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

Today’s guest Ada Limón discusses her latest collection of poetry, The Hurting Kind, whose poems ask and explore what it means to be a human animal among animals, and how language can be a means or an obstacle to this desire. We talk about the relationship of joy to death, poetry to praise, and the desire to and challenges of writing with directness, with an aim to connect. We look at the trajectory of Ada’s poetics, one she describes as getting closer and closer to who she really is, and what it means, in language and on the page, to aim for authenticity, for the “I” in your poems to really be, or aim to be, you. We also talk about pizza, groundhogs, and the Argentinian poet Alejandra Pizarnik (and I make an improbable connection between the three!). Pizarnik is a big part of our conversation and for the bonus audio archive, Ada contributes a reading of some Pizarnik poems that she particularly loves. To learn more about how to subscribe to the bonus audio and the other potential benefits and rewards of becoming a supporter of the show, head over to the Between the Covers Patreon page. Lastly, here is the Bookshop for today’s episode, with all the books mentioned. The post Ada Limón : The Hurting Kind appeared first on Tin House.

Today’s conversation with adrienne maree brown begins with the notion that all organizing is science fiction, and thus that social justice and science fiction are intricately linked imaginative acts, acts that have real effects in the world at large. brown looks at works by Le Guin that she considers foundational texts for activists and organizers, and discusses what it means to do the work of imagination, as well as the dangers of not doing that work, of living within a world imagined by others, people who might not fully imagine you. Many of adrienne’s concepts, from ‘emergent strategy’ to ‘fractal responsibility,’ are linked to everything from Le Guin’s interest in anarchism to their shared interest in Taoism. If you enjoyed today’s conversation consider becoming a supporter of the show. Check out all the possible rewards and benefits of doing so, from rare Le Guin collectibles to access to bonus audio by Ted Chiang to N.K. Jemisin, to becoming an early reader for Tin House, receiving books months before they are available to the general public by going to the show’s Patreon page. Lastly, here is today’s Bookshop, which contains the books by Le Guin mentioned today and many of adrienne’s books, from her debut novel Grievers to her books on social activism to the anthology she coedited, Octavia’s Brood.     The post Crafting with Ursula : adrienne maree brown on Social Justice & Science Fiction appeared first on Tin House.

Cristina Rivera Garza returns to the show to discuss her New and Selected Stories, which gathers together fiction across thirty years of her writing life. Some are stories translated into English for the first time. Others are stories in English that haven’t yet appeared in Spanish. Still others are new versions, rewritten, retranslated or both. We talk about her lifelong interest in troubling the borders between these two languages, Spanish and English, and the borders between Mexico and the United States, even between writer and translator. But Cristina also undermines the borders of selfhood and identity in such uncanny ways, ways that have implications around gender and the status of women, and around nature and the status of the nonhuman other. In addition we look at some of her more scholarly work on “necrowriting” (writing with the dead) and what it means to have a writing practice of “disappropriation,” one that returns writing to its plural form. Today’s bonus audio is a long-form conversation with Cristina’s longtime translator Sarah Booker. Among the many things we discuss is the unique fashion in which Cristina and Sarah write and rewrite, translate and retranslate each other’s work, a horizontal relationship that redefines authorship and is informed for both of them by a feminist ethics. To learn more about how to subscribe to the bonus audio and to check out the many other potential benefits and rewards of joining the Between the Covers community as a supporter, head over to the show’s Patreon page. Finally, here is this episode’s Bookshop. The post Cristina Rivera Garza : New and Selected Stories appeared first on Tin House.

Today’s guest, Caren Beilin, talks about her latest novel Revenge of the Scapegoat. All four of her books—two nonfiction, two fiction—each stand alone but they each also share recognizable people/characters that travel across books and across genre. How do the fictional versions of the real people in her life—her partner, her parents, her siblings, her friends—relate to their “real selves” and how does this spilling over from one book to the next help Caren engage with shared questions that animate them all? We talk about what it means to write prose with a disability poetics, about pain’s relationship to form, about the unruly body and body humor, and about creating stories that interrogate and undermine destructive systems, from medical and institutional gaslighting to ‘the scapegoat mechanism,’ to the dynamics of the family unit itself. We also talk about sentences, about the pleasure and power of knots of language, as a site for expression, rebellion, and even liberation. For the bonus audio archive, Caren discusses and reads from Flaubert’s final, unfinished novel Bouvard et Pécuchet, the novel whose two grumpy old men, Bouvard and Pécuchet, Caren’s most recent protagonist names her two painful, arthritic feet after. To find out how to subscribe to the bonus audio and to check out all the other potential benefits of becoming a listener-supporter of the show (including a limited number of signed copies of Caren’s Blackfishing the IUD) head over to the show’s Patreon page. And finally here is today’s Bookshop which contains many of the books mentioned today (from those by Sheila Heti, Gustave Flaubert, and René Girard to those by Beilin herself).   The post Caren Beilin : Revenge of the Scapegoat appeared first on Tin House.

Today’s guest on Crafting with Ursula, the award-winning writer of science fiction, fantasy, and historical fiction Karen Joy Fowler, was a longstanding friend of Ursula K. Le Guin. And they both shared a deep interest not only in science, but also in raising questions about the biases deeply embedded in the way we conduct it (species biases, cultural biases, gender biases, etc.). These questions about science enter and animate their stories, stories that examine the foundations of species supremacy, of how we define intelligence (and why), of what qualities we want to reserve and defend as human or humane, of the implications on both animals and women when we feminize certain approaches to knowledge and inquiry and then discount them. This is a great complement to the last Crafting with Ursula with Isaac Yuen, both deeply engaged with questions of the human and nonhuman in storytelling, and yet these two conversations go to very different, if kindred, places. If you enjoyed today’s conversation consider transforming from a listener to a listener supporter of the show. Join the collective brainstorm of who to invite on the show going forward, get the supplementary resources that go out to supporters with each episode, and check out the other potential rewards of doing so, from rare Le Guin collectibles to bonus readings from everyone from N. K. Jemisin to Ted Chiang, at the show’s Patreon page. Finally here is today’s Bookshop with many of the books by Le Guin, Fowler, and others mentioned during the conversation. The post Crafting with Ursula : Karen Joy Fowler on Experimental Women, Animals, Science & Story appeared first on Tin House.

Sheila Heti returns to Between the Covers to discuss her latest unclassifiable novel Pure Colour. When something happens in your life that upends everything you thought you knew, that changes what you notice and value, something that is hard, if not impossible, to put into language, that mystifies you even now, how do you find a new form to reflect this? We discuss what it is to write books influenced less by other books than by other art forms (what does it mean to try to write more like a painter paints or sculptor sculpts?), about the role of criticism and inviting other writers into the process of a book becoming itself, about the art critic characters in her new book that are imagining a future world better than this one, and much more. For the bonus audio archive Heti discusses and reads from her serialized Oulipian project, taking her diary entries from the past ten years and alphabetizing the sentences (this joins a previous contribution by Sheila, a reading of her essay “My Life is a Joke”). To learn how to subscribe to the bonus audio and about the many other potential benefits and rewards of joining the community of Between the Covers supporters, head over to the show’s Patreon page. Finally here is the Bookshop for today’s episode with many of the books mentioned. The post Sheila Heti : Pure Colour appeared first on Tin House.

Today’s guest is Chilean novelist, essayist, literary critic, and poet Alejandro Zambra, talking about his latest novel Chilean Poet, a novel brimming over with, yes, Chilean poets and poems, but also with love and laughter, artistic dreams and failures, and the desire to find language for things deeply felt that have no name. This conversation, one about everything from writing itself to translation, cats to parenthood, Mexico to Chile, Roberto Bolaño to Nicanor Parra, and poetry to prose, is ultimately one wondrous love letter to literature, those who make it and those who read it. Whenever a guest comes on the show for a book they wrote in another language than English, I try to do a second long-form conversation with the translator for the bonus audio archive. The bonus audio (one of the potential benefits of becoming a listener-supporter of the show) is full of a wide variety of supplemental material (from readings to craft talks) but the most robust material, often hour-long conversations, are these conversations with translators. These include Sophie Hughes (translating Fernanda Melchor), Kurt Beals (translating Jenny Erpenbeck), Suzanne Jill Levine (translating Cristina Rivera Garza), and Emma Ramadan (translating Abdellah Taïa). Today’s translator conversation is with Megan McDowell, who has translated Alejandro since his 2nd book and who translates many other South American writing luminaries (e.g. Samanta Schweblin and Mariana Enriquez).  To learn more about the potential benefits of becoming a supporter of the show, including the bonus audio, head over to the Between the Covers Patreon page. And here is the Bookshop for today’s conversation with many of the books mentioned during it. The post Alejandro Zambra : Chilean Poet appeared first on Tin House.

Today’s “Crafting with Ursula,” a conversation with nature writer Isaac Yuen, explores Le Guin’s writing of the nonhuman other in her fiction. Why might we consider decentering the human within our stories and how do we do so? How does one evoke a truly alien intelligence (i.e. that of a plant or an insect) but using human language for a human readership? Looking closely at three of Le Guin’s short fictions, “The Direction of the Road,” “Bones of the Earth,” and “The Author of the Acacia Seeds and Other Extracts from the Journal of Therolinguistics,” Isaac and David discuss the various strategies Le Guin uses to evoke a world that is more than human, and that stretches past human comprehension. We place these stories alongside stories and essays of Isaac’s to find the ways Le Guin and Yuen’s work speak one to another. This episode’s Bookshop contains all the Le Guin books mentioned in today’s conversation along with Yuen’s  favorite touchstone books of nature writing in both fiction and nonfiction. If you enjoyed today’s conversation, consider becoming a supporter of the show. Check out all the potential benefits and rewards, including Le Guin collectibles, bonus audio from iconic SFF guests, and more at the Between the Covers Patreon page. The post Crafting with Ursula : Isaac Yuen on Writing Nature & Nature Writing appeared first on Tin House.

It’s been five years since Solmaz Sharif’s first appearance on Between the Covers, for her National Book Award–finalist debut collection Look. Since then, many listeners have pointed to this conversation as one of the most memorable episodes to date. Solmaz returns today to discuss her much-anticipated follow-up, Customs. We talk about belonging, exile and language, about what it means to write against goodness, to write uncivilly, to write against language even. We look at the ways her poetry has changed from one book to the next, and the vulnerability and fear of writing from a single voice, in the first person, rather than through the poly-vocal conceptual frame of Look. We also take some of Solmaz’s animating questions into the world of the classroom, into poetry pedagogy, as well as out into the world, as a lens into the lives of political poets, and into what poems can (and can’t) do. Check out today’s Bookshop, where the works of writers we engaged with today, from June Jordan to Dionne Brand to Forough Farrokhzad, can be found. Also if you enjoyed today’s program consider becoming a listener-supporter of the show. There are many potential benefits and rewards of doing so, including 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, rare collectibles from past guests (from Ursula K. Le Guin to Nikky Finney), and the bonus audio archive with contributions from Kaveh Akbar, Rabih Alameddine, Phil Metres, Layli Long Soldier, Alice Oswald, Jorie Graham, and more. These and many other things can be found at the show’s Patreon page.   The post Solmaz Sharif : Customs appeared first on Tin House.

Writer and performance artist Gabrielle Civil talks about her latest book the déjà vu: black dreams & black time, as well as her chapbook ( ghost gestures ), chosen by Bhanu Kapil for the Gold Line Press Nonfiction prize. What does Civil mean by “Black time” and how does she enact this in the déjà vu? What is “performance writing” or “performance memoir” and how do her work on the stage and on the page speak to each other across forms? What does it mean to consider one’s ancestry, one’s lineage, one’s generation, and future ones, in the “now” of your work? Civil discusses all of this and much more in today’s conversation. Today’s episode touches on the work of everyone from bell hooks to Dionne Brand to Ntozake Shange to Alexis Pauline Gumbs. This abundance of referred-to books, as well as Gabrielle Civil’s own, have been collected in this episode’s Bookshop (a great way to support today’s guest, other writers, independent booksellers and the show all at one time). For the bonus audio archive Gabrielle adds a reading and discussion of one of her favorite American sonnets by Wanda Coleman. To find out more about how to subscribe to the bonus audio and the many other potential benefits of becoming a listener-supporter of the show, check out the Between the Covers Patreon page. The post Gabrielle Civil : the déjà vu appeared first on Tin House.