Between The Covers : Conversations with Writers in Fiction, Nonfiction & Poetry

One of Le Guin’s lesser known but lifelong practices was that of a translator. Her translations of the first Latin American Nobel Prize Laureate in literature (and the only Latin American woman to receive the award), Gabriela Mistral, were the first truly substantive presentations of her work in both English and Spanish. She’s translated other poets and novelists from Chile and Argentina (Angélica Gorodischer, Diana Bellessi), as well as individual poems by Rilke and Goethe. And for many decades she worked on her now much beloved rendition of Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching. Le Guin also reread the Aeneid in Latin as part of her preparation to write her final novel, Lavinia, Le Guin’s retelling of that classic epic of Virgil’s but from the point of view of a voiceless woman in the original. There were many feminist choices and considerations that went into both how Le Guin translated and who she chose to translate. That is also true of today’s guest Maria Dahvana Headley who has done both a contemporary feminist retelling of Beowulf in her novel The Mere Wife and who has also translated, to much critical and public acclaim, Beowulf itself, engaging with both the masculinity in the original and the misogyny inserted by various male translators over the centuries. She, like Le Guin, has also engaged with the Aeneid. Her ten-part musical adaptation of the epic is forthcoming. Together, we look at questions of feminist translation in both Maria and Ursula’s work and explore multiple theories on why Le Guin’s novels inspire many of today’s woman writers engaging with classical texts. If you enjoyed today’s conversation consider joining the Between the Covers/Crafting with Ursula community by becoming a listener-supporter of the show. Receive resource-rich emails with each episode, joining the collective brainstorm of who to invite in the future, and choose from a wide and deep selection of potential rewards and gifts, including rare Le Guin collectibles. Check it all out at the show’s Patreon page. Finally here is today’s Bookshop.

Today’s guest Dionne Brand, to borrow the words of John Keene, “is without question one of the major living poets in the English language.” Kamau Brathwaite called Brand “our first major exile female poet.” Adrienne Rich described her as “a cultural critic of uncompromising courage, an artist in language and ideas, and an intellectual conscience for her country.” Dionne Brand is, as well, a celebrated and beloved novelist, essayist, filmmaker, editor, activist, and thinker. But today, with the release of the landmark work Nomenclature: New and Collected Poems, which gathers eight volumes of her poetry between 1982 and 2010, and includes a new book-length poem never before published, today we center her poetry, and look at why she considers herself a poet first and foremost. What does stepping back together, and looking at her body of work across the decades, tell us about her poetry over time? How is time itself related to her deep engagement with Black life and liberation in her writing? How does Brand employ language as a means to gesture toward an otherwise, an elsewhere, in order to both write toward a future and from a future time? For the bonus audio archive Dionne Brand contributes readings from two of the most-anticipated releases of 2023, a reading from poet Canisia Lubrin’s fiction debut Code Noir and a reading from Christina Sharpe’s Ordinary Notes. This joins a robust archive of supplemental material from Nikky Finney reading from Lorraine Hansberry’s diaries to Myriam Chancy reading and teaching from a passage of Jamaica Kincaid’s to a craft talk on the art of narrative seduction by Marlon James. To learn how to subscribe to the bonus audio and the other potential benefits of joining the Between the Covers community as a listener-supporter head over to the show’s Patreon page. Finally here is today’s Bookshop.

“White supremacy makes for terrible readers” says today’s guest Elaine Castillo, arguing that we are all overeducated in a set of fundamentally terrible reading techniques, ones that impoverish us as readers and thinkers, ones that diminish the availability of meaning and meaningfulness in our lives. When Castillo says “read,” and suggests that how we read needs a reevaluation, she is indeed talking about books. But not only. “How to read” extends to what we watch—television, movies, the news—to how we read our histories, and ultimately to how we read the world. What if we aren’t really reading in the true sense at all? And what would a real reading practice, one that is not extractive but one that itself endows meaning, what would it do for us as readers, or as writers or art-makers or activists, and most importantly, as thinking and feeling people in the world? Join Elaine Castillo as she challenges us to re-vision reading. If you enjoy today’s conversation consider joining the Between the Covers community. Every supporter, regardless of level of support, gets resource-rich emails with each episode, and can participate in our collective brainstorm around what future guests we should invite on the show. There are also a wealth of gifts, rare collectibles, the bonus audio archive, and more available to choose from. You can check it all out at the show’s Patreon page. Here is today’s Bookshop too.

Today’s conversation is about one of Ursula K. Le Guin’s most iconic and influential essays: The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, an essay that deserves an entire episode to itself. And who better to discuss it than Lidia Yuknavitch, whose latest novel Thrust follows a character who herself is a “carrier.” Because this essay has influenced not only an incredible number of writers but anthropologists, visual artists, filmmakers, performance artists, scholars, and musicians as well, we weave in the voices of others, across disciplines, as we talk about and unpack this work of Le Guin’s. The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction interrogates questions of labor and economy, and interrogates gender in relation to inherited story forms, and looks at the power of story, both to tell and to silence. Le Guin’s essay is her way to reimagine the shape of a story, to dethrone the hero to allow many less familiar and stranger stories to find their way. And she invites us all in to figure it out with her. If you enjoy the Crafting with Ursula series consider transforming yourself from a listener to a listener-supporter. Every supporter gets a resource-rich email with each episode chock full of things referenced in the conversation and things discovered in preparing for it. But there are a ton of other goodies, from rare Le Guin collectibles to the book Ursula and I did together, Ursula K. Le Guin: Conversations on Writing, and much more. You can check it all out at the show’s Patreon page. And lastly, here is today’s Bookshop.

Claire Schwartz’ poetry collection Civil Service looks at the ways ordinary, everyday actions uphold and sustain state violence, the ways civility can and does serve extraordinary atrocities. The world of this collection, populated by civil positions—The Accountant, The Archivist, The Curator, The Intern—also has within it a fugitive voice, a disruptive voice, the voice of Amira. Her voice, if not beyond language, nevertheless reaches to its edges, reaches beyond the dominant meaning-making of the system that precludes her, reaches toward and imagines an elsewhere and an otherwise. Our conversation ranges widely, weaving Claire’s thoughts on her own work with the writings of Paul Celan, June Jordan, Gwendolyn Brooks, Edmond Jabès, Dionne Brand, and many others. All in service of asking what it means to write poetry towards love and revolution. Claire also contributes a reading of Edmond Jabès to the bonus audio archive. Joining an ever-growing wealth of supplemental material, from Alice Oswald reading from the Book of Job to Jen Bervin reading from the letters and prose of Paul Celan and then one of her poems under his influence. The bonus audio is only one of many potential rewards of becoming a listener-supporter and joining the Between the Covers community. You can check out everything at the show’s Patreon page. Lastly, here is the Bookshop for today’s conversation

Morgan Talty’s collection of linked short stories is set on the Penobscot Reservation on Indian Island in Maine. But Morgan is quick to point out that these stories are not Penobscot stories in so far as they do not ‘represent’ the Penobscot people, that even people who are praising the book are often falling into this trope of “exoticized foreknowledge.” As we talk about his acclaimed debut fiction collection, we talk about this term (coined by David Treuer), about the problematic ways people often come to literature written by Native Americans, and the ways Talty himself subverts these expectations. We talk about symbols in stories, about the challenges of being the sole well-known Penobscot fiction writer, about writing in a way that does not perform indigeneity for the white gaze and much more. For the bonus audio archive Morgan contributes a reading of his essay “The Citizenship Question : We the People” which extends our discussion from the main conversation about blood quantum, Native identity, and questions of belonging. This joins an ever-growing archive of supplementary bonus audio, including from indigenous writers Terese Marie Mailhot, Elissa Washuta, Brandon Hobson, Natalie Diaz, Layli Long Soldier, and Jake Skeets, among many others. To learn how to subscribe to the bonus audio archive and about the many other potential rewards and benefits of joining the community of Between the Covers listeners-supporters, head over to the show’s Patreon page. Lastly, here is the Bookshop for today’s episode.

Ursula K. Le Guin’s biographer, Julie Phillips, joins “Crafting with Ursula” to talk about the writing mother, how Le Guin’s embrace of both writing and motherhood influenced her engagement with feminism, as well as with story form, and ultimately how it prompted her to develop a philosophical framework from which to re-vision her own work going forward. Julie is not only the perfect guest to discuss this because of the regular conversations she had with Le Guin over the years, but also because she is the author of The Baby on the Fire Escape: Creativity, Motherhood and the Mind-Baby Problem. This book looks at six writing mothers, from Audre Lorde to Doris Lessing to Angela Carter to Ursula herself, and how they each navigated becoming and defending a life as both a writer and as a mother. If you enjoyed today’s conversation consider becoming a supporter of the show. There are many potential rewards and benefits of doing so, from resource-rich emails with each episode, to bonus audio from past guests, everyone from N.K. Jemisin to Ted Chiang, to rare Le Guin collectibles. You can check it all out at the show’s Patreon page. Finally here is today’s conversation’s Bookshop.

Daniel Mendelsohn’s latest book you could say is about digression and about ring composition, a form of storytelling with digression at its heart. And yet this book, about digression, is not only his shortest and most concise, a mere 112 pages, but also somehow contains all the concerns of his previous books and much more, distilled down into a tight hypnotic spiral. A book about Homer and the Hebrew Bible, about the Odyssey and the Holocaust, about forced migration, exile, and unexpected hospitality, about Proust, Sebald, Auerbach, Fénelon and many others lost to history. But ultimately it is about representation and narrative. Of how best to represent something in a way that feels most true, whether when telling a story, performing a play, building a monument, or creating a memorial. Three Rings is as much a meditation on art-making and writing as it is a meditation on memory and remembering; the mysteries of both, and also the thorny political and ethical questions that arise when choosing to represent reality in one way or another. A conversation rich with references, you can find many of the books mentioned in today’s conversation at the Bookshop for today’s episode. If you enjoyed today’s conversation, help ensure the future of in-depth conversations just like this by becoming a part of the Between the Covers listener-supporter community. Find out all the potential rewards and benefits of doing so at the show’s Patreon page.  

The Immortal King Rao is somehow three narratives in one, a historical novel set within a Dalit community in 1950s India, a near-future tech dystopia on the islands of the Puget Sound near Seattle, and an immigration story from the former to the latter. As a technology reporter herself, Vauhini Vara is interested in artificial intelligence in relation to writing and narrative, and she has found an ingenious tech-assisted point of view to tell this story of India and the United States, of caste and capitalism, of corporate governance and the anarchist resistance to it, in the most novel of ways. This may be the only podcast you listen to this year where pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis, the longest word in the dictionary, is spoken. Surely it is the only one that looks at everything from artificial intelligence to anarchism, Ambedkar to Gandhi, global capitalisms to global feminisms, and questions of representation, diversity, and erasure within everything from technology itself to whose stories get published and read. During today’s conversation Vauhini mentions many books by Dalit authors (as well as books about Taoism and anarchism and capitalism) and we’ve collected many of them in today’s Bookshop. Vauhini’s contribution to the bonus audio archive is also of note. She reads from and discusses her award-winning essay “Ghosts,” which engages with an artificial intelligence called GPT-3. Vara believes it is a technology that could be useful for writers that are having trouble finding the language for something that defies words, much as her engagement with GPT-3 helps her find a way into the grief she felt about losing her sister, something until then she had been unable to write into. This joins bonus audio from so many others: from Viet Thanh Nguyen reading and discussing Maxine Hong Kingston to Ted Chiang reading his essay on why Silicon Valley fears super-intelligent A.I. You can find out more about subscribing to the bonus audio and about the many other potential rewards and benefits of becoming a listener-supporter and joining the Between the Covers community at the show’s Patreon page.

“People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by them,” says Ursula K. Le Guin. “From within.” This is just one of many quotes that arise from Le Guin’s high regard for the child reader and for the unique intelligence of children. Her philosophy around the importance of the imagination and of imaginative fiction is also rooted in this regard for children. Le Guin’s respect for their unique intelligence, on its own terms, connects to many of her other concerns as well, whether ecological, political, cosmological, or literary. So we are lucky today to have National Book Award–winning children’s author William Alexander on Crafting with Ursula. Le Guin not only held his work in high regard, but they reviewed each other, became friends, and corresponded. Alexander himself has thought deeply about the longstanding fear of the imagination, and how it is playing out today, whether in schools, with the battles for what is considered acceptable literature or acceptable history to teach, or in relation to “the other,” the fear of the stranger, the fear of the nonhuman, the fear of that which is both real and true and something we can’t understand. For the bonus audio archive Will contributes a description of his playful and theatrical writing exercise called “Smoke.” An associative nonlinear technique, “Smoke” is something he uses to either create or develop characters in his stories to help them come alive on the page. This joins bonus audio from many past guests, from Daniel José Older and Ted Chiang to Carmen Maria Machado and N. K. Jemisin. You can find out how to subscribe to the bonus audio and check out all the other potential rewards of becoming a listener-supporter, from Le Guin collectibles to becoming an early reader for Tin House, receiving twelve books over the course of a year months before they are available to the general public, at the show’s Patreon page. Finally, here is the Bookshop for today’s episode, including the books discussed today by both Le Guin and Alexander.

Hernan Diaz’s debut novel In the Distance went on to become not only one of the great debuts of the year, but a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in fiction and the PEN/Faulkner award. His follow-up Trust is also a book that engages with and interrogates the stories that the United States tells about itself and the mythologies it creates, but this time focusing not on the Western frontier but rather on the accumulation of capital and the mythos of money. But Trust is really about the contract between reader and writer, fiction’s relationship to truth and history, and the way the “reality” of what really happened is often built upon the erasure of certain voices. Trust is a marvel of both form and voice. It is a nested puzzle that requires the reader to be a textual detective, and yet, at the same time, remains a compulsive, immersive reading experience. Somehow the book is able to shift styles—from that of Edith Wharton or Henry James to that of Jean Rhys or Virginia Woolf—and not only remain a cohesive project but deepen as it sheds one skin and assumes another. If you enjoy today’s deep dive with Hernan Diaz consider joining the Between the Covers community as a listener-supporter. There are many benefits and rewards for doing so. Check them all out at the show’s Patreon page. Lastly, here is today’s Bookshop with all of the books mentioned today.

The first time Rae Armantrout came on the show, in 2017, we looked at her poetry through the lens of her interest in quantum physics. Now, five years later, with the release of this double collection of poems, we look at her career-long desire to cultivate a poetics that encourages life to interrupt and interject within her poems, to disrupt what her constructing mind desires to write and change the poem’s trajectory. We look at this approach, and the resulting poems, through another of Rae’s longstanding interests: cognitive science, not only how we perceive or think, but how we construct meaning and to what end. This takes us many places, from anthropology to philosophy, but always returns us to the mysteries of language and language-making and to questions of selfhood, voice, and truth. For the bonus audio archive Rae contributes a reading of many poems from her just-finished manuscript, giving us an early sneak peek of what is coming next for her. This joins bonus readings from Jorie Graham, Alice Oswald, Rosmarie Waldrop, Nikky Finney, Natalie Diaz, Layli Long Soldier, Forrest Gander, Arthur Sze, and many others. The bonus audio is only one potential benefit of becoming a supporter of the show and joining the Between the Covers community. There are many other gifts and rewards to choose from, all of which you can find at the show’s Patreon page. Lastly here is this episode’s Bookshop with all the books mentioned today.

Today’s guest, Kim Stanley Robinson, is perhaps the living writer most associated with utopian literature today. And as a student of the philosopher, political theorist, and literary critic Fredric Jameson, Robinson has thought deeply about the history of utopias, the history of the novel, and the strange hybrid form that became the utopian novel. In his mind it was Ursula K. Le Guin who wrote the first truly great utopian novel. We discuss Le Guin’s utopian work alongside his, and contextualize her importance historically. Robinson also shares some incredible anecdotes from his time in the 70s as her student and the ways their lives as fellow writers have intersected over the decades. What is a utopian novel? What is an ambiguous utopia? And why has this genre become a particularly vital form and even a critical tool of the human imagination today? Listen in to find out. And if you enjoy this series consider transforming yourself from a listener into a listener-supporter. Head over to the show’s Patreon page to check out all the potential rewards and benefits of doing so, from rare Le Guin collectibles to bonus audio from SFF luminaries. Lastly, here is the Bookshop for today’s episode which contains many of the books and stories discussed today.  

Courtney Maum’s latest book, her memoir The Year of the Horses, is about a writer at a rough point in her writing career, in her marriage, as a mother, as a woman, finding a way back to herself in all of these spheres by learning to listen and communicate, outside of language, to another species. What are the therapeutic benefits of learning to be with a horse of all creatures, an animal that is not geared towards comforting us or aiming to please? Why do anxious or traumatized people find help by being with an anxious animal? And what can a person like Courtney, whose life is word-centric, as a language maker, a writer, bring back to language when returning to the desk from the barn? We discuss these questions, but we also unpack issues of gender and misogyny with regards to how memoir writing is framed, and talk about the status of women and animals in the world of writing and the world of riding both. Lastly, because Courtney is a writing teacher, a writing coach, and the author of Before and After the Book Deal, we talk about agents and editors, drafting and revision, and about useful tips and techniques to take one’s abundance of life material and shape it into story. For the bonus audio archive Courtney contributes a discussion of an essay by poet, essayist, and psychoanalyst Nuar Alsadir. This joins bonus readings from everyone from Ada Limón to Teju Cole, Sheila Heti to Victoria Chang. To find out how to subscribe to the bonus audio and the many other potential benefits of becoming a supporter of the show head over to the Between the Covers Patreon page. Here is the Bookshop for today’s conversation with all the books mentioned today.

Today’s guest Ada Limón discusses her latest collection of poetry, The Hurting Kind, whose poems ask and explore what it means to be a human animal among animals, and how language can be a means or an obstacle to this desire. We talk about the relationship of joy to death, poetry to praise, and the desire to and challenges of writing with directness, with an aim to connect. We look at the trajectory of Ada’s poetics, one she describes as getting closer and closer to who she really is, and what it means, in language and on the page, to aim for authenticity, for the “I” in your poems to really be, or aim to be, you. We also talk about pizza, groundhogs, and the Argentinian poet Alejandra Pizarnik (and I make an improbable connection between the three!). Pizarnik is a big part of our conversation and for the bonus audio archive, Ada contributes a reading of some Pizarnik poems that she particularly loves. To learn more about how to subscribe to the bonus audio and the other potential benefits and rewards of becoming a supporter of the show, head over to the Between the Covers Patreon page. Lastly, here is the Bookshop for today’s episode, with all the books mentioned.

Today’s conversation with adrienne maree brown begins with the notion that all organizing is science fiction, and thus that social justice and science fiction are intricately linked imaginative acts, acts that have real effects in the world at large. brown looks at works by Le Guin that she considers foundational texts for activists and organizers, and discusses what it means to do the work of imagination, as well as the dangers of not doing that work, of living within a world imagined by others, people who might not fully imagine you. Many of adrienne’s concepts, from ‘emergent strategy’ to ‘fractal responsibility,’ are linked to everything from Le Guin’s interest in anarchism to their shared interest in Taoism. If you enjoyed today’s conversation consider becoming a supporter of the show. Check out all the possible rewards and benefits of doing so, from rare Le Guin collectibles to access to bonus audio by Ted Chiang to N.K. Jemisin, to becoming an early reader for Tin House, receiving books months before they are available to the general public by going to the show’s Patreon page. Lastly, here is today’s Bookshop, which contains the books by Le Guin mentioned today and many of adrienne’s books, from her debut novel Grievers to her books on social activism to the anthology she coedited, Octavia’s Brood.    

Cristina Rivera Garza returns to the show to discuss her New and Selected Stories, which gathers together fiction across thirty years of her writing life. Some are stories translated into English for the first time. Others are stories in English that haven’t yet appeared in Spanish. Still others are new versions, rewritten, retranslated or both. We talk about her lifelong interest in troubling the borders between these two languages, Spanish and English, and the borders between Mexico and the United States, even between writer and translator. But Cristina also undermines the borders of selfhood and identity in such uncanny ways, ways that have implications around gender and the status of women, and around nature and the status of the nonhuman other. In addition we look at some of her more scholarly work on “necrowriting” (writing with the dead) and what it means to have a writing practice of “disappropriation,” one that returns writing to its plural form. Today’s bonus audio is a long-form conversation with Cristina’s longtime translator Sarah Booker. Among the many things we discuss is the unique fashion in which Cristina and Sarah write and rewrite, translate and retranslate each other’s work, a horizontal relationship that redefines authorship and is informed for both of them by a feminist ethics. To learn more about how to subscribe to the bonus audio and to check out the many other potential benefits and rewards of joining the Between the Covers community as a supporter, head over to the show’s Patreon page. Finally, here is this episode’s Bookshop.

Today’s guest, Caren Beilin, talks about her latest novel Revenge of the Scapegoat. All four of her books—two nonfiction, two fiction—each stand alone but they each also share recognizable people/characters that travel across books and across genre. How do the fictional versions of the real people in her life—her partner, her parents, her siblings, her friends—relate to their “real selves” and how does this spilling over from one book to the next help Caren engage with shared questions that animate them all? We talk about what it means to write prose with a disability poetics, about pain’s relationship to form, about the unruly body and body humor, and about creating stories that interrogate and undermine destructive systems, from medical and institutional gaslighting to ‘the scapegoat mechanism,’ to the dynamics of the family unit itself. We also talk about sentences, about the pleasure and power of knots of language, as a site for expression, rebellion, and even liberation. For the bonus audio archive, Caren discusses and reads from Flaubert’s final, unfinished novel Bouvard et Pécuchet, the novel whose two grumpy old men, Bouvard and Pécuchet, Caren’s most recent protagonist names her two painful, arthritic feet after. To find out how to subscribe to the bonus audio and to check out all the other potential benefits of becoming a listener-supporter of the show (including a limited number of signed copies of Caren’s Blackfishing the IUD) head over to the show’s Patreon page. And finally here is today’s Bookshop which contains many of the books mentioned today (from those by Sheila Heti, Gustave Flaubert, and René Girard to those by Beilin herself).  

Today’s guest on Crafting with Ursula, the award-winning writer of science fiction, fantasy, and historical fiction Karen Joy Fowler, was a longstanding friend of Ursula K. Le Guin. And they both shared a deep interest not only in science, but also in raising questions about the biases deeply embedded in the way we conduct it (species biases, cultural biases, gender biases, etc.). These questions about science enter and animate their stories, stories that examine the foundations of species supremacy, of how we define intelligence (and why), of what qualities we want to reserve and defend as human or humane, of the implications on both animals and women when we feminize certain approaches to knowledge and inquiry and then discount them. This is a great complement to the last Crafting with Ursula with Isaac Yuen, both deeply engaged with questions of the human and nonhuman in storytelling, and yet these two conversations go to very different, if kindred, places. If you enjoyed today’s conversation consider transforming from a listener to a listener supporter of the show. Join the collective brainstorm of who to invite on the show going forward, get the supplementary resources that go out to supporters with each episode, and check out the other potential rewards of doing so, from rare Le Guin collectibles to bonus readings from everyone from N. K. Jemisin to Ted Chiang, at the show’s Patreon page. Finally here is today’s Bookshop with many of the books by Le Guin, Fowler, and others mentioned during the conversation.

Sheila Heti returns to Between the Covers to discuss her latest unclassifiable novel Pure Colour. When something happens in your life that upends everything you thought you knew, that changes what you notice and value, something that is hard, if not impossible, to put into language, that mystifies you even now, how do you find a new form to reflect this? We discuss what it is to write books influenced less by other books than by other art forms (what does it mean to try to write more like a painter paints or sculptor sculpts?), about the role of criticism and inviting other writers into the process of a book becoming itself, about the art critic characters in her new book that are imagining a future world better than this one, and much more. For the bonus audio archive Heti discusses and reads from her serialized Oulipian project, taking her diary entries from the past ten years and alphabetizing the sentences (this joins a previous contribution by Sheila, a reading of her essay “My Life is a Joke”). To learn how to subscribe to the bonus audio and about the many other potential benefits and rewards of joining the community of Between the Covers supporters, head over to the show’s Patreon page. Finally here is the Bookshop for today’s episode with many of the books mentioned.

Today’s guest is Chilean novelist, essayist, literary critic, and poet Alejandro Zambra, talking about his latest novel Chilean Poet, a novel brimming over with, yes, Chilean poets and poems, but also with love and laughter, artistic dreams and failures, and the desire to find language for things deeply felt that have no name. This conversation, one about everything from writing itself to translation, cats to parenthood, Mexico to Chile, Roberto Bolaño to Nicanor Parra, and poetry to prose, is ultimately one wondrous love letter to literature, those who make it and those who read it. Whenever a guest comes on the show for a book they wrote in another language than English, I try to do a second long-form conversation with the translator for the bonus audio archive. The bonus audio (one of the potential benefits of becoming a listener-supporter of the show) is full of a wide variety of supplemental material (from readings to craft talks) but the most robust material, often hour-long conversations, are these conversations with translators. These include Sophie Hughes (translating Fernanda Melchor), Kurt Beals (translating Jenny Erpenbeck), Suzanne Jill Levine (translating Cristina Rivera Garza), and Emma Ramadan (translating Abdellah Taïa). Today’s translator conversation is with Megan McDowell, who has translated Alejandro since his 2nd book and who translates many other South American writing luminaries (e.g. Samanta Schweblin and Mariana Enriquez). To learn more about the potential benefits of becoming a supporter of the show, including the bonus audio, head over to the Between the Covers Patreon page. And here is the Bookshop for today’s conversation with many of the books mentioned during it.

Today’s “Crafting with Ursula,” a conversation with nature writer Isaac Yuen, explores Le Guin’s writing of the nonhuman other in her fiction. Why might we consider decentering the human within our stories and how do we do so? How does one evoke a truly alien intelligence (i.e. that of a plant or an insect) but using human language for a human readership? Looking closely at three of Le Guin’s short fictions, “The Direction of the Road,” “Bones of the Earth,” and “The Author of the Acacia Seeds and Other Extracts from the Journal of Therolinguistics,” Isaac and David discuss the various strategies Le Guin uses to evoke a world that is more than human, and that stretches past human comprehension. We place these stories alongside stories and essays of Isaac’s to find the ways Le Guin and Yuen’s work speak one to another. This episode’s Bookshop contains all the Le Guin books mentioned in today’s conversation along with Yuen’s favorite touchstone books of nature writing in both fiction and nonfiction. If you enjoyed today’s conversation, consider becoming a supporter of the show. Check out all the potential benefits and rewards, including Le Guin collectibles, bonus audio from iconic SFF guests, and more at the Between the Covers Patreon page.

It’s been five years since Solmaz Sharif’s first appearance on Between the Covers, for her National Book Award–finalist debut collection Look. Since then, many listeners have pointed to this conversation as one of the most memorable episodes to date. Solmaz returns today to discuss her much-anticipated follow-up, Customs. We talk about belonging, exile and language, about what it means to write against goodness, to write uncivilly, to write against language even. We look at the ways her poetry has changed from one book to the next, and the vulnerability and fear of writing from a single voice, in the first person, rather than through the poly-vocal conceptual frame of Look. We also take some of Solmaz’s animating questions into the world of the classroom, into poetry pedagogy, as well as out into the world, as a lens into the lives of political poets, and into what poems can (and can’t) do. Check out today’s Bookshop, where the works of writers we engaged with today, from June Jordan to Dionne Brand to Forough Farrokhzad, can be found. Also if you enjoyed today’s program consider becoming a listener-supporter of the show. There are many potential benefits and rewards of doing so, including becoming an early reader for Tin House, receiving twelve books over the course of a year months before they are available to the general public, rare collectibles from past guests (from Ursula K. Le Guin to Nikky Finney), and the bonus audio archive with contributions from Kaveh Akbar, Rabih Alameddine, Phil Metres, Layli Long Soldier, Alice Oswald, Jorie Graham, and more. These and many other things can be found at the show’s Patreon page.  

Writer and performance artist Gabrielle Civil talks about her latest book the déjà vu: black dreams & black time, as well as her chapbook ( ghost gestures ), chosen by Bhanu Kapil for the Gold Line Press Nonfiction prize. What does Civil mean by “Black time” and how does she enact this in the déjà vu? What is “performance writing” or “performance memoir” and how do her work on the stage and on the page speak to each other across forms? What does it mean to consider one’s ancestry, one’s lineage, one’s generation, and future ones, in the “now” of your work? Civil discusses all of this and much more in today’s conversation. Today’s episode touches on the work of everyone from bell hooks to Dionne Brand to Ntozake Shange to Alexis Pauline Gumbs. This abundance of referred-to books, as well as Gabrielle Civil’s own, have been collected in this episode’s Bookshop (a great way to support today’s guest, other writers, independent booksellers and the show all at one time). For the bonus audio archive Gabrielle adds a reading and discussion of one of her favorite American sonnets by Wanda Coleman. To find out more about how to subscribe to the bonus audio and the many other potential benefits of becoming a listener-supporter of the show, check out the Between the Covers Patreon page.

Today’s guest on the second episode of Crafting with Ursula, Molly Gloss, the acclaimed writer of both award-winning science fiction and fantasy as well as feminist Westerns, has a particular insight into the work and writing life of Le Guin. Gloss’ writing career began as a student of Le Guin’s in a workshop in the 1980s. And yet they soon became friends, were friends and writing peers for thirty-five years, and were in peer writing groups together in both poetry and prose during that time, critiquing each other’s work. Today’s episode focuses on something Ursula herself loved to think about, the meanings that lie beneath the words we write, the music (or lack of music) in a line or sentence that make our stories or our poetry gurgle or sing. And, of course, how to create this meaning from below and why. While this conversation begins at the level of the line, at the level of the sentence, we do come to talk about the unusual way Le Guin employs technology in her work, a sensibility that informs Gloss’ writing, particularly in The Dazzle of Day. We talk about her different relationship to fiction and to poetry, and perhaps most notably we get to hear a long, never-before-seen, unpublished poem of Le Guin’s that was brought to one of their shared poetry peer groups, a poem about the practice of writing itself. The Bookshop for today’s episode is particularly robust: Gloss’ most iconic SFF works, Le Guin’s craft books, her poetry, and more. It is just one way to support writers, independent bookstores, and the show all at the same time. If you enjoyed today’s program, consider transforming yourself from a listener to a listener-supporter. There are many potential benefits of doing so, from the bonus audio archive to rare collectibles from past guests including from Ursula K. Le Guin herself. Check it all out at the show’s Patreon page.

Writer, critic, performer, & visual artist James Hannaham talks about his latest and most uncategorizable book Pilot Impostor. This book slips between the borders of prose and poetry, fiction and nonfiction, image and text, facts and fake news, selfhood and persona, pretending and privilege. And Pilot Impostor comes into being piece by piece through an engagement with the work, poem by poem, of Fernando Pessoa, a writer who created and wrote from over seventy (!!!) different heteronyms (personas that interacted with each other and had full biographies, from a bisexual naval engineer in Scotland to an uneducated Portuguese shepherd trying to unlearn even more). And yet this book of Hannaham’s is also somehow about Trump, air disasters, the nature of selfhood, and the ongoing legacy of colonialism and slavery. How is this all possible? Well, listen in to find out! Here is the Bookshop for today’s conversation, with all of the books mentioned today, where you can support writers, independent bookstores, and the podcast all in one act. If you enjoy today’s episode, consider becoming a listener-supporter of Between the Covers. Many past guests, from Nikky Finney to Ursula K. Le Guin, have donated collectibles for future supporters. There is also the possibility of becoming a Tin House early reader, receiving twelve books over the course of a year, months before they are available to the general public. And every supporter joins a community that is helping shape the future of the show, as well as receiving a resource-rich email with each conversation. Check it all out at the Between the Covers Patreon page.  

Rabih Alameddine talks about his new novel The Wrong End of the Telescope, which is set on the island of Lesbos amidst the medical personnel and tourist-volunteers involved with helping the arriving Syrian refugees. Interestingly, the writer, one suspiciously similar to Rabih himself, is a secondary character in this novel, a character who asks Mina, a Lebanese-American doctor, to tell this story, to be the narrator, because the writer is too undone by the situation to do so. We talk about narrative distance, about how to find what Rabih calls “the Goldilocks distance” not too enmeshed, not to detached, to be able to effectively tell a story that needs to be told. We talk about the power and limits of literature, of empathy, of volunteerism, about why each of Rabih’s books is a rebellion against the one before, about how to write without relying on the reader’s preexisting emotions and why one might want to do so. The Bookshop for this episode contains most of the books mentioned today (from Vivian Gornick to Elisa Gabbert to Italo Calvino, and of course most of Rabih’s books that we talk about today too). It is a nice way to support the show, the writer, and independent bookstores, all in one gesture. For the bonus audio archive Rabih contributes a brief discussion and reading of a favorite poem of his by Fernando Pessoa. To find out about how to subscribe to the bonus audio and about the other potential benefits of becoming a supporter of the show head over to the Between the Covers Patreon page.

Today’s guest, Becky Chambers, discusses her own work, and her own considerations when imagining alien cultures and the beings that inhabit them. She does this in light of Le Guin’s novel The Left Hand of Darkness and Le Guin’s short story, “Coming of Age in Karhide,” written by Le Guin 25 years later, but within the same world as the the novel. What does putting these two narratives side by side tell us about storytelling, about audience, about otherness, about the author herself? And what does it mean to imagine worlds not through the science of physics but through the science of culture and the science of bodies? What can be gained by decentering (or even disposing of) plot, conflict, or heroes? And what are the biological and technological considerations one might think about when imagining a future or the beings that might inhabit it? If this first episode of Crafting with Ursula is your first encounter with the Between the Covers podcast, you can sort the show’s archive by genre, foregrounding, if you desire, all the past science fiction and fantasy conversations with everyone from Ted Chiang and N.K. Jemisin to Neal Stephenson, Daniel José Older, and Kelly Link. All the books mentioned in today’s conversation with Becky Chambers can be found at the show’s BookShop (a nice way to support the author, the show, and independent booksellers all at the same time). To learn more about the potential benefits and rewards of becoming a listener-supporter of the show, from rare Le Guin collectibles to becoming an early reader for Tin House, head over to the Between the Covers Patreon page.  

Poet Victoria Chang talks about her latest and most uncategorizable book Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief. A book composed largely of essay-like letters, Dear Memory also contains collages by Victoria, created from the artifacts (mementos, documents, photographs) found in her family’s storage locker, and short poems which she places among the images. What does this formal shapeshifting tell us about this project? How are form and identity related? What does changing form (in this case from poetry to prose) reveal about the self? What role does imagination play in memory? What is post-memory and how does one write into memories that one didn’t have oneself but which nevertheless cast a shadow under which one’s life has been shaped? What does it mean to put language at risk and how does one go about doing it? Is it possible that constructing a self comes not from striving toward wholeness, but from entering the gaps, the silences, the severance, and departures from which one comes? Today’s conversation invokes the thoughts and work of many other writers (from Brandon Shimoda to Don Mee Choi to Theresa Hak Kyung Cha to Rick Barot). You can check out all the books mentioned (by both Victoria and others) at today’s episode’s BookShop. For the bonus audio archive Victoria adds a reading from her forthcoming collected The Trees Witness Everything as well as a short discussion of writing using constraints, talking about the multiple constraints that produced the tiny poems in this very different upcoming collection. You can find out how to subscribe to the bonus audio as well as about the other potential benefits of becoming a Between the Covers supporter at the show’s Patreon page.

Today’s guest, Mexican poet, painter, and translator Valerie Mejer Caso talks about her latest book, the bilingual publication of poetry, collage, and photography Edinburgh Notebook, translated by Michelle Gil-Montero for Action Books. What does it mean to write something both autobiographical and surreal, both dream-like and real? How can questions of selfhood and identity (the identity of nation, of language, of family) become uncanny? What does it mean to write with “shattered language” and how can one find words, images, and forms to capture grief, loss, and death? This only scratches the surface of this conversation with Valerie, one that ranges widely, from Freud’s dreams to Tarkovsky’s notion of time to Raúl Zurita’s thoughts on the relationship of poetry to mortality itself. Today’s addition to the bonus audio archive is a long-form, in-depth conversation with the translator of Edinburgh Notebook, Michelle Gil-Montero. We talk about translating Valerie Mejer Caso’s work, about studying under poet-translators Forrest Gander and C.D. Wright, about her press Eulalia Books that seeks to translate poetry and hybrid works that are ex-centric and ecstatic and which trouble notions of nation, and about finding the right balance between her own writing, her translating, her teaching, and her editing. Near the end she reads some of her most recent poetry as well. To learn how to subscribe to the bonus audio and the other potential benefits of becoming a supporter of Between the Covers head over to the show’s Patreon page.

British poet, educator, and writer Raymond Antrobus has two poetry collections out this year. The US release of his award-winning debut The Perseverance and his follow-up, just out now, All The Names Given. We discuss both books in relation to Antrobus’ own particular deaf poetics. What questions do his poems raise about audience and accessibility, about the written, the heard, the signed, the performed? What questions do they raise about sound itself? We also discuss the intersection of deafness and race, and about holding a space for the tensions and contradictions when exploring, in one’s art, both sides of the Antrobus family tree, white, Black, Jamaican and British. All of this and much more. As 2021 comes to a close, consider becoming a supporter of Between the Covers going into 2022. To find out all the potential benefits and rewards of doing so head over to the show’s Patreon page.

Tice Cin’s debut novel Keeping the House is set within the Turkish Cypriot community of North London. But while it is also set within the heroin trade there, this book is not a crime novel, or if it is, it is like no crime novel you’ve read before. Keeping the House is a book, by Cin’s own description, for people who feel “glitched.” The book “glitches” between past and present, between prose and poetry, and between one language and another and back again. Keeping the House not only subverts the tropes of crime fiction, of hero narratives and the gender dynamics within them, but challenges us to be within a new form, to feel our way forward, carried by the rhythms of this newness on its own terms. Our conversation ranges widely, from glitching to cabbages, artificial intelligence to complex PTSD, sensitivity reads to chosen families, to what it means to keep the house, to find a home. Tice Cin’s contribution to the bonus audio archive is a first for the show. She asked me to give her a writing prompt so that she could write something new especially for Between the Covers supporters. Having spent some time in North Cyprus myself, the place her family comes from, and given the food-centric formal shape of her novel, I came up with a prompt that is both Cyprus and food-specific and she wrote what could best be described as something that lingers between a poem and a song, one that will take your breath away. To find out how to subscribe to the bonus audio and/or about the many other potential benefits of becoming a listener-supporter of BTC head over to the Between the Covers Patreon page.

Today’s guest, poet and translator Rosmarie Waldrop, is best known for her prose poetry and for good reason. Waldrop is one of the great prose poetry practitioners and innovators over the course of the last half century. We speak about her latest collection, The Nick of Time, through the lens of the themes, questions, and poetics that animate her work across the decades: her attraction to betweenness, to the gap between two things or between two words; her desire to distress the sentence and to what end; her aversion to metaphor and analogy; and her belief that it is in the silence, the not-said, the unrepresented, the nothingness that lies between two words, where creation and generation truly happens. We also explore her life as a translator, particularly in relation to the work of Egyptian Jewish writer Edmond Jabès, and the friendship they forged through their shared engagement with the mysteries of language (she translated fourteen of his books from French to English), and the questions this relationship raises about identity, both the self and the other. For the bonus audio archive Waldrop reads from her translation of Jabès’ remarkable “Adam, or The Birth of Anxiety” from The Book of Shares. To learn more about how to subscribe to the bonus audio and the other potential benefits and rewards of becoming a supporter of the show (from rare collectibles to becoming an early reader for Tin House) head over to the Between the Covers Patreon page.  

Today’s guest, Percival Everett, author of twenty-one novels, four short story collections, six collections of poetry and a children’s book, has also been a horse and mule trainer, a jazz guitarist, a fly fisherman, a rehabilitator of mandolins, and an abstract painter. He is, however, best known for his “gleefully unhinged” (New York Times) hard-to-categorize novels, books that engage with the tropes of genre (e.g. detective novels, Westerns, Greek myths) and subvert those same tropes, often in the service of looking at the stories America likes (and more notably, doesn’t like) to tell about itself. We talk today about his latest novel The Trees (Graywolf Press), a book that is somehow a police procedural, a possibly supernatural revenge story, a comic burlesque, and an examination of the ongoing history of lynching in the United States. If you enjoy today’s conversation consider becoming a listener-supporter of Between the Covers. Find out more about the benefits and rewards of doing so at the show’s Patreon page.

Haitian-Canadian-American writer Myriam Chancy is an acclaimed novelist but she is also a literary scholar who studies, among other things, storytelling. As a scholar instrumental in inaugurating Haitian women’s studies as a contemporary field of specialization, and one who has argued that much of Haitian women’s literature should be viewed through the lens of the novel as revolutionary tool, we talk today to Myriam about her own latest novel, a polyvocal choral work that takes place just before, during, and just after the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, What Storm, What Thunder. It is impossible however, to talk about the earthquake, why it had the impact on Haiti that it did, why the aid produced so little long-term change, and how the world viewed Haiti in the aftermath of its worst tragedy, without also talking about the stories forever told about Haiti, stories told ever since it became the first Black republic in the Western hemisphere, a successful revolution led by slaves that sent shudders through the slave-holding nations of the world, from America to France. What are these stories about Haiti, the stories of it as a “cursed nation,” what do these stories tell about the storytellers? What lesser known stories, what true histories, do these stories hide or erase? And how are stories by Haitians themselves, particularly by Haitian women, revolutionary tools? For the bonus audio archive Myriam Chancy alternates between reading from Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place and talking about its importance for us. It is immediately apparent, even if she hadn’t mentioned it at the onset, that she teaches this text, that she knows it well. She alternates between reading passages and then extended commentary and then returns to the reading and comments again, commenting on what it illuminates not just about Antigua but about Haiti, and not just about what she loves about Kincaid’s writing but how it has influenced her own writing in her most recent novel. This is one that I think warrants multiple listens. To find out more about how to subscribe to the bonus audio and the other potential benefits of becoming a listener-supporter of the show head over to the Between the Covers Patreon page.

“Negotiating the Love and Renouncing the Rest,” today’s Tin House Live conversation between poets Destiny O. Birdsong & Donika Kelly, was recorded at the 2021 Tin House Summer Writers Workshop. Among many other things, they ask what it would mean to center yourself in your own work, in your own story. How would that look, and what would need to be decentered to make that happen on the page? They also talk about writing (or not writing) into and about abuse and trauma, about families of origin and chosen families, and much more. Destiny O. Birdsong is a poet, novelist, and essayist whose debut poetry collection, Negotiations, was published in 2020 by Tin House and longlisted for the 2021 PEN/Voelcker Award. Elizabeth Acevedo said of Birdsong’s collection: “Reading Negotiations is like walking into a boxing match with an indefatigable fighter; you will be struck, and it will hurt. But for all of its ferocity in how it grapples with womanhood, sexuality, assault, and race, this collection is also full of wonder. Of forgiveness. Of tenderness, the like of which, ultimately, delivers the most powerful sucker punch.” Destiny Birdsong’s debut novel, Nobody’s Magic, is forthcoming in February 2022 from Grand Central Publishing. Donika Kelly is the author of Bestiary from Graywolf, winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Poetry, and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. The collection was also longlisted for the National Book Award, and was a finalist for a Publishing Triangle Award and a Lambda Literary Award. And she is the author of the poetry collection The Renunciations, out this year from Graywolf. A collection poet Ellen Bass describes as follows: “In her vital new poetry collection, Donika Kelly harnesses ‘the air, the earth, and flame’ to renounce the old gods: child abuse, violence, racial injustice, generational trauma. . . . The Renunciations is a work of stunning power, alive with haunting images, complex metaphor. And while Kelly looks unsparingly at pain and suffering—her own and others’—with transformation comes joy.” If you enjoy today’s conversation consider becoming a supporter of Between the Covers. Check out all the potential benefits and rewards of doing so at the Between the Covers Patreon page.

Irish theologian, storyteller, poet, conflict mediator, and host of the podcast Poetry Unbound Pádraig Ó Tuama joins David to discuss the role of both narrative storytelling and poetry in relationship to encountering ‘the other.’ How can the stories we tell about ourselves prevent us from seeing who we are, from being open to accountability and change, open to encounter and transformation? How can certain stories, in contrast, be a means to bring people with deep grievances to the table, to move them toward recognition and repair? How does poetry, like prayer, orient us toward something beyond ourselves, beyond our meaning-making capacities, and how is that sort of encounter, with all that lies beyond our understanding, important to a human life? If you’ve ever asked some version of the eternal question—do poems and stories and art-making matter? If so, what do they do?—don’t miss today’s episode. For the bonus audio archive Pádraig Ó Tuama reads some new poems, written as part of a collaborative project with some Scottish writers. He reads in both English and Irish. This joins bonus audio from many other writers including Doireann Ní Ghríofa, Alice Oswald, Layli Long Soldier, Jorie Graham, Nikky Finney, Richard Powers, and more. To learn about subscribing to the bonus audio and the other potential benefits of becoming a listener-supporter of the show head over to the Between the Covers Patreon Page.

The latest book by Palestinian novelist Adania Shibli, Minor Detail, was a finalist for the National Book Award for Translated Literature, and longlisted for the International Booker Prize. Shibli talks about what it means that she doesn’t write about Palestine but rather from Palestine. And why for her, as a writer, so many of the questions of colonization, dehumanization, and ethnonationalism come down to questions of language. What types of sentences are created by the victors versus the vanquished? What shapes do the stories of each take? What happens to a language that can be only spoken in whispers? How do these two different approaches to language change one’s relationship to history, to memory? How can language’s failure, the absence of language, silence, even weakness, be brought into language and used against the dictatorship of a seamless, linear narrative? If you enjoy today’s conversation consider become a listener-supporter of Between the Covers. There are all sorts of benefits to doing so. Check out the possibilities at the Between the Covers Patreon Page.

Originally delivered at the 2021 Tin House Summer Writers Workshop, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore’s electrifying talk “Writing On Your Own Terms” explores what it means to write against the canonical imperative, to write against the world as it is, to instead write on your own terms, toward community, and specifically toward the community of people who might truly appreciate and understand your work. Sycamore is the author and editor of many books and anthologies. Most recently she is the editor of Between Certain Death and a Possible Future: Queer Writing on Growing Up with the AIDS Crisis (forthcoming in October 2021) and the author of the 2021 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award finalist, The Freezer Door. Wayne Koestenbaum’s assessment of The Freezer Door seems particularly relevant to the theme of writing on one’s own terms: “Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore puts sex and gender, suffering and gentrification, encounter and solitude, at the center of a book that defies borders and uses language to dive directly into mystery. I admire Sycamore’s gossamer refusal ever to land anywhere definitive; the sentences travel further and further into trauma’s backyard, where complex ideas find a habitat among the simplest formulations. Sycamore, by breathing into the prose, treats the act of book-building as a practice strange and organic as sleeping, walking, bathing, eating. The Freezer Door delves into the philosophy of the sexual meetingplace with a virtually unprecedented aplomb.” Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore first appeared on the show for a deep dive into her last novel Sketchtasy. So if you are hungry for more Sycamore after this talk, as I’m confident you will be, this is a great place to go next. If you appreciate the show, consider becoming a supporter of Between the Covers. Check out the benefits and rewards of doing so at the Between the Covers Patreon page.        

Today’s guest, poet Kaveh Akbar, discusses his latest poetry collection Pilgrim Bell. Given that Akbar once suggested that syntax was identity, how do the changes in Akbar’s own poetry, from his first collection to now, reflect changes in himself as a person? Akbar talks about the ways in which poetry can be a spiritual technology, about the qualities poetry and prayer share, about the language and gesture of prayer, about the orbital nature of poetry, and about making room for silence and the unsayable in one’s poems. Akbar also talks about revolutionary poetics. What would a revolutionary poetics look like? Who are good examples of poets whose poems and lives do real work in the world? How do we know if our poems are doing work or just fooling us into thinking so? For the bonus audio archive, Kaveh Akbar adds a reading and discussion of “In Praise of the Laughing Worm,” a poem that, although he loves it, didn’t quite fit in the collection. This joins bonus audio from Jorie Graham, Alice Oswald, Nikky Finney, Douglas Kearney, Arthur Sze, Layli Long Soldier, Natalie Diaz, and many others. To find out how to subscribe to the bonus audio and about the many other potential benefits of becoming a listener-supporter of the show, including books and rare collectibles donated by past guests, head over to the Between the Covers Patreon page.

Callum Angus’s A Natural History of Transition is described as a collection of short stories “that disrupts the notion that trans people can only have one transformation.” Angus talks about trans narratives, both the ones most commonly seen in the culture at large, and his notion of transness, not as a journey between two static gender poles, by a person “trapped in the wrong body,” but one of continual adaptation, reevaluation, and renewal. Callum Angus is particularly interested in the intersections between trans writing and nature writing. As the editorial statement for the journal he founded, smoke and mold, says: “The trans body is considered ‘unnatural,’ its changes supposedly go ‘against nature,’ with few in mainstream literature, medicine, or history acknowledging that nature is nothing but change.” We talk about why he chose to write fiction versus nonfiction, and chose fantastical fiction over realism, as the best way for him to explore transition in his protagonists and transition in the world at large. What does a story collection look like written by an author who isn’t trying to “tell a good story” but rather resist it? An author who thinks there is much power for ill in linear narratives and too-powerful stories? What possibilities open up for the short story form, for nature writing, for our understanding of the human within the larger natural world, when looked at through a trans lens? We talk about many other writers in this conversation, from Rikki Ducornet to Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, Reinaldo Arenas to John Keene. Keene’s Counternarratives was a particular inspiration for Angus’s new book and for the bonus audio archive Angus reads the short story “Mannahatta” for us. This joins bonus readings from John Keene himself, CAConrad, Garth Greenwell, Carmen Maria Machado, and many others. To find out how to subscribe to the bonus material and to check out the many other potential benefits of transforming yourself from a listener to a listener-supporter head over to the Between the Covers Patreon page.

Today’s episode with poet Douglas Kearney is about his latest book of poetry, Sho, and the poetry-performance album (with Haitian sound artist Val Jeanty) Fodder. Throughout Kearney’s career he has engaged with the tension between the stage and the page, the eye and the ear, the word and the body, all as a means to explore the contradictions of being Black in America. What does it mean to make the page into a stage, or to make the stage into a compositional space? How does Kearney critique the way anti-Black violence is made into spectacle, while himself being a Black performer who uses spectacle? What does a poetics that works against catharsis, against relief, entail and to what end? Why is Kearney skeeved out by simile and why does he find violence within metaphor? These questions only scratch the surface of a wide-ranging conversation that travels from Susan Howe to Public Enemy. For the bonus audio archive, Kearney adds the reading of two new poems. These join readings by Ross Gay, Teju Cole, Nikky Finney, Jorie Graham, Layli Long Soldier, Arthur Sze, and many others. To learn more about how to subscribe to the bonus audio and to check out the many other potential benefits of becoming a listener-supporter of Between the Covers, head over to the Between the Covers Patreon page.

Arthur Sze, winner of the 2019 National Book Award in Poetry for Sight Lines, joins David Naimon to discuss his latest book, The Glass Constellation: New and Collected Poems. Together they step back to take in a half century of Arthur’s work, not only how it has changed and why, tracking the growth of a poet and person across time, but also what animating questions, despite all the changes, have endured. They also step forward and look closely at questions of selfhood in relationship to poetry, how one decenters the controlling self when writing (and to what end), the place of the human in the more-than-human world, the relationship of the image to the word, and what it means to aim to write as if there is no hierarchy between any one word and another. Arthur also talks about the role of divination, particularly the I Ching, in the crafting of some of his poems, and his engagement with everything from quantum physics to Native American cultures and languages (as professor emeritus at the Institute of American Indian Arts his students included Layli Long Soldier, Sherwin Bitsui, Orlando White, Santee Frazier, and dg nanouk okpik, among many others), as part of his poetry and poetics. When Arthur has felt the need to grow as a poet, to break out of well-worn patterns of writing, but hasn’t known how or in what way to do so, he has often turned to translation as a way to move his writing into a new phase. In the main conversation we discuss the four different periods of translation for him over the past fifty years, the Chinese poetry he chose to translate in each era to help move his poetry forward. For the bonus audio archive Arthur introduces us to and reads some of the translations themselves, translations of poets from the Tang Dynasty, Chinese modernist poetry, and poems by contemporary Chinese poets. I encourage you to listen to the bonus audio after hearing our conversation as you’ll then really be able to track Arthur’s own development as a poet while listening to the poetry of others, both translated and read by him. To find out how to subscribe to the bonus audio and the other many potential benefits of becoming a listener-supporter of the show head over to the Between the Covers Patreon Page.

Today’s guest, Irish Canadian writer Anakana Schofield, joins us to talk about her latest novel, Bina, winner of the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year. Bina was also shortlisted for the 2020 Goldsmith Prize, awarded to fiction that pushes the boundaries of form (in the spirit of Walter Benjamin who said “All great works of literature either dissolve a genre or invent one”). We talk about form as content, form as momentum (as a way to move story forward instead of plot), and form that both creates and reveals character. We also talk about Bina the protagonist, about the invisibility of older women, about social class in relation to storytelling, about centering people in one’s writing who have been shunted aside due to age, economic status, or gender. We talk about the declining value of the imagination in North American letters, how writers shouldn’t be asked to verify what is true in their imaginative works, and why women writers are often asked to uncover the “real” and confessional within their novels, far more than their male counterparts. All that said, this conversation begins with a discussion of humor and is full of anecdote, digression, and laughter throughout. I hope you’ll join us. If you enjoy today’s conversation consider becoming a supporter of Between the Covers. To check out the possible benefits and rewards of doing so (from rare collectibles from writers like Ursula K. Le Guin and Nikky Finney, to becoming a Tin House Early Reader, receiving twelve books over the course of the year months before the general public, to getting resource-rich emails with each episode that point you to further things to explore after the conversation, provide links to things referenced within it, and where David shares the most remarkable finds he used to prepare for it) head over to the Between the Covers Patreon page.

Irish poet Doireann Ní Ghríofa joins us to talk about her latest poetry collection, To Star the Dark, and her prose debut, A Ghost in the Throat, a debut that has captured the imaginations (and all the awards) in Ireland and the UK and is just out now in North America. A Ghost in the Throat is wonderfully hard to categorize: a memoir, a work of historical fiction, an autofiction, a translation, a book about translation, a book about poetry, a book that is poetry. It is all of these things and yet reads less like a work of avant-garde literary experiment and more like a detective or adventure story, an act of literary archaeology, a love letter, and a reclamation against the erasure of women’s lives and women’s art. We talk about the erasure of women, the erasure of motherhood in literature, the erasure of Irish language, Irish culture and the Irish social order under British colonization, and how she conjured the largely erased life of Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill (who wrote the Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire, one of the great laments of keens in Irish literature) in the face of such absence and silence. We also talk about translating the Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire and about self-translation (of Doireann’s own Irish language poetry into English), about oral poetic traditions carried down from one woman’s body to another versus text-based poetry fixed to the page. All this and much more. For the bonus audio archive Doireann reads two contemporary poems she loves. “A Spider” by the Irish poet Colette Bryce and “Broom” by the American poet Deborah Digges. To learn more about how to subscribe to the bonus audio and about the many other potential benefits of becoming a listener-supporter of Between the Covers head over to the Between the Covers Patreon Page.  

Today’s guest, Moroccan writer and filmmaker Abdellah Taïa discusses his most recent novel A Country For Dying translated by Emma Ramadan and winner of the 2021 PEN Translation Award. We talk about voice in relation to self, story in relation to truth, writing in one’s second language, particularly a language imposed by colonization, about making that tongue bend to one’s reality, about being both Muslim and gay (as well as being the first openly homosexual Arab writer from Morocco), about why it is important not to write characters who are good, or only so, about Isabelle Adjani, the Zulawski film Possession, the role of possession and djinns in his work, and about creating a literature that does not itself come from literature, that does not come from books or speak to them. A great complement to today’s conversation with Abdellah is the hour-long conversation with his translator Emma Ramadan which joins the Between the Covers bonus audio archive. Emma talks about what attracts her to Abdellah’s writing, about the resonances she sees between his work and that of Marguerite Duras, about the challenges of bringing his work into English, about translating explicit sex scenes, gender pronouns and gendered words, about sexism in the translation industry, about the benefits of co-translation, and about the relationship of translation to the body. To find out how to subscribe to the bonus audio and the many other potential benefits of becoming a listener-supporter of the show head over to the Between the Covers Patreon Page.  

Today’s episode of Between the Covers is with writer Elissa Washuta about White Magic, her new memoir in essays just out from Tin House. Elissa Washuta’s body of work, and White Magic is no exception, is deeply engaged with form, particularly in relationship to the telling of our own true stories. How do we find the right form to tell our stories? How much can we shape what we lived (into story, into narrative) and have it still remain true? What can we learn about our voices, our selves, from adopting the form of another? What are some ways to create new forms when none are sufficient to carry what we’ve experienced? This is the magic of White Magic, witnessing Elissa Washuta wield form like a spell, like a magic trick, like an act of divination, to conjure her voice and bring her story into words on the page the way she wants it, on its own terms. As Stephen Graham Jones says “White magic, red magic, Stevie Nicks magic—this is Elissa Washuta magic, which is a spell carved from a life, written in blood, and sealed in an honesty I can hardly fathom.” For the bonus audio archive Elissa Washuta reads from the draft of an essay-in-progress called “Apocalypse Pathology.” This joins a wealth of bonus material from Carmen Maria Machado, Ted Chiang, Layli Long Soldier, Morgan Parker, Tommy Pico, Teju Cole, N. K. Jemisin, and many others. To learn how to subscribe to the bonus audio, and to check out the many other potential benefits of becoming a listener-supporter of the show head over to the Between the Covers Patreon page.    

Writer, poet, and painter Rikki Ducornet returns to Between the Covers to discuss her latest novel Trafik which is her first foray into science fiction. Ducornet’s body of work—surrealist, alchemical, gnostic, metamorphic—is sparked by the wonder and mystery of dreams, as well as by the shared company of the non-human other, the eels and butterflies and orcas and jaguars we share the earth with. What does it mean for such a writer to leave earth behind? To imagine herself into a post-earth (post-home), post-human (post-body) world where everything we know is of our own creation? We talk about the real and the virtual, language as generative magic and language as weapon. We discuss surrealism (where if you open the International Encyclopedia of Surrealism you’ll find Rikki between Marcel Duchamp and Max Ernst) and the little acknowledged but vital ecological strain within it, one that challenges the anthropocentric view of the world, transgresses species classifications, and troubles notions of individual identity as well. For the bonus audio archive Rikki reads some of her poems for us. To find out how to subscribe to the bonus audio archive, or how to get a signed giclée reproduction of one of Rikki’s illustrations from the 1983 edition of Jorge Luis Borges’ Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, or to check out the many other potential benefits of becoming a listener-supporter head over to the Between the Covers Patreon Page.

Today’s guest is poet Jorie Graham. We speak about her fifteenth book of poetry, Runaway. This latest book, along with the three that precede it—Sea Change, Place, and Fast—confronts our accelerating trajectory toward climate disaster. But as Lidija Haas says for Harper’s Magazine, Graham “in her poems remakes a world you can inhabit, one in which you can sense what it is you’re letting go of, now, before it’s gone.” We talk about what it means to engage with deep time as a poet, about (dis)embodiment, about soul-making, about finding collectivity through the sensorial and subjective, about apprenticeship and lineage, the line and the sentence, and much more. For the bonus audio archive Jorie discusses the many manifestations of rain, and then reads two rain poems, one by Edward Thomas, the other by Robert Creeley. To find out about how to subscribe to the bonus audio, among the other potential benefits and rewards of becoming a listener-supporter of the show, head over to the Between the Covers Patreon Page.

Today’s Between the Covers conversation with Brandon Hobson is about his novel The Removed, his first book since his National Book Award finalist, Where the Dead Sit Talking. The Removed places us with the Echota family fifteen years after the death of their son Ray-Ray at the hands of the police, and in the long shadow of the forced removal of the Cherokee from their ancestral lands to modern-day Oklahoma where the book takes place. We talk about writing into the silence surrounding police killings of Native people, writing against stereotype, against the expectations of the non-Native imagination, about the foster care system and its legacy in Native communities, and also about questions of form and language. Brandon talks about the influence Diane Williams has had on him on the sentence level. And if you are looking for a deep dive into syntax and the sentence, there is probably no better episode to go to after this than her past appearance on the show. For the bonus audio archive Brandon Hobson reads from “The Man Came to Visit Us,” the lead story in the latest issue of Noon, Diane Williams’ magazine, where Brandon frequently appears. To learn more about how to subscribe to the bonus audio and the other potential benefits of becoming a listener-supporter, from joining our collective brainstorm which is shaping who we invite as guests going forward, to receiving resource-rich emails with each episode, to collectibles from your favorite writers, to becoming an Early Tin House Reader, receiving twelve books over the course of the year months before the general public, head over to the Between the Covers Patreon page.