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

Haitian-Canadian-American writer Myriam Chancy is an acclaimed novelist but she is also a literary scholar who studies, among other things, storytelling. As a scholar instrumental in inaugurating Haitian women’s studies as a contemporary field of specialization, and one who has argued that much of Haitian women’s literature should be viewed through the lens of the novel as revolutionary tool, we talk today to Myriam about her own latest novel, a polyvocal choral work that takes place just before, during, and just after the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, What Storm, What Thunder.   It is impossible however, to talk about the earthquake, why it had the impact on Haiti that it did, why the aid produced so little long-term change, and how the world viewed Haiti in the aftermath of its worst tragedy, without also talking about the stories forever told about Haiti, stories told ever since it became the first Black republic in the Western hemisphere, a successful revolution led by slaves that sent shudders through the slave-holding nations of the world, from America to France. What are these stories about Haiti, the stories of it as a “cursed nation,” what do these stories tell about the storytellers? What lesser known stories, what true histories, do these stories hide or erase? And how are stories by Haitians themselves, particularly by Haitian women, revolutionary tools? For the bonus audio archive Myriam Chancy alternates between reading from Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place and talking about its importance for us. It is immediately apparent, even if she hadn’t mentioned it at the onset, that she teaches this text, that she knows it well. She alternates between reading passages and then extended commentary and then returns to the reading and comments again, commenting on what it illuminates not just about Antigua but about Haiti, and not just about what she loves about Kincaid’s writing but how it has influenced her own writing in her most recent novel. This is one that I think warrants multiple listens. To find out more about how to subscribe to the bonus audio and the other potential benefits of becoming a listener-supporter of the show head over to the Between the Covers Patreon page. The post Myriam J. A. Chancy : What Storm, What Thunder appeared first on Tin House.

“Negotiating the Love and Renouncing the Rest,” today’s Tin House Live conversation between poets Destiny O. Birdsong & Donika Kelly, was recorded at the 2021 Tin House Summer Writers Workshop. Among many other things, they ask what it would mean to center yourself in your own work, in your own story. How would that look, and what would need to be decentered to make that happen on the page? They also talk about writing (or not writing) into and about abuse and trauma, about families of origin and chosen families, and much more. Destiny O. Birdsong is a poet, novelist, and essayist whose debut poetry collection, Negotiations, was published in 2020 by Tin House and longlisted for the 2021 PEN/Voelcker Award. Elizabeth Acevedo said of Birdsong’s collection: “Reading Negotiations is like walking into a boxing match with an indefatigable fighter; you will be struck, and it will hurt. But for all of its ferocity in how it grapples with womanhood, sexuality, assault, and race, this collection is also full of wonder. Of forgiveness. Of tenderness, the like of which, ultimately, delivers the most powerful sucker punch.” Destiny Birdsong’s debut novel, Nobody’s Magic, is forthcoming in February 2022 from Grand Central Publishing. Donika Kelly is the author of  Bestiary from Graywolf, winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Poetry, and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. The collection was also longlisted for the National Book Award, and was a finalist for a Publishing Triangle Award and a Lambda Literary Award. And she is the author of the poetry collection The Renunciations, out this year from Graywolf. A collection poet Ellen Bass describes as follows: “In her vital new poetry collection, Donika Kelly harnesses ‘the air, the earth, and flame’ to renounce the old gods: child abuse, violence, racial injustice, generational trauma. . . . The Renunciations is a work of stunning power, alive with haunting images, complex metaphor. And while Kelly looks unsparingly at pain and suffering—her own and others’—with transformation comes joy.” If you enjoy today’s conversation consider becoming a supporter of Between the Covers. Check out all the potential benefits and rewards of doing so at the Between the Covers Patreon page. The post Tin House Live : Negotiating the Love and Renouncing the Rest with Destiny O. Birdsong and Donika Kelly appeared first on Tin House.

Irish theologian, storyteller, poet, conflict mediator, and host of the podcast Poetry Unbound Pádraig Ó Tuama joins David to discuss the role of both narrative storytelling and poetry in relationship to encountering ‘the other.’ How can the stories we tell about ourselves prevent us from seeing who we are, from being open to accountability and change, open to encounter and transformation? How can certain stories, in contrast, be a means to bring people with deep grievances to the table, to move them toward recognition and repair? How does poetry, like prayer, orient us toward something beyond ourselves, beyond our meaning-making capacities, and how is that sort of encounter, with all that lies beyond our understanding, important to a human life? If you’ve ever asked some version of the eternal question—do poems and stories and art-making matter? If so, what do they do?—don’t miss today’s episode. For the bonus audio archive Pádraig Ó Tuama reads some new poems, written as part of a collaborative project with some Scottish writers. He reads in both English and Irish. This joins bonus audio from many other writers including Doireann Ní Ghríofa, Alice Oswald, Layli Long Soldier, Jorie Graham, Nikky Finney, Richard Powers, and more. To learn about subscribing to the bonus audio and the other potential benefits of becoming a listener-supporter of the show head over to the Between the Covers Patreon Page. The post Pádraig Ó Tuama : In the Shelter & Borders and Belonging appeared first on Tin House.

In this engaging conversation, Adania Shibli, a Palestinian novelist known for her award-nominated book, Minor Detail, dives deep into the politics of language and its connection to identity. She explores how stories reflect personal and societal experiences shaped by colonization and dehumanization. Shibli discusses the complexities of exile, silence as resistance, and the transformative power of perceived weaknesses in creativity. With poignant anecdotes, she illuminates the struggle of reclaiming Palestinian cultural identity through the nuances of language and memory.

Originally delivered at the 2021 Tin House Summer Writers Workshop, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore’s electrifying talk “Writing On Your Own Terms” explores what it means to write against the canonical imperative, to write against the world as it is, to instead write on your own terms, toward community, and specifically toward the community of people who might truly appreciate and understand your work. Sycamore is the author and editor of many books and anthologies. Most recently she is the editor of Between Certain Death and a Possible Future: Queer Writing on Growing Up with the AIDS Crisis (forthcoming in October 2021) and the author of the 2021 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award finalist, The Freezer Door. Wayne Koestenbaum’s assessment of The Freezer Door seems particularly relevant to the theme of writing on one’s own terms: “Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore puts sex and gender, suffering and gentrification, encounter and solitude, at the center of a book that defies borders and uses language to dive directly into mystery. I admire Sycamore’s gossamer refusal ever to land anywhere definitive; the sentences travel further and further into trauma’s backyard, where complex ideas find a habitat among the simplest formulations. Sycamore, by breathing into the prose, treats the act of book-building as a practice strange and organic as sleeping, walking, bathing, eating. The Freezer Door delves into the philosophy of the sexual meetingplace with a virtually unprecedented aplomb.” Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore first appeared on the show for a deep dive into her last novel Sketchtasy. So if you are hungry for more Sycamore after this talk, as I’m confident you will be, this is a great place to go next. If you appreciate the show, consider becoming a supporter of Between the Covers. Check out the benefits and rewards of doing so at the Between the Covers Patreon page.         The post Tin House Live : Writing On Your Own Terms with Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore appeared first on Tin House.

Today’s guest, poet Kaveh Akbar, discusses his latest poetry collection Pilgrim Bell. Given that Akbar once suggested that syntax was identity, how do the changes in Akbar’s own poetry, from his first collection to now, reflect changes in himself as a person? Akbar talks about the ways in which poetry can be a spiritual technology, about the qualities poetry and prayer share, about the language and gesture of prayer, about the orbital nature of poetry, and about making room for silence and the unsayable in one’s poems.  Akbar also talks about revolutionary poetics. What would a revolutionary poetics look like? Who are good examples of poets whose poems and lives do real work in the world? How do we know if our poems are doing work or just fooling us into thinking so? For the bonus audio archive, Kaveh Akbar adds a reading and discussion of  “In Praise of the Laughing Worm,” a poem that, although he loves it, didn’t quite fit in the collection. This joins bonus audio from Jorie Graham, Alice Oswald, Nikky Finney, Douglas Kearney, Arthur Sze, Layli Long Soldier, Natalie Diaz, and many others. To find out how to subscribe to the bonus audio and about the many other potential benefits of becoming a listener-supporter of the show, including books and rare collectibles donated by past guests, head over to the Between the Covers Patreon page. The post Kaveh Akbar : Pilgrim Bell appeared first on Tin House.

Callum Angus’s A Natural History of Transition is described as a collection of short stories “that disrupts the notion that trans people can only have one transformation.” Angus talks about trans narratives, both the ones most commonly seen in the culture at large, and his notion of transness, not as a journey between two static gender poles, by a person “trapped in the wrong body,” but one of continual adaptation, reevaluation, and renewal. Callum Angus is particularly interested in the intersections between trans writing and nature writing. As the editorial statement for the journal he founded, smoke and mold, says: “The trans body is considered ‘unnatural,’ its changes supposedly go ‘against nature,’ with few in mainstream literature, medicine, or history acknowledging that nature is nothing but change.” We talk about why he chose to write fiction versus nonfiction, and chose fantastical fiction over realism, as the best way for him to explore transition in his protagonists and transition in the world at large. What does a story collection look like written by an author who isn’t trying to “tell a good story” but rather resist it? An author who thinks there is much power for ill in linear narratives and too-powerful stories? What possibilities open up for the short story form, for nature writing, for our understanding of the human within the larger natural world, when looked at through a trans lens? We talk about many other writers in this conversation, from Rikki Ducornet to Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, Reinaldo Arenas to John Keene. Keene’s Counternarratives was a particular inspiration for Angus’s new book and for the bonus audio archive Angus reads the short story “Mannahatta” for us. This joins bonus readings from John Keene himself, CAConrad, Garth Greenwell, Carmen Maria Machado, and many others. To find out how to subscribe to the bonus material and to check out the many other potential benefits of transforming yourself from a listener to a listener-supporter head over to the Between the Covers Patreon page. The post Callum Angus : A Natural History of Transition appeared first on Tin House.

Today’s episode with poet Douglas Kearney is about his latest book of poetry, Sho, and the poetry-performance album (with Haitian sound artist Val Jeanty) Fodder. Throughout Kearney’s career he has engaged with the tension between the stage and the page, the eye and the ear, the word and the body, all as a means to explore the contradictions of being Black in America. What does it mean to make the page into a stage, or to make the stage into a compositional space? How does Kearney critique the way anti-Black violence is made into spectacle, while himself being a Black performer who uses spectacle? What does a poetics that works against catharsis, against relief, entail and to what end? Why is Kearney skeeved out by simile and why does he find violence within metaphor? These questions only scratch the surface of a wide-ranging conversation that travels from Susan Howe to Public Enemy. For the bonus audio archive, Kearney adds the reading of two new poems. These join readings by Ross Gay, Teju Cole, Nikky Finney, Jorie Graham, Layli Long Soldier, Arthur Sze, and many others. To learn more about how to subscribe to the bonus audio and to check out the many other potential benefits of becoming a listener-supporter of Between the Covers, head over to the Between the Covers Patreon page. The post Douglas Kearney : Sho appeared first on Tin House.

Arthur Sze, winner of the 2019 National Book Award in Poetry for Sight Lines, joins David Naimon to discuss his latest book, The Glass Constellation: New and Collected Poems. Together they step back to take in a half century of Arthur’s work, not only how it has changed and why, tracking the growth of a poet and person across time, but also what animating questions, despite all the changes, have endured. They also step forward and look closely at questions of selfhood in relationship to poetry, how one decenters the controlling self when writing (and to what end), the place of the human in the more-than-human world, the relationship of the image to the word,  and what it means to aim to write as if there is no hierarchy between any one word and another. Arthur also talks about the role of divination, particularly the I Ching, in the crafting of some of his poems, and his engagement with everything from quantum physics to Native American cultures and languages (as professor emeritus at the Institute of American Indian Arts his students included Layli Long Soldier, Sherwin Bitsui, Orlando White, Santee Frazier, and dg nanouk okpik, among many others), as part of his poetry and poetics. When Arthur has felt the need to grow as a poet, to break out of well-worn patterns of writing, but hasn’t known how or in what way to do so, he has often turned to translation as a way to move his writing into a new phase. In the main conversation we discuss the four different periods of translation for him over the past fifty years, the Chinese poetry he chose to translate in each era to help move his poetry forward. For the bonus audio archive Arthur introduces us to and reads some of the translations themselves, translations of poets from the Tang Dynasty, Chinese modernist poetry, and poems by contemporary Chinese poets. I encourage you to listen to the bonus audio after hearing our conversation as you’ll then really be able to track Arthur’s own development as a poet while listening to the poetry of others, both translated and read by him. To find out how to subscribe to the bonus audio and the other many potential benefits of becoming a listener-supporter of the show head over to the Between the Covers Patreon Page. The post Arthur Sze : The Glass Constellation : New & Collected Poems appeared first on Tin House.

Today’s guest, Irish Canadian writer Anakana Schofield, joins us to talk about her latest novel, Bina, winner of the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year. Bina was also shortlisted for the 2020 Goldsmith Prize, awarded to fiction that pushes the boundaries of form (in the spirit of  Walter Benjamin who said “All great works of literature either dissolve a genre or invent one”). We talk about form as content, form as momentum (as a way to move story forward instead of plot), and form that both creates and reveals character. We also talk about Bina the protagonist, about the invisibility of older women, about social class in relation to storytelling, about centering people in one’s writing who have been shunted aside due to age, economic status, or gender. We talk about the declining value of the imagination in North American letters, how writers shouldn’t be asked to verify what is true in their imaginative works, and why women writers are often asked to uncover the “real” and confessional within their novels, far more than their male counterparts. All that said, this conversation begins with a discussion of humor and is full of anecdote, digression, and laughter throughout. I hope you’ll join us. If you enjoy today’s conversation consider becoming a supporter of Between the Covers. To check out the possible benefits and rewards of doing so (from rare collectibles from writers like Ursula K. Le Guin and Nikky Finney, to becoming a Tin House Early Reader, receiving twelve books over the course of the year months before the general public, to getting resource-rich emails with each episode that point you to further things to explore after the conversation, provide links to things referenced within it, and where David shares the most remarkable finds he used to prepare for it) head over to the Between the Covers Patreon page. The post Anakana Schofield : Bina appeared first on Tin House.