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

Joe Sacco, a talented artist known for his exquisite eye for detail and powerful storytelling, discusses his latest book 'Paying the Land' and his experience creating war reportage comics. They explore the impact of colonialism, residential schools, and resource extraction on indigenous communities in the Canadian subarctic. Sacco shares his literary influences and upcoming projects, including a book on the Rolling Stones and an Indian riot.

“Verge is a bouquet of dynamite: explosive, deadly, and spectacularly beautiful. These stories captivated me like modern fairy tales, and like those dark lessons they showed me how resilience is forged through survival, beauty through brokenness, joy by fire. The women who occupy them are my favorite kinds of heroines: as flawed as they are furious, as bold as they are tender. I won’t soon forget them.” —Melissa Febos

Today’s talk, “On Likability” by Lacy M. Johnson, was given at the 2018 Tin House Writers Workshop. It later became an essay, one selected by Rebecca Solnit for The Best American Essays 2019.

“Shrapnel Maps is so beautiful. Half dream, half nightmare, all real. Filled with the remnants of what people hope for and what they are willing to do, and everything that remains afterwards. It’s a confrontation to identity and it dares to conjugate love as a defiance to the capacity of violence. Extraordinary. . . . elegant and devastating and compelling and complex.” —Pádraig Ó Tuama, poet, theologian, and conflict mediator

Lidia Yuknavitch gave this craft talk, “Writing from the Deep Cut,” at the 2018 Tin House Writers Workshop. As Lidia says: “We are (always) living in tumultuous times. The despair and trauma fracture our life narratives daily, culturally and personally. And yet we endure, make love, make art, we keep creating. There is so much to learn from the edge of things, from the cracks and cuts and fissures of the earth, of our hearts. What can writing become? What new narrative strategies are emerging? How might we become and story ourselves differently? How might more bodies and stories and voices emerge as the old mono stories break apart? Storytelling is a site of resistance and generative possibility, in all times.”

“The City We Became is a wonderfully inventive love letter to New York City that spans the multiverse. A big middle finger to Lovecraft with a lot of heart, creativity, smarts and humor. A timely and audacious allegorical tale for our times. This book is all these things and more.” —Rebecca Roanhorse “The most important speculative writer of her generation . . . She’s that good.” —John Scalzi      

“Love Child’s Hotbed of Occasional Poetry is a 21st-century paean to the sterling love songs humming throughout four hundred years of black American life.” —Lit Hub “Her poems elide the generational and the personal with ample music. They are, therefore, more than taut with vital details; they are alive with nuance and contrast, where doom is rightfully proximate to creation and grace.” —Sewanee Review

Given at the 2019 Tin House Summer Workshop, Rebecca Makkai’s craft talk “You Talkin’ to Me?: The ‘Ear’ of the Story” looks at an important but underappreciated aspect of story craft, the flip side of point of view, the point of telling.  In her words, “Who is the story’s implied listener? Are you casting your listeners as people who already know this world or people who need to be filled in? And what are the political and artistic implications of glossing a culture or setting for readers who don’t know it?”

“Fernanda Melchor is part of a wave of real writing, a multi-tongue, variform, generationless, decadeless, ageless wave, that American contemporary literature must ignore if it is to hold on to its infantile worldview.” —Jesse Ball Shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize, Hurricane Season is the English-language debut of one of the most thrilling and accomplished young Mexican writers, and her conversation on Between the Covers is Melchor’s first radio/podcast discussion of it in English.

“A Fortune for Your Disaster proves that, if you pay attention, Black people have defined and still define themselves for themselves amid roses and dandelions, cardinals and violets, the blues of music and police uniforms, prayer and swagger. . . . The disaster is not us or ours but what we endure, forced and as a matter of course, whether our presence is acknowledged or not, on our terms or not. As death insists on invading our lives, we keep making more and more beauty in order to survive it. . . . The beauty of our excellence is soundtracked by love and violence. . . . The fortune is us and it is ours. With a music as richly profound as we are, Abdurraqib makes it undeniably so.” —Khadijah Queen