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

Who better to talk about the unique power of telling stories than one of our great contemporary storytellers, Neil Gaiman? One deep way Neil Gaiman and Ursula K. Le Guin are kindred spirits is how they both share an abiding interest in the strange, uncanny relationship between truth and fiction, truth and myth, the imagination and the real, the fantastic and reality, and the ways we seem hardwired, from childhood onward, to be adept at finding the enduring truths within stories that others have “made up.” Today’s conversation, as the final one in the Crafting with Ursula series, serves a double purpose. Yes, we do a deep dive into word magic, into the power and purpose of creating and telling stories, into the spells they weave and why. But we also celebrate Le Guin, the intelligence and music of her words, her spells, by having Neil Gaiman, one of the most mellifluous and recognizable narrative voices today, read excerpts of Le Guin’s work for us, from A Wizard of Earthsea to The Lathe of Heaven to Always Coming Home. Whether you’ve been following the Crafting with Ursula series from the beginning, or whether Neil Gaiman is what brought you here for the first time, don’t miss the many other science fiction and fantasy conversations within the main Between the Covers show. You can go to the show’s homepage and sort the archive for “SFF” and not only find the three conversations with Ursula K. Le Guin herself, but also conversations with many others including Ted Chiang, Jeff VanderMeer, N.K. Jemisin, China Miéville, Nnedi Okorafor, William Gibson, Sofia Samatar, Neal Stephenson, Marlon James, Jo Walton, Kelly Link, Daniel José Older, David Mitchell and more. If you enjoyed today’s conversation consider transforming yourself from a listener to a listener supporter. Each supporter receives a resource-rich email with each episode, can join our collective brainstorm, our collective dreaming of who to invite as future guests, and there are a wide variety of other possible benefits from the bonus audio archive to rare Le Guin collectibles. Check it all out at the show’s Patreon page. Finally here is the Bookshop for today’s conversation. photo credits: William Anthony (Le Guin), Beowulf Sheehan (Gaiman) The post Crafting with Ursula: Neil Gaiman on Word Magic & The Power of Telling Stories appeared first on Tin House.

Of Sawako Nakayasu’s many literary endeavors—poetry, translation, performance art—it is hard to know where one begins and another ends. They each seem to not only be talking to each other but Sawako’s work also blurs the boundaries between them, nesting each within the next in a way that illuminates something about all three. Her latest poetry collection, Pink Waves, is a perfect example of this, poetry written within a durational performance, one that involves “microtranslations” of the syntax of the works of others. As Fred Moten says about Pink Waves: “In a deliberate lyricism of regathering, tethering, and receding precedence, in a perpetual canon that keeps spilling and sifting and replenishing what feels like dancing, in a series of breaks weaving wave and snap into writing that listens, Sawako Nakayasu takes the measure of the enjoyment we derive from sensing and making sense of this wasteland of bandwidth and access. Pink Waves is a delicate instrument. Its spare beauty picks up everything.” Much of Sawako Nakayasu’s genre-transgressive work calls into question our notions of originality and selfhood, as she herself explores questions of race and gender and sexual orientation within her poems. By bringing together these various elements, Sawako Nakayasu creates generative questions: How can queer theory speak to translation practices? How can we engage with questions of power between nations and languages and cultures by the choices we make in translation? What does performance tell us about ourselves, and the notion of a self to begin with? And how do these performative and translational activities manifest in poetry, in poems? If you enjoy today’s conversation consider joining the Between the Covers community as a listener-supporter. Each patron receives a resource-rich email with each episode and can participate in the collective brainstorm of who to invite in the future, and choose from a wealth of other rewards and gifts from rare collectibles to writing consultations.  There is also the possibility of subscribing to the bonus audio archive which includes contributions from such luminary poets as Rosmarie Waldrop, Forrest Gander, Dionne Brand, Natalie Diaz, Nikky Finney, Arthur Sze, Layli Long Soldier, and many more. Check it all out at the show’s Patreon page. And don’t miss today’s Bookshop!   The post Sawako Nakayasu : Pink Waves appeared first on Tin House.

“On Seeing and Being Seen” is the title of an Ama Codjoe poem but it could just as easily be a description of her debut collection Bluest Nude as a whole. Bluest Nude is a book that engages with ways of seeing, and its poems often engage with visual art—poems that look at art forms made outside of language but with language, poems that look at how artists look when making art. But more principally Bluest Nude is engaged with looking at how the Black female figure has been (mis)represented in art and asking how a Black female poet can write a poetry that claims a sovereign point of view, that reclaims a Black female subjectivity much as Lorraine O’Grady and Simone Leigh, two of the artists she engages with in her collection, have done in their own work in performance and visual art. These questions of how we see and how we are seen, both by others and by ourselves, call into question notions of selfhood, and the mysteries of how we construct a self, something that only happens in engagement with others, how they see us, how we see them seeing us. For the bonus audio archive Ama Codjoe presents us with three different strategies to write ekphrastic poetry, poetry that engages with visual art. And much like Dionne Brand did when she contributed readings of forthcoming work from 2023 books by Canisia Lubrin and Christina Sharpe, Ama first reads and discusses a poem by Evie Shockley from her forthcoming collection suddenly we, then she reads one of her own poems, and finally she ends with a long poem by Terrance Hayes from his forthcoming collection So to Speak. To learn how to subscribe to the bonus audio and the many other potential benefits of joining the Between the Covers community as a listener supporter head over to the show’s Patreon page to check it all out. Here is the Bookshop for today’s episode. The post Ama Codjoe : Bluest Nude appeared first on Tin House.

Writer and editor Gabrielle Bellot joins Crafting with Ursula to discuss the power of names and naming across Le Guin’s work. From the very beginning, with Ged in Earthsea, a boy-wizard who is named in three very different ways, names have contained both power and an elusive mysterious quality for Le Guin. The ways names can both honor, connect, and reflect something true, or reduce, dismiss, and cause harm speak to deep questions about both language and identity. These are topics Bellot explores in her own writing, both about others—from Edward Gorey to Neil Gaiman, James Baldwin to J.K. Rowling—as well as about her own identity as a multiracial transgender writer from the Commonwealth of Dominica. We take Le Guin’s interest in class, gender, and race down to the level of the sentence and look at the many different ways she has explored names and naming across novels and stories as a means within language to both address the world and listen to it, to both hear the world and speak a new world into being. Today’s episode of Crafting with Ursula might be most in conversation with the first episode of the series with Becky Chambers, on creating aliens and alien cultures. For one, we return again to explore the world of The Left Hand of Darkness, but we also return to vital questions, as writers, and simply as people, around the importance of how we describe “the other,” “the stranger,” the person or being who we feel is not like ourselves, and what that description, what the names and words we choose, say about us. If you enjoy today’s conversation, and Crafting with Ursula more generally, consider joining the community of listener-supporters. You can check out all the many potential benefits of doing so at the show’s Patreon page.  Finally here is the Bookshop for today’s episode.     The post Crafting with Ursula : Gabrielle Bellot on The Power of Names & Naming appeared first on Tin House.

Today’s guest is poet, novelist, playwright, feminist theorist, literary critic, and philosopher Hélène Cixous. Perhaps best known for her iconic 1976 essay “The Laugh of the Medusa,” Cixous thought for much of her writing life that she would never write about her birthplace and childhood in Algeria, that she would never write about her mother, that she would never write about, let alone go to, the German town of Osnabrück from which her mother and mother’s mother escaped (to Algeria) before the town’s entire Jewish population were murdered. But in the last thirty years, to her surprise, these have increasingly become the topics of her work. First writing about and returning to Algeria, and then, in the last twenty years, writing an increasing number of remarkable books about Osnabrück, her mother’s life there, her mother’s return to that city, Cixous’ “return” to it, as well as about her mother’s ultimate expulsion, the second of her life, now from Algeria. We focus today on two of these books, these novel-memoirs: Well-Kept Ruins and Osnabrück Station to Jerusalem. This strain of Cixous’ work, her novel-memoirs, are not books of autofiction like we’ve come to know them. Yes, they blur the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction but they are as concerned with the borderlands between the conscious and unconscious, waking life and dreams, between history and memory, and literature, imagination and experience, where the present moment in one of these narratives is likely to be inhabited, at the same time, by the seen, the imagined, the dead, and the literature one has read. In her latest book Cixous describes writing as a form of archaeology, historical and literary and ancestral, yes, but I think we could say it is also a psychological archaeology as well, a relation of the writer to her writing and herself. Today’s contribution to the bonus audio archive is a long-form conversation with Cixous’ longstanding translator Beverley Bie Brahic. It is an in-depth conversation about the pleasures and challenges of translating Cixous’ work that also, additionally, further illuminates Cixous as a person and writer, adding further texture and nuance to the main conversation with Hélène. To learn how to get access to the bonus audio and the other potential benefits of joining the Between the Covers community as a listener-supporter head over to the show’s Patreon page. Finally here is the Bookshop for today’s episode. The post Hélène Cixous : Well-Kept Ruins appeared first on Tin House.

Poet Billy-Ray Belcourt has already transformed the memoir form, remaking it—strange, fresh, and new, in A History of My Brief Body. He does something similarly unexpected with his first novel, A Minor Chorus. Deeply aware of the history of the novel, of the sociopolitical forces that shaped what we consider a novel today, a form whose limitations, according to Belcourt, can’t accommodate the reality of an indigenous queer life, this novel is both about the searching for a new form (and a new way of living) and a very example of it. Scholarly and sexual, joyful and citational, embodied and theoretical, A Minor Chorus is somehow a polyvocal narrative of self-making (and unmaking), written for the future, that arrives to us, a new form, as if from the future. If you enjoy today’s conversation consider joining the Between the Covers community of listener-supporters. Receive the resource-rich email with each episode, participate in the collective brainstorm of who to invite in the future, and check out the many possible gifts and rewards at the show’s Patreon page. Here is today’s Bookshop with all of Belcourt’s books and most of the books mentioned today, from Saidiya Hartman to José Esteban Muñoz to Judith Butler.   The post Billy-Ray Belcourt : A Minor Chorus appeared first on Tin House.

One of Le Guin’s lesser known but lifelong practices was that of a translator. Her translations of the first Latin American Nobel Prize Laureate in literature (and the only Latin American woman to receive the award), Gabriela Mistral, were the first truly substantive presentations of her work in both English and Spanish. She’s translated other poets and novelists from Chile and Argentina (Angélica Gorodischer, Diana Bellessi), as well as individual poems by Rilke and Goethe. And for many decades she worked on her now much beloved rendition of Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching. Le Guin also reread the Aeneid in Latin as part of her preparation to write her final novel, Lavinia, Le Guin’s retelling of that classic epic of Virgil’s but from the point of view of a voiceless woman in the original. There were many feminist choices and considerations that went into both how Le Guin translated and who she chose to translate. That is also true of today’s guest Maria Dahvana Headley who has done both a contemporary feminist retelling of Beowulf in her novel The Mere Wife and who has also translated, to much critical and public acclaim, Beowulf itself, engaging with both the masculinity in the original and the misogyny inserted by various male translators over the centuries. She, like Le Guin, has also engaged with the Aeneid. Her ten-part musical adaptation of the epic is forthcoming. Together, we look at questions of feminist translation in both Maria and Ursula’s work and explore multiple theories on why Le Guin’s novels inspire many of today’s woman writers engaging with classical texts. If you enjoyed today’s conversation consider joining the Between the Covers/Crafting with Ursula community by becoming a listener-supporter of the show. Receive resource-rich emails with each episode, joining the collective brainstorm of who to invite in the future, and choose from a wide and deep selection of potential rewards and gifts, including rare Le Guin collectibles. Check it all out at the show’s Patreon page. Finally here is today’s Bookshop. The post Crafting with Ursula : Maria Dahvana Headley on Feminist Translation & Classical Retellings appeared first on Tin House.

Today’s guest Dionne Brand, to borrow the words of John Keene, “is without question one of the major living poets in the English language.” Kamau Brathwaite called Brand “our first major exile female poet.” Adrienne Rich described her as “a cultural critic of uncompromising courage, an artist in language and ideas, and an intellectual conscience for her country.” Dionne Brand is, as well, a celebrated and beloved novelist, essayist, filmmaker, editor, activist, and thinker. But today, with the release of the landmark work Nomenclature: New and Collected Poems, which gathers eight volumes of her poetry between 1982 and 2010, and includes a new book-length poem never before published, today we center her poetry, and look at why she considers herself a poet first and foremost. What does stepping back together, and looking at her body of work across the decades, tell us about her poetry over time? How is time itself related to her deep engagement with Black life and liberation in her writing? How does Brand employ language as a means to gesture toward an otherwise, an elsewhere, in order to both write toward a future and from a future time? For the bonus audio archive Dionne Brand contributes readings from two of the most-anticipated releases of 2023, a reading from poet Canisia Lubrin’s fiction debut Code Noir and a reading from Christina Sharpe’s Ordinary Notes. This joins a robust archive of supplemental material from Nikky Finney reading from Lorraine Hansberry’s diaries to Myriam Chancy reading and teaching from a passage of Jamaica Kincaid’s to a craft talk on the art of narrative seduction by Marlon James. To learn how to subscribe to the bonus audio and the other potential benefits 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 Dionne Brand : Nomenclature — New and Collected Poems appeared first on Tin House.

“White supremacy makes for terrible readers” says today’s guest Elaine Castillo, arguing that we are all overeducated in a set of fundamentally terrible reading techniques, ones that impoverish us as readers and thinkers, ones that diminish the availability of meaning and meaningfulness in our lives. When Castillo says “read,” and suggests that how we read needs a reevaluation, she is indeed talking about books. But not only. “How to read” extends to what we watch—television, movies, the news—to how we read our histories, and ultimately to how we read the world. What if we aren’t really reading in the true sense at all? And what would a real reading practice, one that is not extractive but one that itself endows meaning, what would it do for us as readers, or as writers or art-makers or activists, and most importantly, as thinking and feeling people in the world? Join Elaine Castillo as she challenges us to re-vision reading. If you enjoy today’s conversation consider joining the Between the Covers community. Every supporter, regardless of level of support, gets resource-rich emails with each episode, and can participate in our collective brainstorm around what future guests we should invite on the show. There are also a wealth of gifts, rare collectibles, the bonus audio archive, and more available to choose from.  You can check it all out at the show’s Patreon page. Here is today’s Bookshop too. The post Elaine Castillo : How to Read Now appeared first on Tin House.

Today’s conversation is about one of Ursula K. Le Guin’s most iconic and influential essays: The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, an essay that deserves an entire episode to itself. And who better to discuss it than Lidia Yuknavitch, whose latest novel Thrust follows a character who herself is a “carrier.” Because this essay has influenced not only an incredible number of  writers but anthropologists, visual artists, filmmakers, performance artists, scholars, and musicians as well, we weave in the voices of others, across disciplines, as we talk about and unpack this work of Le Guin’s. The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction interrogates questions of labor and economy, and interrogates gender in relation to inherited story forms, and looks at the power of story, both to tell and to silence. Le Guin’s essay is her way to reimagine the shape of a story, to dethrone the hero to allow many less familiar and stranger stories to find their way. And she invites us all in to figure it out with her. If you enjoy the Crafting with Ursula series consider transforming yourself from a listener to a listener-supporter. Every supporter gets a resource-rich email with each episode chock full of things referenced in the conversation and things discovered in preparing for it. But there are a ton of other goodies, from rare Le Guin collectibles to the book Ursula and I did together, Ursula K. Le Guin: Conversations on Writing, and much more. You can check it all out at the show’s Patreon page. And lastly, here is today’s Bookshop. The post Crafting with Ursula : Lidia Yuknavitch on The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction appeared first on Tin House.