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

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.

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.

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.

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.  

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.

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.

“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.

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.

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.