thous and rhymes like "light" and "plight." My parents encouraged me, telling me about my grandfather who was a poet imprisoned and tortured for his politics, telling me that poetry (and, I guess, rebellion) ran in my blood. My father taught me about rhythm by reciting lines from Shakespeare's sonnets with full iambic emphases. I grew up taught that poetry was something to speak aloud and be proud of, and I'm very grateful for that.

Please go to Amazing Stories for the full interview!

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