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

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her different relationship to fiction and to poetry, and perhaps most notably we get to hear a long, never-before-seen, unpublished poem of Le Guin’s that was brought to one of their shared poetry peer groups, a poem about the practice of writing itself.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. The post Crafting with Ursula : Molly Gloss on Writing the Clear, Clean Line appeared first on Tin House.

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.   The post James Hannaham : Pilot Impostor appeared first on Tin House.

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. The post Rabih Alameddine : The Wrong End of the Telescope appeared first on Tin House.

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.   The post Crafting with Ursula : Becky Chambers on Creating Aliens & Alien Cultures appeared first on Tin House.

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. The post Victoria Chang : Dear Memory appeared first on Tin House.

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. The post Valerie Mejer Caso : Edinburgh Notebook appeared first on Tin House.

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. The post Raymond Antrobus : All The Names Given & The Perseverance appeared first on Tin House.

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. The post Tice Cin : Keeping the House appeared first on Tin House.

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.   The post Rosmarie Waldrop : The Nick of Time appeared first on Tin House.

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. The post Percival Everett : The Trees appeared first on Tin House.