Skylight Books Podcast Series

Seawitches is a bi-annual print publication with the eternal theme of water. Within the water theme we’ve explored menstruation, mental health, white privilege, technology, environmental issues, and more. Every issue has an Artist In Residence (AIR), including Leah Koransky (1), Caitlin Mattisson (2), and Savannah Rusher (4). Writers include Easkey Britton, Serena Renner, Kehinde Apara, Margaret Seelie, Maureen Murphy, Coco Peezy, and more. Artists include Amelia Coplan, Andrew Kaineder, Bleen Photography, Chris Duncan, Cristine Blanco, Elizabeth Pepin Silva, Rebecca Schillinger, Kaylee Savage-Wright, Kimberly Rose Wendt, Luke Allen, Marley Reynosa, Paige Laverty, Preston Richardson, Sarah Beeby, Susan Mattisson, Yoni Matatyaou, and more. Whether you love oceans with wild waves, lakes that leave your skin smelling of fresh dirt, pools with sunlight slithering across blue paint, or a good soak in the tub – we think you'll like what you find with Seawitches.

In Best Women’s Erotica of the Year, Volume 5, award-winning editor Rachel Kramer Bussel takes readers on an outrageous journey into the world of female fantasy and desire. These sexy stories offer up wild, hot, and steamy tales from today’s top authors. You’ll be swept away by the sexiest business deal ever, break the rules in a future world where skin-on-skin contact is forbidden, and discover the art of getting off by phone sex. From threesomes to mermaid sex, fetishes, sex parties, and much more, these authors steam up the pages with tales of trysts, love, and lust where nothing is held back. If you’re looking to escape from the everyday and discover what happens when women are ready to get totally outrageous, this book is for you. With new stories by beloved authors including Joanna Angel, Balli Kaur Jaswal, CD Reiss, Sierra Simone, and Sabrina Sol, along with newcomers to the genre, you’ll savor every sizzling page.

In "a strangely ageless world somewhere between Emily Dickinson and David Lynch" (Blake Butler), a cleaning woman at a museum of art nurtures aspirations to do more than simply dust the paintings around her. She dreams of having the liberty to explore them in writing, and so must find a way to win herself the time and security to use her mind. She escapes her lot by marrying a rich man, but having gained a husband, a house, high society, and a maid, she finds that her new life of privilege is no less constrained. Not only has she taken up different forms of time-consuming labor―social and erotic―but she is now, however passively, forcing other women to clean up after her. Perhaps another and more drastic solution is necessary? Reminiscent of a lost Victorian classic in miniature, yet taking equal inspiration from such modern authors as Jean Rhys, Octavia Butler, Clarice Lispector, and Jean Genet, Amina Cain's Indelicacy is at once a ghost story without a ghost, a fable without a moral, and a down-to-earth investigation of the barriers faced by women in both life and literature. It is a novel about seeing, class, desire, anxiety, pleasure, friendship, and the battle to find one’s true calling. Cain is in conversation with Adam Novy, author of The Avian Gospels came out in 2010.

In the early evening of June 25, 1980 in Pocahontas County, West Virginia, two middle-class outsiders named Vicki Durian, 26, and Nancy Santomero, 19, were murdered in an isolated clearing. They were hitchhiking to a festival known as the Rainbow Gathering but never arrived; they traveled with a third woman however, who lived. For thirteen years, no one was prosecuted for the "Rainbow Murders," though deep suspicion was cast on a succession of local residents in the community, depicted as poor, dangerous, and backward. In 1993, a local farmer was convicted, only to be released when a known serial killer and diagnosed schizophrenic named Joseph Paul Franklin claimed responsibility. With the passage of time, as the truth seemed to slip away, the investigation itself caused its own traumas--turning neighbor against neighbor and confirming a fear of the violence outsiders have done to this region for centuries. Emma Copley Eisenberg spent years living in Pocahontas and re-investigating these brutal acts. Using the past and the present, she shows how this mysterious act of violence has loomed over all those affected for generations, shaping their fears, fates, and the stories they tell about themselves. In The Third Rainbow Girl, Eisenberg follows the threads of this crime through the complex history of Appalachia, forming a searing and wide-ranging portrait of America--its divisions of gender and class, and of its violence. Eisenberg is in conversation with Steph Cha, the author of Follow Her Home, Beware Beware, Dead Soon Enough, and Your House Will Pay, out from Ecco in 2019.

Unique in its structure and written to mimic the tidal charts that Evie studies as well as the natural ebbs and flows of life, Creatures takes readers on a provocative and mesmerizing journey as Evie is forced to reckon with her complicated upbringing in this lush, feral land off the coast of Southern California. On the eve of Evie’s wedding, a dead whale is trapped in the harbor of Winter Island, the groom may be lost at sea, and Evie’s mostly absent mother has shown up out of the blue.  Evie grew up with her well-meaning but negligent father, surviving on the money he made dealing the island’s world-famous strain of marijuana, Winter Wonderland. Although he raised her with a deep respect for the elements, the sea, and the creatures living within it, he also left her to parent herself. Crissy Van Meter based Creatures on her own coming of age in Newport Beach. “I was asking questions about what it means to grieve, to love, to experience love informed by grief, and to love someone who isn’t always good.” She explains, “I was interested in digging into my own experiences with my father’s drug and alcohol addiction, his failures as a father, and the dichotomy of still loving him so much… And, I was interested in exploring what it means to have a treacherous past with a father like this, and what it means as an adult to decipher what it means to love, what it means to forgive.” Van Meter is in conversation with Edan Lepucki, bestselling author of the novels California and Woman No. 17.

Lidia Yuknavitch's bestselling novels The Book of Joan and The Small Backs of Children, and her groundbreaking memoir The Chronology of Water, have established her as one of our most urgent contemporary voices: a writer with a rare gift for tracing the jagged boundaries between art and trauma, sex and violence, destruction and survival. In Verge, her first collection of short fiction, she turns her eye to life on the margins, in all its beauty and brutality. A book of heroic grace and empathy, Verge is a viscerally powerful and moving survey of our modern heartache life.

WriteGirl is an innovative nonprofit organization that empowers teen girls through creative writing. Join us for this special chance to hear WriteGirl teens speak their minds and read their original poetry and prose. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, and you’ll be surprised—you won’t want to miss it!  In WriteGirl’s new award-winning anthology, This Moment: Bold Voices from WriteGirl, 180 teens share stories, poems, memoirs, scripts and songs about their hopes and fears, loves and losses, amigas and pan dulce, as they navigate a challenging present and uncertain future with determination and grace. Their words inspire reflection and ignite action. The book includes a Creativity Starter Kit with 15 fresh writing activities to inspire young writers. This Moment is available for purchase at Skylight Books.

Your weekly horoscope is merely one crumb of astrology's cake. In her first book You Were Born For This, Chani Nicholas shows how your birth chart--a snapshot of the sky at the moment you took your first breath--reveals your unique talents, challenges, and opportunities. Fortified with this knowledge, you can live out the life you were born to. Marrying the historic traditions of astrology with a modern approach, You Were Born for This explains the key components of your birth chart in an easy to use, choose your own adventure style. With journal prompts, reflection questions, and affirmations personal to your astrological makeup, this book guides you along the path your chart has laid out for you. Nicholas is in conversation with transgender activist, writer, actress, and producer Jen Richards.

Romance or The End takes up the tools of romantic narrative in order to perform the rupture between self and story that occurs at the onset of trauma. Using known and pathologized literary arcs, Elaine Kahn unspools the fundamental instability of truth, love, and language to create an experiential portrait of narrative’s power to both disfigure and restore. Kahn is in conversation with Justin Torres, who has published short fiction in The New Yorker, Harper's, Granta, Tin House, The Washington Post, Glimmer Train, Flaunt.

"The last time I saw Holly Prado, whom I’d known forty years, we were part of a group performance of Song of Myself at Beyond Baroque. Now we have her experiment in the long poem, Weather, a single, book-length poem in the larger tradition of Whitman’s personal epic, presenting the account of a voyage, lasting from fall 2015 to fall of 2018, through the inner seasons of a mythically conscious woman’s Los Angeles.  "In a more specific tradition, Prado’s work is in the line of Diane Wakoski, Anais Nin, Diane DiPrima, Lyn Hejenian, and other women who have written with wisdom and courage about their resonantly three-dimensional inner lives. Sadly, it is her last book; but a near-compensation is, it is her best. Farthest and deepest in reach, a modernist collage orchestrated by a expressive hand, the poem is open enough to be entered virtually anywhere, yet organically shaped by a mature mythic awareness to have narrative momentum and coherence. Beautifully turned phrases, sentences, and lines abound. An example: "Out in the huge autumn sky, / leonid meteors give us their message: Don’t think too much / of your human pursuits. Don’t think you won’t be / dissolved in everything wilder than you. Enter / your myths with your open-palmed hands on your knees." “Dissolved in everything wilder than you” — that is the state of feeling and vision Prado’s imagination makes available to us. It is also the promise all real poetry makes: that our veil of pursuits be lifted, that we see the wild truth." —James Cushing, joined in conversation and readings by Harry E. Northup and Phoebe MacAdams.