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

Jorge Luis Borges called her the “Tolstoy of Mexico” and César Aira the “greatest novelist of the 20th century,” so why is it likely that you haven’t read or even heard of Elena Garro before now? And given that Garro was, like her fantastical stories,  not beholden to the truth when accounting her own life, and given that her own life was, in its radical shifts and contradictions, so wildly resistant to comprehension, how does one present her now to the world? Jazmina Barrera may be the perfect writer to do so as her new Garro-centric book The Queen of Swords is as unconventional as her subject. Full of cats and revolution, Tarot and the CIA, conspiracy and embroidery, this anti-biographical love letter to another writer also becomes a portrait of Jazmina as well. For the bonus audio archive Jazmina contributes a reading from Elena Garro’s story “When We Were Dogs,” in Christina MacSweeney’s translation. To learn how to subscribe to the bonus audio and the other potential benefits and rewards of joining the Between the Covers community as a listener-supporter, head over to the show’s Patreon page. Finally, here is the BookShop for today. The post Jazmina Barrera : The Queen of Swords appeared first on Tin House.

Caren Beilin’s first appearance on the show, in 2022 to discuss her book Revenge of the Scapegoat, was so unforgettable, and spurred so much enthusiasm and electrifying conversation in its wake, that I couldn’t say “no” to being in conversation with her again, this time live at Powell’s Bookstore, to discuss her latest book Sea, Poison out with New Directions. So get ready, as if you were a donkey dragged through a mossy ditch of Daniel Day-Lewis-ishness, for a conversation of stolen plots and stolen uteri, medical Oulipo, botched eye surgeries, dirty dancing, and more. If you enjoyed today’s conversation consider joining the Between the Covers community as a listener-supporter. Find out about all the potential rewards and benefits of doing so at the show’s Patreon page. Finally, here is the BookShop for today’s conversation. The post Tin House Live : Caren Beilin : Sea Poison appeared first on Tin House.

Painter Stephen Hayes latest exhibition, “Elegy,” consists of twelve abstract paintings that engage with the genocide in Gaza. One of the twelve paintings was created while listening to the Between the Covers conversation with Omar El Akkad about his book One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. Because of this, instead of asking, as he usually does, an art curator or fellow painter to be in a public conversation with him as part of the exhibition, he asked me to interview him. Much as our conversation was surely different than the others he has had about his work over his nearly half-century of being a painter, his invitation also asked me to step into unfamiliar territory, to meet Stephen in this third space, unfamiliar to us both, and make something new together. The conversation was held at the Elizabeth Leach Gallery in Portland, Oregon. Head over to the gallery website to see images of the “Elegy” exhibition and to this post on their Instagram page to see the specific painting that was created under the aura of this podcast. If you enjoyed today’s conversation consider joining the Between the Covers community as a listener-supporter. You can find out about the potential rewards and benefits of doing so at the show’s Patreon page. The post Tin House Live: Stephen Hayes appeared first on Tin House.

Archive of Desire: A Poem in Four Parts for C.P. Cavafy began as a collaborative multidisciplinary project between the poet Robin Coste Lewis, the composer Vijay Iyer, the cellist Jeffrey Zeigler and the visual artist Julie Mehretu. This multimedia quartet traveled to Athens together to engage with the Cavafy archives as part of the composition of their performance, a performance now rendered anew on the page in Robin’s new poetry collection. We look at the different ways Robin alchemizes archival material across her three books, at questions of selfhood and desire when engaging with the poetry of another, at her unique relationship to time, at how queerness informs her poetics and that of Cavafy’s, and much more. A conversation that conjures everyone from Anne Carson to Lyn Hejinian, Daniel Mendelsohn to Ross Gay, and roams from ancient Greece to modern Alexandria. If you enjoyed today’s conversation consider transforming yourself from a listener to a listener-supporter by joining the Between the Covers community. There are many potential rewards and benefits of doing so including the bonus audio archive which includes supplemental contributions by past guests, from Dionne Brand and Nikky Finney, to Ross Gay and Natalie Diaz. Learn how to subscribe to the bonus audio and about the other benefits to choose from at the show’s Patreon page. Finally, here if the BookShop for today’s conversation. The post Robin Coste Lewis : Archive of Desire appeared first on Tin House.

As an artist, how does one dive into the wreck of an archive, a canon, a shared collective memory, a history—one filled with silenced voices, distorted accounts, erasures and elisions—on behalf of those wronged by it? Poet Dionne Brand says “the salvage is the life which exceeds the wreck” and Diana Arterian’s work seems animated by this work of salvage and recovery. We look at her new poetry collection, Agrippina the Younger, about a Roman Empress who, today, is only known as the “daughter of,” “sister of,” “mother of,” “wife of ” various men of history; and also at Diana’s new work of translation (co-translated with Marina Omar) Smoke Drifts, the first time the Anglophone world is able to engage deeply with the work of the Afghan poet Nadia Anjuman, a rising literary star silenced in the prime of her life. We look at feminist practices and strategies of archival confrontation in these two very different contexts, Ancient Rome and modern Afghanistan, and the different considerations and choices Diana makes as she dives deep into the wreck and somehow resurfaces to re-present these lives, this art, shimmering with life, for us. For the bonus audio archive Diana contributes an epic medley of readings, everything from ancient Armenian poetry to some co-translations in-progress of contemporary Armenian poetry; from her memoir-in-progress to a hard-to-find 35 year old piece by Alice Notley called “Homer’s Art” which wonders how a women could write an epic and if “there might be recovered some sense of what the mind was like before Homer, before the world went haywire & women were denied participation in the design & making of it. Perhaps someone might discover that original mind inside herself right now, in these times.” To learn about how to subscribe to the bonus audio archive and about all the other potential benefits and rewards of joining the Between the Covers community as a listener-supporter, head over to the show’s Patreon page. Finally, here is the BookShop for today’s conversation.     The post Diana Arterian : Agrippina the Younger & Smoke Drifts appeared first on Tin House.

Set during the 17th century witch trials in Denmark, and relayed to us through the voice of a magically animated wax child of one of the accused, Olga Ravn’s new book, which creates something uncannily other from primary sources, has been heralded as a “devilishly subversive feminist anthem” and speaks as much to the present moment as it does to the time of the witches. We explore how the witch hunts and trials were an important part of creating a notion of state, family and self that we still live under today. We look at the fear of women gathering, at folk magic and alchemy, at animating the archive through ritual and the imagination, and much more. If you enjoy today’s conversation consider transforming yourself from a listener to a listener-supporter by joining the Between the Covers community. There are lots of rewards and benefits of doing so and you can explore them all at the show’s Patreon page. Finally, here is the BookShop for today.   The post Olga Ravn : The Wax Child appeared first on Tin House.

Ten years in the making, poet Rickey Laurentiis joins us to talk about her much-anticipated remarkable new collection Death of the First Idea. “In the past decade, as Laurentiis has transitioned, her ideas of the lyric and poetry have transformed, as has the America in which she lives,” says the back copy on this book, whose poetry fittingly resists easy categorization. Oracular and lyrical, mythic and confessional, archaic and futuristic, personal and communal, Rickey’s poetry takes us far and wide, from Ancient Greece to New Orleans to Palestine, from Dante to Emily Dickinson to her own past and future selves. As Safiya Sinclair says: “Here is a poet in an ecstatic trance, dancing with the muses. Each page is an inferno of linguistic fervor, reforging trans identity and femme imagination. Deeply felt, rigorous, and erudite, these poems strike deep in the mind and stick to the soul. Startling and raw and exquisitely fearless, above all, these poems choose to live.” For the bonus audio archive Rickey contributes a reading of a new poem, written just two days before this conversation was recorded, entitled “Second Nature.” This joins bonus audio from everyone from Danez Smith to Torrey Peters, Jorie Graham to Dionne Brand. To learn how to subscribe to the bonus audio and about the other potential benefits and rewards of joining the Between the Covers community head over to the show’s Patreon page. Finally, here is the BookShop for today’s episode The post Rickey Laurentiis : Death of the First Idea appeared first on Tin House.

What does it mean to write toward or under the aura of another poet one admires, to write in homage, as a celebration of another? What happens to language when it hovers between two writers, between how they each separately inhabit it? What does it say about the self, or is discovered about it—within the poem and in the world at large—when that self works through a devotional practice of homage? Today we look at one of Laynie Browne’s homage books, her most recent collection Apprentice to a Breathing Hand which is in deep engagement with the poetry of Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge. Fittingly, the conversation becomes a deep exploration of both Laynie and Mei-Mei’s poetry, their animating questions and concerns, and the work that arises when their work is placed alongside, nested within, in dialogue, in this way. For the bonus audio Laynie reads for us from another one of her homage books, this one to Alice Notley, called Everyone and Her Resemblances to demonstrate a very different aesthetic and syntactic, formal and thematic project. To learn about how to subscribe to the bonus audio archive, and the other benefits and rewards to choose from when joining the Between the Covers community, head over to the show’s Patreon page. Finally, here is the BookShop for today.   The post Laynie Browne : Apprentice to a Breathing Hand appeared first on Tin House.

Today’s guest is writer and critic Martha Anne Toll. Through a discussion of her latest novel Duet for One we explore the perennial mystery of writing and art-making, namely how to render something that lives beyond representation, and how words can become a vehicle to evoke what words themselves cannot adequately describe. In this case, we look at how to bring music into language, the experience of making it and hearing it into the realm of words. We explore Martha’s lifelong journey toward becoming a writer, through music and law and social justice, ultimately debuting as a novelist in her sixties. And how her mentorship as a musician affected and shaped her writing life, from craft and form to failure and perseverance. If you enjoyed today’s conversation consider joining the Between the Covers community as a listener-supporter. Find out about all the rewards and benefits of doing so at the show’s Patreon page. Finally here is the BookShop for today’s episode. The post Martha Anne Toll : Duet for One appeared first on Tin House.

Today’s conversation with Rob Macaisa Colgate is about two books, his poetry collection Hardly Creatures and his verse drama My Love is Water. You could say these two books are approaching the same questions, but from opposite, if complementary vantage points. Questions of care and disability, of accessibility and community, of Filipino-American identity and the afterlives of colonialism, of queerness and its intersections with race, of selfhood in relation to psychiatric medications, of cross-species solidarity, of questions of language and form, freedom and love and much more. We explore a Crip Mad Poetics and Disability theory in relation to the syntax of the sentence, the body of the poem, and in relation to the world-at-large. For the bonus audio Rob walks us through how he uses Google spreadsheets as a compositional tool. Reading down several rows of poetry drafts, cell by cell—cells full of recognizable lines of poetry, spontaneous asides, open questions, screenshots and more—he shows us how this process leads to the published poems we hear today. This joins an immense and ever-growing archive of bonus material, with contributions from everyone from Johanna Hedva and adrienne maree brown, to Layli Long Soldier and Victoria Chang. You can learn how to subscribe and about the other potential benefits and rewards of joining the Between the Covers community as a listener-supporter at the show’s Patreon page. Finally, here is the BookShop for today’s conversation. The post Rob Macaisa Colgate : Hardly Creatures & My Love is Water appeared first on Tin House.