What’s the vibe at your local coffeehouse?
We have three coffeehouses in the neighborhood, but I don’t spend a lot of time at them, honestly. We have our own espresso machine at home, and I drink a big Americano (espresso with boiling water) before breakfast, and then another espresso in the late afternoon.
Is dusk, like, the cut-off point in a day for drinking more coffee?
It really depends on the time of year. In the winter, when dusk is 4:30pm or so here in Chicagoland, yes! Dusk would be my cut-off point, or a little later. In June or July, when “dusk” would be 8:30pm or so, that would be too late for me. I wouldn’t be able to sleep if I were drinking coffee then.
How about gardening?
That one took me a minute! Nobody’s mentioned my ancient chapbook to me for ages now (Gardening at Dusk). It’s more likely you’d find me drinking coffee than gardening at dusk, though. My husband Rick is the gardener.
Christina Pugh’s fourth book of poems, Perception, is forthcoming from Four Way Books in 2017. She is also the author of Grains of the Voice (Northwestern University Press, 2013), Restoration (Northwestern University Press, 2008), and Rotary (Word Press, 2004), which received the Word Press First Book Prize. Her poems have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, and other publications; and her criticism has appeared in Poetry, The Emily Dickinson Journal, Literary Imagination, and The Cambridge Companion to American Poetry Since 1945, among others. Pugh is the recipient of a 2015 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship in poetry and a 2016 residency fellowship at the Bogliasco Foundation in Liguria, Italy. She has previously received fellowships and awards from the Poetry Society of America, the Illinois Arts Council, Poetry magazine, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Ragdale and Ucross Foundations. She is Professor of English in the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and consulting editor for Poetry.
Russell Bennetts co-founded Queen Mob's Teahouse in 2014.