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

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.

Claire Schwartz’ poetry collection Civil Service looks at the ways ordinary, everyday actions uphold and sustain state violence, the ways civility can and does serve extraordinary atrocities. The world of this collection, populated by civil positions—The Accountant, The Archivist, The Curator, The Intern—also has within it a fugitive voice, a disruptive voice, the voice of Amira. Her voice, if not beyond language, nevertheless reaches to its edges, reaches beyond the dominant meaning-making of the system that precludes her, reaches toward and imagines an elsewhere and an otherwise. Our conversation ranges widely, weaving Claire’s thoughts on her own work with the writings of Paul Celan, June Jordan, Gwendolyn Brooks, Edmond Jabès, Dionne Brand, and many others. All in service of asking what it means to write poetry towards love and revolution. Claire also contributes a reading of Edmond Jabès to the bonus audio archive. Joining an ever-growing wealth of supplemental material, from Alice Oswald reading from the Book of Job to Jen Bervin reading from the letters and prose of Paul Celan and then one of her poems under his influence. The bonus audio is only one of many potential rewards of becoming a listener-supporter and joining the Between the Covers community. You can check out everything at the show’s Patreon page. Lastly, here is the Bookshop for today’s conversation The post Claire Schwartz : Civil Service appeared first on Tin House.

Morgan Talty’s collection of linked short stories is set on the Penobscot Reservation on Indian Island in Maine. But Morgan is quick to point out that these stories are not Penobscot stories in so far as they do not ‘represent’ the Penobscot people, that even people who are praising the book are often falling into this trope of “exoticized foreknowledge.” As we talk about his acclaimed debut fiction collection, we talk about this term (coined by David Treuer), about the problematic ways people often come to literature written by Native Americans, and the ways Talty himself subverts these expectations. We talk about symbols in stories, about the challenges of being the sole well-known Penobscot fiction writer, about writing in a way that does not perform indigeneity for the white gaze and much more. For the bonus audio archive Morgan contributes a reading of his essay “The Citizenship Question : We the People” which extends our discussion from the main conversation about blood quantum, Native identity, and questions of belonging. This joins an ever-growing archive of supplementary bonus audio, including from indigenous writers Terese Marie Mailhot, Elissa Washuta, Brandon Hobson, Natalie Diaz, Layli Long Soldier, and Jake Skeets, among many others. To learn how to subscribe to the bonus audio archive and about the many other potential rewards and benefits of joining the community of Between the Covers listeners-supporters, head over to the show’s Patreon page. Lastly, here is the Bookshop for today’s episode. The post Morgan Talty : Night of the Living Rez appeared first on Tin House.

Ursula K. Le Guin’s biographer, Julie Phillips, joins “Crafting with Ursula” to talk about the writing mother, how Le Guin’s embrace of both writing and motherhood influenced her engagement with feminism, as well as with story form, and ultimately how it prompted her to develop a philosophical framework from which to re-vision her own work going forward. Julie is not only the perfect guest to discuss this because of the regular conversations she had with Le Guin over the years, but also because she is the author of The Baby on the Fire Escape: Creativity, Motherhood and the Mind-Baby Problem. This book looks at six writing mothers, from Audre Lorde to Doris Lessing to Angela Carter to Ursula herself, and how they each navigated becoming and defending a life as both a writer and as a mother. If you enjoyed today’s conversation consider becoming a supporter of the show. There are many potential rewards and benefits of doing so, from resource-rich emails with each episode, to bonus audio from past guests, everyone from N.K. Jemisin to Ted Chiang, to rare Le Guin collectibles. You can check it all out at the show’s Patreon page. Finally here is today’s conversation’s Bookshop. The post Crafting with Ursula : Julie Phillips on the Writing Mother appeared first on Tin House.

Daniel Mendelsohn’s latest book you could say is about digression and about ring composition, a form of storytelling with digression at its heart. And yet this book, about digression, is not only his shortest and most concise, a mere 112 pages, but also somehow contains all the concerns of his previous books and much more, distilled down into a tight hypnotic spiral. A book about Homer and the Hebrew Bible, about the Odyssey and the Holocaust, about forced migration, exile, and unexpected hospitality, about Proust, Sebald, Auerbach, Fénelon and many others lost to history. But ultimately it is about representation and narrative. Of how best to represent something in a way that feels most true, whether when telling a story, performing a play, building a monument, or creating a memorial. Three Rings is as much a meditation on art-making and writing as it is a meditation on memory and remembering; the mysteries of both, and also the thorny political and ethical questions that arise when choosing to represent reality in one way or another. A conversation rich with references, you can find many of the books mentioned in today’s conversation at the Bookshop for today’s episode. If you enjoyed today’s conversation, help ensure the future of in-depth conversations just like this by becoming a part of the Between the Covers listener-supporter community. Find out all the potential rewards and benefits of doing so at the show’s Patreon page.   The post Daniel Mendelsohn : Three Rings — A Tale of Exile, Narrative, and Fate appeared first on Tin House.

The Immortal King Rao is somehow three narratives in one, a historical novel set within a Dalit community in 1950s India, a near-future tech dystopia on the islands of the Puget Sound near Seattle, and an immigration story from the former to the latter. As a technology reporter herself, Vauhini Vara is interested in artificial intelligence in relation to writing and narrative, and she has found an ingenious tech-assisted point of view to tell this story of India and the United States, of caste and capitalism, of corporate governance and the anarchist resistance to it, in the most novel of ways. This may be the only podcast you listen to this year where pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis, the longest word in the dictionary, is spoken. Surely it is the only one that looks at everything from artificial intelligence to anarchism, Ambedkar to Gandhi, global capitalisms to global feminisms, and questions of representation, diversity, and erasure within everything from technology itself to whose stories get published and read. During today’s conversation Vauhini mentions many books by Dalit authors (as well as books about Taoism and anarchism and capitalism) and we’ve collected many of them in today’s Bookshop. Vauhini’s contribution to the bonus audio archive is also of note. She reads from and discusses her award-winning essay “Ghosts,” which engages with an artificial intelligence called GPT-3. Vara believes it is a technology that could be useful for writers that are having trouble finding the language for something that defies words, much as her engagement with GPT-3 helps her find a way into the grief she felt about losing her sister, something until then she had been unable to write into. This joins bonus audio from so many others: from Viet Thanh Nguyen reading and discussing Maxine Hong Kingston to Ted Chiang reading his essay on why Silicon Valley fears super-intelligent A.I.  You can find out more about subscribing to the bonus audio and about the many other potential rewards and benefits of becoming a listener-supporter and joining the Between the Covers community at the show’s Patreon page. The post Vauhini Vara : The Immortal King Rao appeared first on Tin House.

“People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by them,” says Ursula K. Le Guin. “From within.” This is just one of many quotes that arise from Le Guin’s high regard for the child reader and for the unique intelligence of children. Her philosophy around the importance of the imagination and of imaginative fiction is also rooted in this regard for children. Le Guin’s respect for their unique intelligence, on its own terms, connects to many of her other concerns as well, whether ecological, political, cosmological, or literary. So we are lucky today to have National Book Award–winning children’s author William Alexander on Crafting with Ursula. Le Guin not only held his work in high regard, but they reviewed each other, became friends, and corresponded. Alexander himself has thought deeply about the longstanding fear of the imagination, and how it is playing out today, whether in schools, with the battles for what is considered acceptable literature or acceptable history to teach, or in relation to “the other,” the fear of the stranger, the fear of the nonhuman, the fear of that which is both real and true and something we can’t understand. For the bonus audio archive Will contributes a description of his playful and theatrical writing exercise called “Smoke.” An associative nonlinear technique, “Smoke” is something he uses to either create or develop characters in his stories to help them come alive on the page. This joins bonus audio from many past guests, from Daniel José Older and Ted Chiang to Carmen Maria Machado and N. K. Jemisin. You can find out how to subscribe to the bonus audio and check out all the other potential rewards of becoming a listener-supporter, from Le Guin collectibles to becoming an early reader for Tin House, receiving twelve books over the course of a year months before they are available to the general public, at the show’s Patreon page. Finally, here is the Bookshop for today’s episode, including the books discussed today by both Le Guin and Alexander. The post Crafting with Ursula : William Alexander on Writing for Children appeared first on Tin House.

Hernan Diaz’s debut novel In the Distance went on to become not only one of the great debuts of the year, but a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in fiction and the PEN/Faulkner award. His follow-up Trust is also a book that engages with and interrogates the stories that the United States tells about itself and the mythologies it creates, but this time focusing not on the Western frontier but rather on the accumulation of capital and the mythos of money. But Trust is really about the contract between reader and writer, fiction’s relationship to truth and history, and the way the “reality” of what really happened is often built upon the erasure of certain voices. Trust is a marvel of both form and voice. It is a nested puzzle that requires the reader to be a textual detective, and yet, at the same time, remains a compulsive, immersive reading experience. Somehow the book is able to shift styles—from that of Edith Wharton or Henry James to that of Jean Rhys or Virginia Woolf—and not only remain a cohesive project but deepen as it sheds one skin and assumes another. If you enjoy today’s deep dive with Hernan Diaz consider joining the Between the Covers community as a listener-supporter. There are many benefits and rewards for doing so.  Check them all out at the show’s Patreon page. Lastly, here is today’s Bookshop with all of the books mentioned today. The post Hernan Diaz : Trust appeared first on Tin House.