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

Today’s episode is a classic from the archives, a conversation from 2019 with current Navajo Nation Poet Laureate Jake Skeets about his debut poetry collection Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers. Winner of the Whiting Award in poetry and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, there is no better time to revisit this remarkable collection, and this unforgettable conversation with Skeets, as we await his new book Horses coming this March from Milkweed Editions. For the bonus audio archive Jake contributed a reading and analysis of a poem by the first Navajo Nation Poet Laureate, Luci Tapahonso, a poem called “Hills Brothers Coffee.”  He talks about it in relation to his thoughts on Diné or Navajo poetics. This joins supplemental readings by many past guests including Tommy Pico, Layli Long Soldier, Brandon Hobson, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Natalie Diaz, Elissa Washuta, Morgan Talty and many others. To learn how to subscribe to the bonus audio and about the many other potential benefits and rewards of joining the Between the Covers community as a listener-supporter, head over to the show’s Patreon page.  

“When I tell you a story about my body, I cannot separate it from a story about water. And a story about water is also a story about family. And a story about family is rooted in the earth…,” opens Sangamithra Iyer’s Governing Bodies. What does it mean for a memoir to assume the elusive, ever-changing shape of water, to be the story of family but where the notion of family crosses the boundaries of blood, culture, nation and even species? Governing Bodies, as the Whiting judges said in their citation, is “a subtle, meditative exploration on grief and nonviolence, an international and intergenerational voyage through shared histories and a consideration of what we owe to each other and the natural world.” For the bonus audio archive, Sangu contributes a reading of her remarkable essay “Are You Willing?” which originally appeared in the anthology Writing for Animals: New Perspectives for Writers & Instructors to Educate & Inspire. This joins an ever-growing archive of contributions from past guests—from Richard Powers to adrienne maree brown, Forrest Gander to Arthur Sze, Natalie Diaz to Ada Limón. You can find out how to access the bonus audio and about the many other potential benefits and rewards to choose from, when you join the Between the Covers community as a listener-supporter, at the show’s Patreon page. Finally, here is today’s BookShop.

In Into Being Lily Dunn explores the ways in which writing one’s life has the potential to transform it; how writing, if done well,  can produce “symbolic repair.” We look at Virginia Woolf’s notion of “moments of being” as a means and method to find the form that best fits your specific story to tell. We look at different ways memoirists have used the imagination within their own work, and the various ethical issues that arise when writing about people close to you or about other peoples’ trauma. And from beginning to end, we look at Lily’s own remarkable memoir, Sins of My Father: A Daughter, A Cult, A Wild Unravelling, as a way into these questions as well. For the bonus audio archive Lily walks us through one of the writing exercises in the book. This joins a large and ever-growing archive, everything from craft talks by Marlon James and Jeannie Vanasco, to writing prompts from Danez Smith & Lucy Ives, to readings by everyone from Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore to Richard Powers. You can find out about how to subscribe to the bonus audio and about all the other potential benefits and rewards of joining the Between the Covers community at the show’s Patreon page. Finally here is the BookShop for today.

Randa Abdel-Fattah’s new novel Discipline is set in Sydney, Australia in 2021 during Ramadan. Discipline follows two Palestinians there, one in media and one in academia, where each has to confront questions of silence and complicity in their respective fields. As Israel intensifies its bombardment of Gaza, and as an eighteen-year-old student at a local Islamic school is arrested for protesting a university’s investment in an Israeli arms manufacturer—an arrest that results in an Islamophobic moral panic across Australia, our two Palestinian protagonists make very different decisions on how to engage with the power structures within their disciplines and within the country at large. What is the cost of staying and fighting within an organization that wants to silence you? What is the cost of walking way? In addition to being a riveting read on the level of story, Discipline is also a sort of primer on the weaponization of language, particularly liberal rhetoric employed to capture and domesticate radical movements of change. For the bonus audio archive Randa contributes a reading of excerpts from Chelsea Watego’s “Always Bet on Black (Power): The Fight Against Race.” This joins bonus readings from Dionne Brand, Danez Smith, Isabella Hammad, Natalie Diaz, Omar El Akkad, music from Leanne Betasamosake Simpson and much more. To learn about 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.    

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.