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

Vanessa Veselka returns to Between the Covers, eight years after her first appearance, to discuss her new novel The Great Offshore Grounds. Longlisted for this year’s National Book Award in Fiction, Roxane Gay calls The Great Offshore Grounds epic, original, and “utterly engrossing.” Lidia Yuknavitch adds: “This novel is thrilling in its content, daring in heart, and makes a helix between a novel of ideas and the best damn story of women who forge their identities on their own terms that I’ve read in years.”  You can listen to Vanessa’s first appearance on Between the Covers for her PEN/Robert W. Bingham prize-winning debut Zazen here. In the fall of 2021, Zazen will be reissued by Vintage for its 10th anniversary. For the bonus audio archive Vanessa, a musician for several decades before becoming a writer, performs a song. Learn more about the bonus audio archive and the other potential benefits and rewards of becoming a listener-supporter at: patreon.com/betweenthecovers The post Vanessa Veselka : The Great Offshore Grounds appeared first on Tin House.

This Tin House Live conversation between Leni Zumas and Janice Lee, “Publishing, Power Structures, and Creative Practice,” was recorded at the summer 2020 Tin House Writers Workshop. Leni Zumas is the author most recently of the novel Red Clocks, a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and winner of the Oregon Book Award for Fiction. She is also the author of Farewell Navigator: Stories (Open City) and The Listeners (Tin House). Leni has appeared on Between the Covers twice previously. Her first appearance was also the show’s first discussion of hybrid and/or genre-indeterminate writing and the only episode that interviews a collaborative pair, Leni Zumas (writer) and Luca Dipierro (artist), about their work A Wooden Leg: A Novel in 64 Cards. Leni returned to the program more recently to discuss Red Clocks. Janice Lee is the founder and executive editor of Entropy, contributing editor at Fanzine, co-founder of The Accomplices, and co-publisher of the press Civil Coping Mechanisms. She is also the author of seven books of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, including The Sky Isn’t Blue, Reconsolidation, and Damnation, a book-length meditation on the films of Hungarian director Béla Tarr. Her latest novel, Imagine A Death, whose publishing journey they discuss in today’s episode, a novel about inherited trauma, the apocalypse, and interspecies communication, will be published in 2021 by Texas Review Press. Leni Zumas and Janice Lee both teach in the MFA program at Portland State University. At the beginning of this conversation they reference, and Janice reads from, her 2019 essay “Books Are Not Products, They Are Bridges: Challenging Linear Ideas of Success in Literary Publishing.” To learn more about the benefits and the potential rewards of becoming a listener-supporter of Between the Covers visit the show’s Patreon page. The post Tin House Live : Publishing, Power Structures & Creative Practice with Leni Zumas & Janice Lee appeared first on Tin House.

Today’s episode of Between the Covers is a first for the show, a return to and extension of a recent episode with Natalie Diaz.  Today’s ‘part two’ does not entirely depend upon part one, but it does refer back to it with frequency.  So if you would like to get the fullest experience begin here. In both episodes we take each of the three individual words in Natalie’s most recent National Book Award–shortlisted poetry collection Postcolonial Love Poem and look at Natalie’s work through the lens of each.  Today we focus on the word ‘poem’ and look at poetic lineage, writing poetry under occupation, the oral vs. the written, the use of repetition, the role of time, and what writing ‘in the wake’ and under the influence of water might mean. The post Natalie Diaz : Postcolonial Love Poem : Part Two appeared first on Tin House.

Today’s episode of Between the Covers is a conversation with poet and classicist Alice Oswald. Widely considered one of our great living poets, Oswald is the 46th professor of poetry at the University of Oxford, and the first woman to hold the poetry chair in its over three centuries of existence. Perhaps best known for Memorial, her radical revocalizing of the Iliad, Oswald speaks today of her latest book, Nobody, another engagement with and reimagining of Homer, this time the Odyssey. Originally conceived in collaboration with the abstract watercolorist William Tillyer, Nobody is a book deeply informed by the sea. We talk about Oswald’s lifelong engagement with water in her work, the relationship between water and the mind, the Homeric way of seeing the world, and what makes a poem come alive. For the bonus audio archive Alice reads two things: 1) a sampling of some of the impossible-to-answer questions asked by God in the Book of Job and 2) a short ballad she wrote called Emerald as another partial response to a question Anne Carson asks her in the main interview. Find out how to subscribe to the bonus audio archive and about the other potential benefits and rewards of becoming a listener-supporter of the show at: Patreon.com/betweenthecovers The post Alice Oswald : Nobody appeared first on Tin House.

Join poet-essayists Hanif Abdurraqib & Shayla Lawson for an extended conversation on writing pop culture (and so much more).  This conversation was recorded at the 2020 Tin House Writers Workshop.  Shayla’s most recent book is This is Major: Notes on Diana Ross, Dark Girls and Being Dope & Hanif’s next book is A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance. Don’t miss Hanif’s first appearance on Between the Covers as well, for his most recent poetry collection from Tin House Books, A Fortune for your Disaster, a great follow-up to today’s episode. The post Tin House Live : Writing Pop Culture with Shayla Lawson & Hanif Abdurraqib appeared first on Tin House.

“Amid impending disasters too vast even to be perceived, what can we do―cognitively, morally, and practically? Gabbert, a tenacious researcher and a ruthless self-examiner, probes this ultimate abstraction in her essays, goes past wordless dread and comes up with enough reasoned consideration to lead us through. Do you feel―and how can you not―as if your emotional endurance is exhausted by horrors already well underway? Then you should read this book.” ―Sarah Manguso The post Elisa Gabbert : The Unreality of Memory appeared first on Tin House.

“An urgent, intimate hybrid of memoir and fiction, Homeland Elegies lays bare the broken heart of our American dream turned reality TV nightmare. The book . . . brilliantly captures how we got to this exact moment in time and at what cost. Stunning.” —A. M. Homes “An unflinchingly honest self-portrait by a brilliant Muslim-American writer, and, beyond that, an unsparing examination of both sides of that fraught hyphenated reality. Passionate, disturbing, unputdownable.” —Salman Rushdie The post Ayad Akhtar : Homeland Elegies appeared first on Tin House.

Today’s conversation is with poet Natalie Diaz, author of the National Book Award shortlisted collection Postcolonial Love Poem.  We talk today about questions of postcoloniality, about love and postcolonial love, about writing poetry under occupation, the fine line between participation and complicity, about empathy and what cannot be translated and about the sensuality that arises from what can’t be known of another. For the bonus audio archive Natalie talks about and reads from Jorge Luis Borges’ Book of Imaginary Beings.  To find out how to subscribe to the bonus audio archive and the other rewards and benefits of becoming a listener-supporter of Between the Covers head over to:  patreon.com/betweenthecovers   The post Natalie Diaz : Postcolonial Love Poem : Part One appeared first on Tin House.

In “Getting Past the Gatekeepers: How to Keep Writing in an Industry that Excludes Us,” Kaitlyn Greenidge and Mira Jacob discuss their combined 30+ years of experience navigating literary publishing. From the first feedback to the final copyedits, they discuss strategies to stay sane and keep writing when your story doesn’t fit the industry’s narrow bookshelf. The post Tin House Live : Getting Past the Gatekeepers with Mira Jacob & Kaitlyn Greenidge appeared first on Tin House.

“This collection of essays, memoirs and critical pieces forms an intellectual biography of Europe’s most history-obsessed writer. Beginning with her childhood in East Berlin in the early ’60s and ’70s, the book moves in concentric circles, from the intimate and understatedly moving to the moment History collides with her life. A powerful voice singing the past into the present’s melody.” —John Freeman, Lit Hub The post Jenny Erpenbeck : Not a Novel : A Memoir in Pieces appeared first on Tin House.