Interviews with Winter 2025 Authors : Emilie Mendoza, Kyah Tappmeyer, and Catherine Liu
- julian32019
- 6 hours ago
- 8 min read
Interview Questions by Rishi Janakiraman, Grace Marie Liu, and Aisha Weththasingha
Interview Answers by Emilie Mendoza, Kyah Tappmeyer, and Catherine Liu
Get an inside look into the creative minds of the Winter 2025 authors! In this special feature, we sit and talk with Emilie Mendoza, author of "Moth-Eaten Scapular", Kyah Tappmeyer, author of "Shovels and Knives", and Catherine Liu, author of "Him".
Interview with Emilie Mendoza
Author of "Moth-Eaten Scapular"
Rishi: Just as a starter—how did you get into writing? I’m obsessed with your voice in “Moth-Eaten Scapular,” the way the speaker has such a proximity to the reader, while still not going too deep into confessional territory. There’s an economy in your language. You’re able to balance restraint with emotional proximity. How did you find this original voice?
Emilie: I have always been an avid reader and occasionally tried my hand at creative writing when I was younger, but really got into it in the summer of 2022, when I attended a writing workshop for the first time. I found myself surrounded by peers who loved to write and it was like I had discovered a whole different world. The voice in my work is significantly shaped by my relationship to language itself as a non-native English speaker. When I write, I tend to engage with poetry as a way to verbalize that which there are no words for, which sometimes means translating the untranslatable. Often, this results in a push and pull between meanings — different balances of it uncover new parts of a poem.
Rishi: I adore religious imagery, too, so one of my favorite lines in your poem is “your psalms won’t change that.” The psalms—prayers rooted in divine supplication—are rendered powerless against the material breakdown of the port. Do you enjoy working with religious overtones in your work? In “Moth-Eaten Scapular,” how do lines like these function in the larger context of the piece? Do you consider them critiques, disillusioned remarks, or something else entirely?
Emilie: I use religious overtones in my writing often, though “Moth-Eaten Scapular” is one of the poems where I do so most explicitly. In this poem, religious imagery functions as a way to universalize my own attempts to understand the intersection between religion and culture in a Panamanian context (the “pearls and / crosses” of the second stanza are a reference to a real rosary I have worn with our cultural dress). I see those lines as an attempt to make sense of how it all comes together: tradition, change, and thought.
Rishi: Your later use of anaphora is also striking. The repetition of “I wondered” resounds, reading like a meditation—or even a compulsion. What was your intention in using anaphora here? Did you see it as a way to convey the narrator’s internal restlessness, or perhaps “I wondered” as a kind of self-voyeurism? The speaker is watching themselves think, obsessively interrogating their own perceptions. How does this inward gaze shape the tone and emotional resonance of this piece?
Emilie: I see the repetition of “I wondered” in “Moth-Eaten Scapular” as a foil to how the speaker reflects on habits like prayers and traditions like setting off fireworks. Though wondering is seen as a more open state of searching by the speaker, it ultimately becomes another action they repeat in order to hold on to something constant, in the same way they would a prayer or yearly firework show. The speaker is keenly aware of their own questioning, while also missing the ways in which their thoughts remain the same. Emotionally, it resonates because self-reflection has its own limits, as much as we may wish otherwise.
Rishi: The theme of absence feels central to this piece. The muted fireworks, the darkened house, the disrepair of the port—all these absences in turn create a sense of fullness that feels deeply alive. It reminds me of Mahmoud Darwish’s collection In the Presence of Absence, where loss becomes not just something to mourn but also something to live with. How do you see absence functioning in your work—as an erasure, a space for memory, or something else entirely? Darwish often treats absence as a catalyst for creation. Do you see absence in your piece as generative—a space where the narrator can wrestle with meaning—or is it more of an oppressive void? How do you balance this twoness of loss and creation?
Emilie: Absence in this poem is never about void. The loss the speaker feels is of that which they had previously known to take up space (the noise of fireworks, the light in the house, the past state of the port). Those spaces are not left empty, but the change catalyzes the speaker’s introspection. “Moth-Eaten Scapular” treats the theme of absence as a part of memory. This is how the poem avoids the extreme ends of outright loss and outright creation, while still oscillating between being and not being.
Emilie Mendoza is a writer from Panama who primarily writes poetry and flash fiction. Her work has been previously recognized by Synthesis Publications, Eunoia Review, and more. She is an incoming undergraduate student at Harvard University and excited to have her work in Polyphony Lit!
Interview with Kyah Tappmeyer
Author of "Shovels and Knives"
Grace: Immediately, I’m compelled by the “you” of “Shovels and Knives.” How did you decide to position the “you” within this economy of power? How does the “you” refract and shed light on the speaker? In other words, in examining the relationship between the “I” and the “you,” what are you exploring about this space?
Kyah: When writing this piece, I wanted the “you” to be automatically a menacing presence. The “you” serves to evoke emotions in the speaker that reveal more about their personality and how they handle stressful situations. I think the true intentions of the “you” matter less than the emotions and thoughts the protagonist experiences in reaction to them. The “you” is necessary to strike a specific fear in the speaker, which allows us to learn things about the speaker, such as their knowledge of music and responses to threatening situations.
Grace: I admire this piece for its fluid sense of tension, sustained via repetition—the action of digging “deeper, wider holes”; the narrator’s metamorphosing “piano hands”; the shimmering, shattered shot glasses. How do you approach constructing and weaving images together to create suspense?
Kyah: I think for this story, I wanted to create the sense of time slowing down. The protagonist is processing what she sees outside the window and growing progressively more horrified. Her actions are very deliberate as she attempts to wrap her mind around exactly what her fate is going to be. I chose the repetition and lots of description to try and mimic the tempo of that thought process. I also just love repetition in writing for emphasis, especially on ideas or emotions that are really bothering a character.
Grace: Tell me a little bit about your writer’s process. How does a piece take shape for you? To what extent are your choices deliberate, and how much do they emerge subconsciously?
Kyah: When I am trying to write fiction, I usually start with an emotion or impression I want the reader to experience when reading the piece. From there, I decide where they got that emotion/where that impression originated and ask myself where did that emotion take them? What did they do with it? I try to be very intentional with the plot and word choice.
Grace: Lastly, who are some creatives who have been deeply influential in your own practice?
Kyah: I love Billy Collins and Mary Oliver poetry, and the lyricism of works such as The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros, and I am always inspired by my grandpa, Mark Tappmeyer, who is a retired English teacher and published poet. He taught me to love poetry and look for ways its rhythms manifest in prose.
Kyah Tappmeyer is a homeschool graduate and current college freshman from Louisville, Kentucky. In addition to creative writing, she is also a history lover and enjoys sewing historical reenactment clothing and reading Jane Austen novels in her spare time.
Interview with Catherine Liu
Author of "Him"
Aisha: The character of the brother is so intricately crafted and has so many nuanced details that really bring him to life and make him feel incredibly real. How do you go about creating characters like this? What does your process of making these characters feel three-dimensional look like?
Catherine: To me, characters become three-dimensional when they have depth, which comes from contradictions and lots of gray areas. One of the things I have always found very moving in certain stories is when the narrator sees another character holistically — noticing their flaws, being angry or sad or terrified of them — but loving them despite that. I have always found that very realistic. I don’t have a strict process for creating characters, but I try to incorporate things I’ve liked about how other authors write theirs — for example, one of my favorite authors, Sally Rooney, often incorporates many little details that you never really think about, such as somebody picking their luggage up by the handle because they’re anxious about it making noise. That makes them feel incredibly lifelike to me.
Aisha: “Him” has such a strong casual storytelling voice in the sense that it feels very conversational and is from the point of view of someone still trying to figure out their thoughts about their situation. I personally really loved this choice, but I’d love to hear it from you, directly: what message were you hoping this would convey, creatively? Was there a reason you chose this specific style of writing over any other?
Catherine: I think I was mostly trying to convey a sense of pain. I chose that specific style of writing, the lack of punctuation, because I think it gives dialogue a different feeling, as if it’s less separated from the narration. I wanted everything to feel sort of like a stream of consciousness, messy, because the narrator is jumping through different moments in her life in trying to grapple with her brother’s death. I felt the writing style gave it a more dreamlike feeling.
Aisha: The ending was one of my favorite parts of the entire piece, as it felt so neatly tied together and really finished the piece with such a strong and final blow. However, even with all the implications weaved into the ending, there is still some room open for interpretation in regards to the brother. This is often a stylistic choice for some authors, so I’m wondering if this is a choice you make often? Why so? And how did you feel it impacted “Him” in particular?
Catherine: This is a choice I often make. I think it stems from my own reading habits: I really enjoy reading endings that make me think and leave a lasting impact. I think it affected “Him” through leaving enough details about the brother and the narrator to feel their impact on each other, but enough out so that many parts are left up to the reader’s interpretation.
Aisha: This piece, although labeled fiction, discusses a tragic experience that countless people could relate to themselves. On a personal level, how does writing stories such as “Him” affect you? Does this overlap in any way with how you’re hoping others are impacted while reading your stories?
Catherine: To me, the feeling of the character has always been the most important. I think it affects me in the sense that I put a little bit of my own life and emotions into different characters, so I can sometimes see myself in them or feel close to them. When others read my stories, I hope that they’ll be able to understand the character’s emotions and relate to parts of it — that’s my biggest goal in writing, that the reader is able to feel immersed in the story and thereby impacted by it in some way.
About Polyphony Lit
At Polyphony Lit, we believe that every piece of writing is valuable and every writer shows potential, regardless of whether their work is accepted for publication. Since our founding in 2004, we've received submissions from students in 87 countries and 52 U.S. states / territories. Our student editors have given feedback to every submission, over 21,000 and counting!
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