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

In Early Medieval Ireland there was a language called Ogham that was sometimes referred to as the “Celtic Tree Alphabet'” because its letters each corresponded to and depicted a different tree. At one point Ireland, now one of the most deforested countries in Europe, was largely covered in forest, its culture deeply entwined with the life of trees. Irish visual artist Katie Holten has created a new contemporary tree alphabet, gathered the voices, thoughts, poems, and meditations of some of the great thinkers about trees and the natural world, and translated their writings into “tree.” A book of image and a book of text, the wisdom of Ursula K. Le Guin and Richard Powers, Ross Gay and Robert Macfarlane, Amitav Ghosh, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Ada Limón, and many more, is transformed into tree language as they each, in their own way, evoke the complex beings that are trees, and argue, as Richard Powers does, that “this is not our world with trees in it. It’s a world of trees, where humans have just arrived.” If you enjoy today’s conversation consider joining the Between the Covers community as a listener-supporter. Find out about all the potential rewards and benefits of doing so at the show’s Patreon page. Today’s conversation was recorded at Powell’s Books in downtown Portland before a live audience. The post Tin House Live : Katie Holten on The Language of Trees appeared first on Tin House.

Back in 2019, when Richard Powers was a guest on Between the Covers for The Overstory, we also appeared together that very same night, in conversation again. This time, an onstage ticketed event at Revolution Hall before a live audience. I’ve wanted to share this second conversation ever since. Not only because I prepared two distinctly different interviews, but also because this was Powers’ first visit to Oregon for The Overstory, a book not merely set in the Pacific Northwest but one that deeply engages with the longstanding history of forest defense in the region on behalf of the last remaining stands of old growth forest. Because Powers hadn’t been to Portland for his hardback or paperback tours and had since won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for this very book, and because of the deep connection the Portland community has to the stories within this novel, the atmosphere was electric at this sold-out event, overflowing with anticipation, excitement, and joy. I’m so happy to be able to now share this with you and want to thank Richard Powers, W. W. Norton, and Powell’s Books, the host of the event, for making that possible. And whether or not you’ve heard the podcast conversation that aired with Powers in 2019, it is a great complement to today’s episode. Two conversations on the same day, one with just Richard and me, the other celebrating the book in community, quite different in tone and content and yet interwoven and speaking to each other. For the bonus audio archive, Richard contributes a reading of an incredibly moving  W. S. Merwin poem about trees, which joins Jorie Graham reading poems by others about rain, Kaveh Akbar reading about worms, Forrest Gander reading poems about lichen, and much more. The bonus audio is only one possible benefit of joining the Between the Covers community as a listener-supporter. You can find out about them all at the show’s Patreon page. Lastly, here is today’s very tree-centric Bookshop.   The post Tin House Live: Richard Powers on The Overstory appeared first on Tin House.

Melanie Rae Thon’s latest book, As If Fire Could Hide Us, is described not as a novel with three chapters, nor as a collection of three stories, but as “a love song in three movements.” What does it mean to see a story as song, to sing from or toward love, to experience a book’s phases not as sections but as movements? How does writing from or toward love change the music of our sentences or lines, the shapes of our stories, the way we represent others—whether other people or other nonhuman beings? Thon suggests a relationship between attention and attentiveness and this question of love. By quoting Simone Weil, who says, “Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love. Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer,” Thon speaks to what she calls the “ethics of perception,” that we can avert our eyes or risk compassion, in our lives and on the page. A conversation that is as much about living as writing, and one that speaks as deeply to questions of poetry, music, silence, spirit, and yes, love, as it does to story. In today’s conversation Melanie also speaks generously about her approach to the teaching of writing. In that spirit she offers to all Between the Covers supporters two of her teaching documents, “Memory & Adventure” and “The Gospel of Grief, Grace, and Gratitude.” In addition, for the bonus audio archive she gives a craft talk of hers called “The Ethics of Perception.” This joins craft talks from Marlon James (“The Nine and a Half Rules of Seduction”) and Jeannie Vanasco (“How to Write Memorable Lines”) as well as readings by everyone from Teju Cole to Lance Olsen, Carmen Maria Machado to Jenny Offill. You can find out about all of this and the many other potential benefits of joining the Between the Covers community at the show’s Patreon page. Finally, here is the Bookshop for today’s conversation. The post Melanie Rae Thon : As If Fire Could Hide Us appeared first on Tin House.

There may be no writer, no thinker, who has shaped my conversations on the show more than Christina Sharpe. Whether her work is explicitly part of a conversation (in episodes with Ross Gay, Solmaz Sharif, Natalie Diaz, and Dionne Brand, to name a few) or whether her thought and vision provide a foundation and subtext for one (conversations as wide-ranging as those with Viet Thanh Nguyen, Monica Youn, Claire Schwartz, Cristina Rivera Garza, and Charif Shanahan), Sharpe’s scholarship has been a crucial part of some of the most dynamic conversations on the show. Her work has always been more than academic work however. It has always been a hybrid, scholarly and literary, visual and textual, personal and structural. But her latest book, Ordinary Notes, is the most personal to date, and among the many things it could be considered (John Keene suggests it combines memoir, memorial, literary criticism, and political and cultural critique) is as a love letter to Sharpe’s mother and how she cultivated and nourished, in the face of all the brutalities of our world, an atmosphere of Black life, Black art, and Black thought within their home. Of how she pursued, in Christina’s words, “beauty as a method.” This is a rare book that will work on you if you work your way through it. Ordinary Notes is both generous and challenging, envisioning an elsewhere and otherwise of shared risk and care. For the bonus audio archive Christina contributes readings from Dionne Brand’s The Blue Clerk, Victoria Adukwei Bulley’s Quiet, and Canisia Lubrin’s forthcoming Code Noir. These join bonus material from everyone from Nikky Finney to Layli Long Soldier. And the bonus material is only one of many potential benefits of joining the Between the Covers community as a listener-supporter. Find out more at the show’s Patreon page. Today’s Bookshop is the largest and deepest yet, with Christina’s books, of course, but also with many of the Black writers and thinkers and artists that she has been shaped by or writes alongside. The post Christina Sharpe : Ordinary Notes appeared first on Tin House.

Today’s guest, novelist, storyteller, essayist, playwright, scholar, translator, and perennial front-runner for the Nobel Prize in Literature Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, is an iconic figure in postcolonial thought. His latest book, The Language of Languages, is the first book dedicated to his writings on translation and the status of African languages, globally and in Africa today, a topic that is quite personal for him, and central to his writing life. During his year in a maximum security prison in the Kenya of the 1970s, he decided to stop writing his novels in English and wrote his fifth novel, Devil on the Cross, on squares of toilet paper in Gikuyu, his mother tongue. Ngũgĩ suspects that he wasn’t jailed simply because he wrote and put on a play that was critical of the Kenyan government (his recent novels in English had been just as critical of the government) but because it had been written and performed in Gikuyu. Thus, every novel he has written since, he has written in Gikuyu, and then later translated into English himself. You would be right to think that writing in one’s mother tongue should be the most natural and obvious thing to do. And yet the obstacles to doing so continue to be immense and speak to larger questions around the status of the African continent today and postcolonial Africa’s relationship to its colonial past. Today we look at the histories and legacies within languages as well as the power dynamics between them, and how collapsing the hierarchies between languages is crucial to doing the same geopolitically, that the beginnings of true sovereignty begin with our languages. If you enjoy today’s episode consider joining the Between the Covers community as a listener-supporter. Every supporter gets the resource-rich email with each episode with things referenced during the conversation in question as well as places to explore once you’ve finished listening, and there are many other potential benefits to choose from. These include the bonus audio archive with readings from everyone from Dionne Brand to Layli Long Soldier; the Tin House early readership program, receiving twelve books over the course of a year months before they are available to the general public; rare collectibles from past guests; and more. You can check it all out at the show’s Patreon page. Finally, here is today’s Bookshop, full of the books we mention today.   The post Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o : The Language of Languages appeared first on Tin House.

Early in poet Charif Shanahan’s latest collection, Trace Evidence, we encounter the lines: “I want to ​tell you what for me it has been like. // To speak at all / I must occupy a position // In a system whose positions / I appear not to occupy.” How does one connect to others, be seen and heard by others, make art about oneself in language, when language itself does not capture one’s identity, when the available categories do not describe your life, when one’s identity is defined by its instability or uncategorizability?  Today’s conversation looks at complex intersections between Arabness and Blackness, between North Africa and North America, between a mother’s self-conception and a son’s very different one, and the ways different legacies of race—historically, geopolitically—can ripple through the most intimate of spaces, within a family, between lovers, before one’s therapist, among one’s peers. Shanahan’s very particular journey around finding a language, a poetics, that can more fully evoke his embodied life experience tells us all something about the construction of self more generally, about the relationship of language to self-making, and about what possibilities the ways we are categorized, or categorize ourselves, either open up or foreclose. For the bonus audio archive Shanahan contributes a reading of a long excerpt from what will be his next book, a polyvocal, epistolary project called Dear Whiteness. In addition, Mizna, the journal of Arab American art, literature, and culture, has also contributed copies of issues related to today’s conversation, or which might be of particular interest to listeners of the show, for new supporters of the show. These are only two of many possible benefits of joining the Between the Covers community as a listener supporter. You can find out more at the show’s Patreon page. Finally here is the Bookshop for today’s episode, with Charif’s books but also books by everyone from Safia Elhillo to Chouki El Hamel. The post Charif Shanahan : Trace Evidence appeared first on Tin House.

Today’s guest is poet, storyteller, and now essayist Sabrina Orah Mark. Her latest book, Happily: A Personal History—with Fairy Tales, is an intriguing blend of two radically different forms, memoir and fairy tale. Much as fairy tales are feral, forever escaping a simple, reductive meaning, forever changing shape and being retold, forever out of fashion and always enduring, ancient and contemporary at the same time, Sabrina’s essays refuse to be only essays, somehow becoming fairy tales themselves. Our conversation about this essay collection is about fiction, fantasy, memoir, and poetry, about childhood, motherhood, and step-motherhood, and how they all magically coexist in the alchemy of Sabrina’s prose. Ultimately these tales, these surreal dreams, are not ways to look away from the world, but ways to be in it, to cope, confront, and engage with the unimaginably difficult, whether the raising of two Black Jewish boys in the United States today, unspeakable ancestral rupture, a global pandemic and climate apocalypse, or the anxieties and uncertainties of the everyday. Happily takes our hands to walk into the forest together. For the bonus audio archive Sabrina contributes a reading of the Bruno Schulz story “Birds.” This joins a vast archive of material from Jai Chakrabarti reading poems by Bruno Schulz’s biographer, the Polish poet Jerzy Ficowski, to Jen Bervin reading the letters of Paul Celan, to Rosmarie Waldrop reading Edmond Jabès or Alice Oswald reading from the Book of Job. This is one of many possible benefits to joining the Between the Covers community as a listener-supporter. You can find out about them all at the show’s Patreon page. Finally here is the Bookshop corresponding to today’s conversation. The post Sabrina Orah Mark : Happily appeared first on Tin House.

Poet Monica Youn discusses writing from a poetics of difference, exploring anti-Asian violence in the US, Greek mythology, and racial triangulation. The conversation delves into the complexities of identity, home, and community interconnectedness in her latest poetry collection 'From From'.

Today’s conversation with novelist and story writer Jai Chakrabarti is unusually wide-ranging, touching on everything from classical Indian aesthetics to Jewish ritual, from poetry to cognitive science, from Tagore’s plays to Buber’s philosophy, from sublimating the self to writing the other. Chakrabarti’s new story collection, A Small Sacrifice for an Enormous Happiness, engages with complex questions of class, gender, race, religion, and nationality, particularly in relation to families and family making, and the tensions between our individual dreams and the countervailing realities of the people we share lives with and among. We discuss questions of story shape, characterization, point of view, and the role of the reader in order to look deeply at how to tell such stories in ways that feel nuanced, lived, and embodied. For the bonus audio archive Jai reads two poems by the Polish poet and translator (and biographer of Bruno Schulz) Jerzy Ficowski. The epigraph to Jai’s novel comes from one of them, and the second poem is dedicated to the memory of Janusz Korczak (who we discuss quite a bit in the main discussion). To learn how to subscribe to the bonus audio and about the many other potential benefits and rewards from joining the Between the Covers community as a listener-supporter, head over the the show’s Patreon page. Finally, here is the Bookshop for today’s conversation. The post Jai Chakrabarti : A Small Sacrifice for an Enormous Happiness appeared first on Tin House.

Today’s guest, Argentinian novelist, short story writer, and journalist Mariana Enriquez has been called the queen of Latin American gothic horror. She is in the vanguard of a generation of Latin American women writers breaking new ground in the horror genre. We look at the ways her work extends Argentina’s long and storied tradition of fantastical literature, but, even more, we look at the remarkable ways her writing departs from it, the ways Anglophone horror writers have inspired her to write an Argentinian horror that is similarly place-based, that comes up from the land and the events that happened on it (and still haunt it today), that engages with the stories, customs, rituals, fears, and politics of the place where the story is set. We also talk about her assertion that Latin America, while it has a long and deep history of fantastical literature, as well as a few examples of horror, doesn’t, in her mind, have what amounts to a horror tradition, and she theorizes about why England and the U.S., by contrast, have such a deep engagement with horror as a genre. We talk not only about horror in relation to place and literary tradition, but also horror in relation to gender, and the gothic in relation to gender. About the role of women as characters in the horror genre and about the new wave of Latin American women writers attracted to horror as a lens through which to create their work. We also talk about the politics and aesthetics of portraying violence, and how her work does and does not map itself in relation to the brutal dictatorship she grew up under and which is the setting of her new novel, her first in English, Our Share of Night. Many writers get mentioned and discussed in this conversation, from Jorge Luis Borges to Stephen King to Ursula K. Le Guin, but I want to mention one writer who we discuss several times, the Mexican writer Fernanda Melchor. Melchor’s past appearance on the show to discuss her book Hurricane Season is the perfect pairing with today’s episode with Mariana. For the bonus audio archive, we’ve added a long-form conversation with Mariana Enriquez’s translator Megan McDowell. There is also a long-form conversation with Megan from when Alejandro Zambra was on the show as well. They make a great pairing as Megan was translating both of their books simultaneously during the first years of the pandemic and she makes some revelatory comparisons between their books, and between Chilean and Argentinian literature in relation to the fantastic and the real. To learn how to subscribe to the bonus audio archive and about the many other potential rewards of joining the Between the Covers community as a listener supporter, head over to the show’s Patreon page. Finally here is today’s Bookshop.   The post Mariana Enriquez : Our Share of Night appeared first on Tin House.