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

Today’s guest, Viet Thanh Nguyen, returns to Between the Covers after six years to discuss The Committed, his much-anticipated follow-up to the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Sympathizer. The second book in this trilogy finds our protagonist in the French Vietnamese community of Paris in the 1980s. We talk about the differences between France and the United States with regards to race and racism, communism, socialism, and revolution, and how that shapes the discourse within the Vietnamese communities in each country. We talk about the history of the term Asian American in this context, about ethical memory and what it requires of an individual and a community, about being a refugee versus an immigrant, about Francophone postcolonial and revolutionary thought—from Frantz Fanon to Jean-Paul Sartre to Hélène Cixous to Aimé Césaire—and much more. You can listen to our first conversation from 2015 here. For the bonus audio archive Viet talks about the importance of the work of Edward P. Jones and Maxine Hong Kingston for him as a writer, and reads excerpts from each of them to demonstrate why they are influential upon his work. To learn more about how to subscribe to the bonus audio and to look through the other potential rewards and gifts and content available to listener-supporters head over to the Between the Covers Patreon Page.

Today’s Between the Covers conversation is with the poet Ross Gay about Be Holding, his book-length poem that emerges from a sustained meditation on a mere few seconds of the basketball career of Julius Erving (aka Dr. J). Be Holding is a finalist for this year’s PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, given to a work “which has broken new ground by reshaping the boundaries of its form and signaling strong potential for lasting influence.” (This year’s judges are Vievee Francis, Fred Moten, and Tommy Orange). Whether you love basketball or break out in hives at the mention of sports, do watch the video of Dr. J’s move, a move that is akin as much to dance or song or even poetry, as it is to athletics. How is joy inseparable from death? Flight connected to entanglement? Looking to growing? Dr. J to mushrooms and trees, fathers and gardens, birds and cameras? What can we learn about the act of looking, the act of beholding, when it comes to the making of art, to the writing of poems? Join us to find out all of this and much more. For the bonus audio archive Ross Gay reads a poem by Jean Valentine and talks to us about her. To find out more about how to subscribe to the bonus audio and to explore the wealth of potential gifts and rewards and benefits of becoming a listener-supporter of Between the Covers head over to the show’s Patreon page here.

Today’s guest is writer, photographer, critic, and curator Teju Cole. In this extended conversation, we use Cole’s latest photo book Fernweh as a lens through which to look at his entire career, from his novels to his essay collection, from his collaborative work of image-text to the curation of his Spotify playlists. “Who is a stranger? Who is kin? What do we owe each other? What, in the inferno, is not infernal?” he asks at the beginning of Human Archipelago. We explore how these questions echo through his work, and look carefully at the nature of looking itself, and the ethics of how we look and what we show. Teju Cole has added a remarkable three-part reading to the Between the Covers bonus audio archive, one where each of the three texts chosen is in conversation with the others. He begins by reading from John Berger’s The Shape of a Pocket, then from poet Etel Adnan speaking on prehistoric cave paintings and painters, and finally he gives us a glimpse from his forthcoming essay collection Black Paper, reading a piece addressed to John Berger himself. You can find out more about the bonus audio archive and the many other potential benefits of becoming a listener-supporter of the show at the Between the Covers Patreon page.

Today’s episode is with one of today’s great writers of science fiction and fantasy, Nnedi Okorafor. Using her new novella Remote Control (Tor Books) as a lens and a frame, we discuss the difference between Afrofuturism and Africanfuturism, questions of hybrid identity and home within her stories, her use of Nigerian, Namibian, and Ghanian cosmologies to build worlds, how she harnesses anger as a fuel and fear as a creative beacon, her pivotal phone call with Octavia Butler, and why LeVar Burton thinks she should be on any team assembled for first contact with an alien species. As an aside, Nnedi Okorafor, after winning the World Fantasy Award for Who Fears Death, was involved in the successful push to have H.P. Lovecraft removed as the likeness of the statuette. We only touch on this briefly but one could assemble a nice thread of past Between the Covers conversations that either explicitly or implicitly engage with Lovecraft and his legacy. In reverse chronological order the episodes that come to mind are with: N.K. Jemisin, Daniel José Older, Jeff Vandermeer and China Miéville. If you enjoy today’s program and want to learn about the potential benefits and rewards of becoming a listener-supporter (from Ursula K. Le Guin collectibles to craft talks by Marlon James) you can find out more at the Between the Covers Patreon page.  

Vanessa Veselka returns to Between the Covers, eight years after her first appearance, to discuss her new novel The Great Offshore Grounds. Longlisted for this year’s National Book Award in Fiction, Roxane Gay calls The Great Offshore Grounds epic, original, and “utterly engrossing.” Lidia Yuknavitch adds: “This novel is thrilling in its content, daring in heart, and makes a helix between a novel of ideas and the best damn story of women who forge their identities on their own terms that I’ve read in years.” You can listen to Vanessa’s first appearance on Between the Covers for her PEN/Robert W. Bingham prize-winning debut Zazen here. In the fall of 2021, Zazen will be reissued by Vintage for its 10th anniversary. For the bonus audio archive Vanessa, a musician for several decades before becoming a writer, performs a song. Learn more about the bonus audio archive and the other potential benefits and rewards of becoming a listener-supporter at: patreon.com/betweenthecovers

This Tin House Live conversation between Leni Zumas and Janice Lee, “Publishing, Power Structures, and Creative Practice,” was recorded at the summer 2020 Tin House Writers Workshop. Leni Zumas is the author most recently of the novel Red Clocks, a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and winner of the Oregon Book Award for Fiction. She is also the author of Farewell Navigator: Stories (Open City) and The Listeners (Tin House). Leni has appeared on Between the Covers twice previously. Her first appearance was also the show’s first discussion of hybrid and/or genre-indeterminate writing and the only episode that interviews a collaborative pair, Leni Zumas (writer) and Luca Dipierro (artist), about their work A Wooden Leg: A Novel in 64 Cards. Leni returned to the program more recently to discuss Red Clocks. Janice Lee is the founder and executive editor of Entropy, contributing editor at Fanzine, co-founder of The Accomplices, and co-publisher of the press Civil Coping Mechanisms. She is also the author of seven books of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, including The Sky Isn’t Blue, Reconsolidation, and Damnation, a book-length meditation on the films of Hungarian director Béla Tarr. Her latest novel, Imagine A Death, whose publishing journey they discuss in today’s episode, a novel about inherited trauma, the apocalypse, and interspecies communication, will be published in 2021 by Texas Review Press. Leni Zumas and Janice Lee both teach in the MFA program at Portland State University. At the beginning of this conversation they reference, and Janice reads from, her 2019 essay “Books Are Not Products, They Are Bridges: Challenging Linear Ideas of Success in Literary Publishing.” To learn more about the benefits and the potential rewards of becoming a listener-supporter of Between the Covers visit the show’s Patreon page.

Today’s episode of Between the Covers is a first for the show, a return to and extension of a recent episode with Natalie Diaz. Today’s ‘part two’ does not entirely depend upon part one, but it does refer back to it with frequency. So if you would like to get the fullest experience begin here. In both episodes we take each of the three individual words in Natalie’s most recent National Book Award–shortlisted poetry collection Postcolonial Love Poem and look at Natalie’s work through the lens of each. Today we focus on the word ‘poem’ and look at poetic lineage, writing poetry under occupation, the oral vs. the written, the use of repetition, the role of time, and what writing ‘in the wake’ and under the influence of water might mean.

Today’s episode of Between the Covers is a conversation with poet and classicist Alice Oswald. Widely considered one of our great living poets, Oswald is the 46th professor of poetry at the University of Oxford, and the first woman to hold the poetry chair in its over three centuries of existence. Perhaps best known for Memorial, her radical revocalizing of the Iliad, Oswald speaks today of her latest book, Nobody, another engagement with and reimagining of Homer, this time the Odyssey. Originally conceived in collaboration with the abstract watercolorist William Tillyer, Nobody is a book deeply informed by the sea. We talk about Oswald’s lifelong engagement with water in her work, the relationship between water and the mind, the Homeric way of seeing the world, and what makes a poem come alive. For the bonus audio archive Alice reads two things: 1) a sampling of some of the impossible-to-answer questions asked by God in the Book of Job and 2) a short ballad she wrote called Emerald as another partial response to a question Anne Carson asks her in the main interview. Find out how to subscribe to the bonus audio archive and about the other potential benefits and rewards of becoming a listener-supporter of the show at: Patreon.com/betweenthecovers

Join poet-essayists Hanif Abdurraqib & Shayla Lawson for an extended conversation on writing pop culture (and so much more). This conversation was recorded at the 2020 Tin House Writers Workshop. Shayla’s most recent book is This is Major: Notes on Diana Ross, Dark Girls and Being Dope & Hanif’s next book is A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance. Don’t miss Hanif’s first appearance on Between the Covers as well, for his most recent poetry collection from Tin House Books, A Fortune for your Disaster, a great follow-up to today’s episode.

“Amid impending disasters too vast even to be perceived, what can we do―cognitively, morally, and practically? Gabbert, a tenacious researcher and a ruthless self-examiner, probes this ultimate abstraction in her essays, goes past wordless dread and comes up with enough reasoned consideration to lead us through. Do you feel―and how can you not―as if your emotional endurance is exhausted by horrors already well underway? Then you should read this book.” ―Sarah Manguso

“An urgent, intimate hybrid of memoir and fiction, Homeland Elegies lays bare the broken heart of our American dream turned reality TV nightmare. The book . . . brilliantly captures how we got to this exact moment in time and at what cost. Stunning.” —A. M. Homes “An unflinchingly honest self-portrait by a brilliant Muslim-American writer, and, beyond that, an unsparing examination of both sides of that fraught hyphenated reality. Passionate, disturbing, unputdownable.” —Salman Rushdie

Today’s conversation is with poet Natalie Diaz, author of the National Book Award shortlisted collection Postcolonial Love Poem. We talk today about questions of postcoloniality, about love and postcolonial love, about writing poetry under occupation, the fine line between participation and complicity, about empathy and what cannot be translated and about the sensuality that arises from what can’t be known of another. For the bonus audio archive Natalie talks about and reads from Jorge Luis Borges’ Book of Imaginary Beings. To find out how to subscribe to the bonus audio archive and the other rewards and benefits of becoming a listener-supporter of Between the Covers head over to: patreon.com/betweenthecovers  

In “Getting Past the Gatekeepers: How to Keep Writing in an Industry that Excludes Us,” Kaitlyn Greenidge and Mira Jacob discuss their combined 30+ years of experience navigating literary publishing. From the first feedback to the final copyedits, they discuss strategies to stay sane and keep writing when your story doesn’t fit the industry’s narrow bookshelf.

“This collection of essays, memoirs and critical pieces forms an intellectual biography of Europe’s most history-obsessed writer. Beginning with her childhood in East Berlin in the early ’60s and ’70s, the book moves in concentric circles, from the intimate and understatedly moving to the moment History collides with her life. A powerful voice singing the past into the present’s melody.” —John Freeman, Lit Hub

“In The Fish & The Dove, Mary-Kim Arnold’s lyrical scope sweeps across intersecting terrains, moving through time to capture the history of occupation and legacy war in Korea, through the delicate tethers between biological mother, adoptive mother, motherland and daughter, and through the permeable membranes which exist between person and place. . . . With this fiercely tender offering, she lays bare multiple wars: ones between countries, in memory, within a family, as well as the ones between women and men. . . . ʻ[T]ime is a robe stitched through with ash’ that Arnold keeps ʻtrying to shake off.’ And it is an astonishing sight to behold.” —Diana Khoi Nguyen  

A conversation between Brandon Taylor & Garth Greenwell about queer aesthetics, “problematic art,” representation, and much more.

“It’s hard to overstate the importance of this gorgeous, harrowing, heartbreaking book, which tackles sexual violence and its aftermath while also articulating the singular pain of knowing—or loving, or caring for, or having a history with—one’s rapist. Vanasco is whip-smart and tender, open and ruthless; she is the perfect guide through the minefield of her trauma, and ours.” —Carmen Maria Machado “I wish everyone in this country would read it.” —Melissa Febos

“Anatomy of Melancholy” is a conversation between Melissa Febos & Bassey Ikpi at the 2020 Tin House Summer Writers Workshop. Febos & Ikpi talk about making narrative (and aesthetic) sense out of the darkest parts of one’s past. Bassey Ikpi is the New York Times bestselling author of I’m Telling the Truth But I’m Lying and founder of The Siwe Project, a worldwide non-profit dedicated to promoting mental health awareness throughout the global black community. Melissa Febos is the author of the critically acclaimed memoir Whip Smart, the beloved essay collection Abandon Me (for which she first appeared on Between the Covers), and her upcoming second essay collection Girlhood. She teaches in the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa.

“In Lauren Camp’s Took House we are enveloped in a poetry both precise and mysterious, intimate and sublime. Reading through these poems, I was reminded of the tenet that poetry is not like the interior life, but is the interior life, the thing itself made flesh via language. . . . Here is a poet articulating her human existence . . . here is a particular heart and mind removing its shield in order to commune, to help us see the world again, more deeply and more strangely, and reader, I am grateful.” —Allison Benis White

“Sacco is a talent entirely unto himself, applying an exquisitely fine eye for detail to the urgent histories that define the world around us. . . . Now, Sacco brings that eye to the lives of the Dene people in the Canadian subarctic, getting the full picture as only he can.” —Jonny Diamond, Literary Hub “A tour de force . . . luminous . . . What begins as an exploration of the effects of fracking on Native lands sprawls into a haunted history of an entire civilization.” —Ed Park, The New York Times Book Review

“Verge is a bouquet of dynamite: explosive, deadly, and spectacularly beautiful. These stories captivated me like modern fairy tales, and like those dark lessons they showed me how resilience is forged through survival, beauty through brokenness, joy by fire. The women who occupy them are my favorite kinds of heroines: as flawed as they are furious, as bold as they are tender. I won’t soon forget them.” —Melissa Febos

Today’s talk, “On Likability” by Lacy M. Johnson, was given at the 2018 Tin House Writers Workshop. It later became an essay, one selected by Rebecca Solnit for The Best American Essays 2019.

“Shrapnel Maps is so beautiful. Half dream, half nightmare, all real. Filled with the remnants of what people hope for and what they are willing to do, and everything that remains afterwards. It’s a confrontation to identity and it dares to conjugate love as a defiance to the capacity of violence. Extraordinary. . . . elegant and devastating and compelling and complex.” —Pádraig Ó Tuama, poet, theologian, and conflict mediator

Lidia Yuknavitch gave this craft talk, “Writing from the Deep Cut,” at the 2018 Tin House Writers Workshop. As Lidia says: “We are (always) living in tumultuous times. The despair and trauma fracture our life narratives daily, culturally and personally. And yet we endure, make love, make art, we keep creating. There is so much to learn from the edge of things, from the cracks and cuts and fissures of the earth, of our hearts. What can writing become? What new narrative strategies are emerging? How might we become and story ourselves differently? How might more bodies and stories and voices emerge as the old mono stories break apart? Storytelling is a site of resistance and generative possibility, in all times.”

“The City We Became is a wonderfully inventive love letter to New York City that spans the multiverse. A big middle finger to Lovecraft with a lot of heart, creativity, smarts and humor. A timely and audacious allegorical tale for our times. This book is all these things and more.” —Rebecca Roanhorse “The most important speculative writer of her generation . . . She’s that good.” —John Scalzi      

“Love Child’s Hotbed of Occasional Poetry is a 21st-century paean to the sterling love songs humming throughout four hundred years of black American life.” —Lit Hub “Her poems elide the generational and the personal with ample music. They are, therefore, more than taut with vital details; they are alive with nuance and contrast, where doom is rightfully proximate to creation and grace.” —Sewanee Review

Given at the 2019 Tin House Summer Workshop, Rebecca Makkai’s craft talk “You Talkin’ to Me?: The ‘Ear’ of the Story” looks at an important but underappreciated aspect of story craft, the flip side of point of view, the point of telling. In her words, “Who is the story’s implied listener? Are you casting your listeners as people who already know this world or people who need to be filled in? And what are the political and artistic implications of glossing a culture or setting for readers who don’t know it?”

“Fernanda Melchor is part of a wave of real writing, a multi-tongue, variform, generationless, decadeless, ageless wave, that American contemporary literature must ignore if it is to hold on to its infantile worldview.” —Jesse Ball Shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize, Hurricane Season is the English-language debut of one of the most thrilling and accomplished young Mexican writers, and her conversation on Between the Covers is Melchor’s first radio/podcast discussion of it in English.

“A Fortune for Your Disaster proves that, if you pay attention, Black people have defined and still define themselves for themselves amid roses and dandelions, cardinals and violets, the blues of music and police uniforms, prayer and swagger. . . . The disaster is not us or ours but what we endure, forced and as a matter of course, whether our presence is acknowledged or not, on our terms or not. As death insists on invading our lives, we keep making more and more beauty in order to survive it. . . . The beauty of our excellence is soundtracked by love and violence. . . . The fortune is us and it is ours. With a music as richly profound as we are, Abdurraqib makes it undeniably so.” —Khadijah Queen

The New Yorker poetry editor and host of The New Yorker poetry podcast, Kevin Young, delivered this talk, “How to Write a Hoax Poem,” at the 2014 Tin House Writers Workshop. He discusses some of the more notable modern poetry hoaxes, glimpsing into the secret history of the poem as something conceived to tempt or even trick. By understanding the ways the hoax works, Young suggests that we may better know our own assumptions, habits, and hurts, and how to subvert them in our writing.

“Whether speaking about motherhood, grief, or poetry, Zucker’s unrelenting eye and wittily critical voice peel back these experiences to reveal insights that are both deeply human and uncompromisingly analytic. . . . Above all, this book is open—open about difficult subjects, open in the way its language operates, open in its willingness to create a psychological intimacy between the speaker and the reader.” —Morgan Levine for The Columbia Review

Ingrid Rojas Contreras’ talk “Power & Audience: On Not Writing for White People” was given at the 2019 Tin House Summer Workshop in Portland, Oregon. In this talk she references a 2019 Publishing Industry Survey and a series of pie charts showing the racial, gender, sexual orientation, and ability breakdown of various subsets of the publishing industry. Contreras also further discusses these themes, in relationship to the recent controversy over the book American Dirt, in her new essay at The Cut called “There’s Nothing Thrilling About Trauma.”  

Dorothy Allison treated the participants of the 2011 Summer Workshop to a spirited discussion of how characters should speak on the page. Not only “he said, she said, none of them said a thing,” but a whole range of language issues—what is said and not said, dialect and rhythm, pacing, patterns in speech, and most importantly, the language of gesture and avoidance.  

“Reinhardt’s Garden is one of those perfect books that looks small and exotic and melancholic from the outside but, once in, is immense and exultant in the best possible way. Think Amulet by Roberto Bolaño, think Nightwood by Djuna Barnes, think Train Dreams by Denis Johnson, think Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys, think Zama by Antonio Di Benedetto, think The Loser by Thomas Bernhard. Think.” —Rodrigo Fresán

“Novelists don’t need to dream the end of the world anymore—they need to wake up to it. Jenny Offill is one of today’s few essential voices, because she writes about essential things, in sentences so clipped and glittering it’s as if they are all cut from one diamond.” –Jonathan Dee

“Lance Olsen locates his porous, alluring, heartbreaking, and haunted narrative in Berlin on a day in 1927. Poised at a moment of such hope and doom, it is a ravishing meditation on history, on time, and on what it is to be alive.” —Carole Maso

Alexander Chee delivered this craft lecture, from “First Draft to Plot,” at the 2016 Tin House Summer Workshop. Chee is the author most recently of the essay collection How to Write an Autobiographical Novel.

“Garth Greenwell, whose first book is a masterpiece, amazingly has written a second book that is also a masterpiece. The great enterprise that Joyce and Lawrence began—to write with utter literal candor about sex, grounding one’s moral life and philosophical insight in what that candor reveals about us—finds fulfillment, a late apotheosis, in Greenwell’s work. Cleanness is the act of a master.” —Frank Bidart

“In the Dream House . . . confronts the issues of credibility, self-doubt, and disbelief that all too frequently arise when survivors of domestic abuse speak out. But the work also stands as an intervention explicitly aimed at the silences, erasures, and lacunae of the culture at large . . . Machado’s In the Dream House shows us that a narrative of lesbian domestic abuse can be her story told in precisely her way—a human story, full of artistry, candor, and grace.” —James W. Fuerst

Jericho Brown gave these two talks, on suicide, and on joy, at the 2016 Tin House Summer Workshop in Portland, Oregon. His latest poetry collection The Tradition (Copper Canyon Press) was a finalist for the 2019 National Book Award.

“In The Magical Language of Others, E. J. Koh writes of the boundary between anonymity and naming, between absence and abandonment, between cruelty and safety for four generations of mothers and daughters, each speaking with an occupied heart and crossing narrative borders between Korea, Japan, and America. As a reader, you give yourself over to her narrative territory and the resetting of the borders of lineage, language, and lives lost.” —Shawn Wong

“In this retelling of the Mahabharata from the point of view of its hitherto minor female characters, Karthika Naïr uncovers a seminal feminist text. Until the Lions makes dazzling use of concrete verse and surreptitious rhyme to tell a story you think you know. By poem’s end you understand, with gratitude, that you know nothing and the old world has been made new. This is nervy and accomplished poetry. Listen.” —Jeet Thayil

“CAConrad always argues (from the inside of their poems) for a poetry of radical inclusivity while keeping a very queer shoulder to the wheel. Their kind of queerness strikes me as nonpolarizing, not intentionally but because of the fullness of their exposition, a kind of gigantism that seems to me to be most deeply informed by love, and a tenderness for the ravages and tumult of existence.” —Eileen Myles

“Older’s spellbinding novel is a fever dream full of magic and loss, wickedness and grace, faith and love, spirit and power.” —Marlon James; “A lyrical, beautiful, devastating, literally haunting journey of assimilation, resistance, and family. Older just gets better and better.” —N.K. Jemisin

“Jake Skeets takes us to ‘The Indian Capital of the World,’ a landscape of erosion and erasure, where ‘boys only hold boys / like bottles’ and eros is a dangerous thing. In the brush and horseweed, ghosts and trains and abandoned trailers, a young Diné attempts to answer all the question marks of adolescence and early adulthood, desire and death commingling around him. These are poems born of unspokenness, testing the limits of language, love, and silence.”―D. A. Powell

Recorded on the final day of the 2019 Tin House Summer Writers Workshop, the panel “On Writing Towards Joy” ended the week on a high note. Moderated by Tin House Assistant Books Editor Elizabeth DeMeo, panelists Kelly Link, Garth Greenwell, and Justin Torres unpack a rarely discussed topic. How does one create joy on the page, in the reader? What are the craft questions and existential ones regarding joy? And what exactly is joy and to what ends should it be pursued?  

“This book is beyond special. Richard Powers manages to turn trees into vivid and engaging characters, something that indigenous people have done for eons but that modern literature has rarely if ever even attempted. It’s not just a completely absorbing, even overwhelming book; it’s a kind of breakthrough in the ways we think about and understand the world around us, at a moment when that is desperately needed.”—Bill McKibben  

“Grand Union is an unusual creature, combining all the experimental exuberance of a writer discovering a form with the technical prowess of one at the height of her abilities. The result is exhilarating. Between the covers of one book, readers will find such disparate forms as allegory, parable, speculative thriller and satire, as well as shorter incarnations of Smith’s characteristic social comedy . . . Smith’s voracious intellect is on full display.” —San Francisco Chronicle

Recorded at the 2019 Tin House Summer Writers Workshop at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, today’s episode is a medley of readings from three different nights. Garth Greenwell reads from his upcoming novel Cleanness (FSG January 2020), Michelle Tea from her novel-in-progress, Little Faggot, and Kaveh Akbar the short and long poems “Vines” and “The Palace” respectively.

“Rob Schlegel has a voice you’d follow into the dark woods, knowing full well it’s hard, awful, daily, plain, living truth you’re running toward. The speaker in this book is a heartbreaker of a storyteller—a synesthesiac of mixed feelings, bad news, and wordsmithery. I feel known, caught out, believed in, vulnerable, when I read this book.”—Brenda Shaughnessy, judge, Iowa Poetry Prize