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

Lily Brooks-Dalton’s Ruins is both a cleverly plotted page-turner, and an emotionally engaging, character-driven novel with an unforgettable protagonist; it’s both erudite and a wild ride, inviting and yet mysterious, only slowly revealing its cards. Through the lens of archaeology, Ruins explores how cultures construct history and shape memory, and through our prickly protagonist Ember, the difficulties and rewards of questioning the beliefs we’ve inherited. Today’s conversation, beyond delving into the themes and narrative of Ruins, also is a deep dive into craft, particularly exploring a writer’s considerations when it comes to plotting. As part of that discussion, we not only discuss Lily’s sensibilities when it comes to her three successful novels, but we also talk about two completed novels that never coalesced and why that might be. For the bonus audio archive, Lily contributes a reading from the opening of one of these novels we will never see. This joins bonus readings from everyone from Ted Chiang to N.K. Jemisin, adrienne maree brown to Dionne Brand. You can find out how to subscribe to the bonus audio, and about all the other potential benefits of joining the Between the Covers community as a listener-supporter, at the show’s Patreon page. Finally, here is the BookShop for today’s conversation.

Excited to share this classic episode from the archives with one of the great short storytellers of our time, Ted Chiang. This conversation happened in 2019 at the studios of KBOO community radio in Portland, Oregon. Blake Crouch speaking of Exhalation, the book we discuss today, says “Ted Chiang has no contemporary peers when it comes to the short story form. His name deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as Carver, Poe, Borges, and Kafka. Every story is a universe. Every story is a diamond. You will inhale Exhalation in a single, stunned sitting, because true genius doesn’t come along nearly as often as advertised. This is the real thing.” For the bonus audio archive Ted contributed a reading of his essay “Silicon Valley Is Turning into its Own Worst Fear,” first published at Buzzfeed, an essay exploring the reasons why Silicon Valley might particularly fear superintelligent A.I. and how credible those fears really are. This joins contributions from everyone from N.K. Jemisin to Daniel Jose Older to Vajra Chandrasekera. You can find out how to subscribe to the bonus audio, and about the other potential rewards and benefits of joining the Between the Covers community as a listener-supporter, at the show’s Patreon page.

Today’s conversation with Jordy Rosenberg is many things but at its heart it explores the question of what it means to write revolutionary literature (or as Trotsky would call it “October literature”). Whether we are talking about trans horror or a Marxist surreal, the originating violence of early capitalism or writing toward utopian horizons; whether we are getting granular on the level of craft and form or looking more broadly at the role of art and artists, the question of how our writing can lend itself toward conjuring an elsewhere and otherwise is, I think, the animating force behind it all. Jordy’s provocative choices in his latest novel Night Night Fawn bring these questions urgently to the fore as it centers and is narrated by someone whose worldview Jordy strongly opposes. Night Night Fawn is an opioid-addled, deathbed rant by one Barbara Rosenberg, a transphobic Zionist woman modeled after Jordy’s own mother. Barbara holds court not only on her life’s disappointments, but on Marxism and gender delivered through her cracked lens. All while her greatest disappointment, her transgender son, who may or may not want to kill her, visits her at her bedside. What opportunities, challenges and dangers does this approach create for a writer with revolutionary aims? How can looking back at originary violences, within a family or a nation or an ideology, be a liberatory act? And when confronting structural or familial violence, what is the role of humor and satire? Perhaps it is best summed up by Book Page in its starred review when they say Night Night Fawn is “comedic fiction as political firepower.” For the bonus audio archive Jordy contributes a reading of Kay Gabriel & Andrea Abi-Karam’s “What is the Project of Trans Poetics Now?” This joins supplemental readings by Torrey Peters, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, Rickey Laurentiis, Randa Abdel-Fattah, Isabella Hammad, Naomi Klein, Dionne Brand, Christina Sharpe, Layli Long Soldier, Natalie Diaz and many others. To learn how to subscribe to the bonus audio, and about the many other potential benefits and rewards 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. Given Jordy’s generous citational practice, it is more robust than most.

When Cynthia Cruz describes Joan Naviyuk Kane’s latest collection as a series of poems that “both shows and enacts how a self is brought to being through the abyss,” I think of Kane’s own words about poetry: as “a place of refuge and possibility, a generative space. Not a space of loss, but contingence.” What is a home in the face of dispossession? Inheritance in the face of rupture and colonial erasure? And what is the role of language on behalf of continuity and continuation? We explore all of these questions and much more, both generally, but also quite granularly within the context of the indigenous circumpolar North. For the bonus audio archive, Joan contributes the reading of a long poem, one that she is still working on, called “Provisionally.” She grants us a sneak peek of a poem that she has been drafting and revising for a year, in its current provisional form. This joins many remarkable contributions— from everyone from Layli Long Soldier to Dionne Brand, Isabella Hammad to Arthur Sze, Jorie Graham to Danez Smith. Find out how to subscribe to the bonus audio, and about the other potential benefits and rewards of joining the Between the Covers community as a listener-supporter at the show’s Patreon page. Finally, here is the BookShop for today’s conversation.

Today’s episode is a classic from the archives, a conversation from 2019 with Brandon Shimoda about his book The Grave on the Wall. While the book centers on an exploration of Shimoda’s grandfather’s internment at Fort Missoula during World War II, it is really an interrogation of America that extends both directions in time from that moment. Forts such as these, that imprisoned Japanese and Japanese-Americans during the war, were also previously used to fight the Indian wars that established white dominance over Native lands, and are now today being used as detention centers/concentration camps for the refugees and immigrants from our southern border. The Grave on the Wall is also an engagement with photography and (mis)representation, memory and memorialization and asks the question of what it means to memorialize something that is ongoing, that has never ended. For the bonus audio archive Brandon Shimoda contributes a reading from Etel Adnan’s long poem “Fog,” a poem she dedicated to him. This joins contributions from everyone from Isabella Hammad to Dionne Brand, Natalie Diaz to Kaveh Akbar and more. To learn how to subscribe to the bonus audio and about all the other potential rewards and benefits of joining the Between the Covers community as a listener-supporter head over to the show’s Patreon page.

What if we were to take seriously that we, as humans, aren’t the sole authors of our world, that there are other intelligences at play, that we are only one of many agents of change and transformation, and that “we” aren’t even entirely ourselves given that “we” are composed of many “others,” many strangers that nevertheless make up what we call a “self”—what would a philosophy and politics emerging from this look like, one where we weren’t the center or central agent of the story? And what would we do if we discovered that the way we’ve been responding to the things we want to change—colonialism, racism, fascism, environmental devastation, and more—what if something about the way we oppose these forces actually reinscribes them, where the very way we are responding to the crisis becomes part of the crisis? We explore these animating philosophical questions of Báyò Akómoláfé today and take them also into the realm of words— from what it means when Báyò says “poetry precedes language” to how to tell stories while recognizing, in their remarkable power, their danger and limitations. We talk koans and tricksters, monsters and fugitives, shifting shape, following cracks, making sanctuary and much more. If you enjoy today’s conversation consider transforming yourself from a listener to a listener-supporter by joining the Between the Covers community. Find out more about all the potential benefits and rewards of doing so at the show’s Patreon page. Finally the BookShop for today.

Canisia Lubrin returns to Between the Covers for a live conversation in downtown Portland, at Powell’s Bookstore, about her latest poetry collection The World After Rain. A private book, that Canisia never intended to publish, we explore what it means to write elegy beyond personal biography, what it means that “metaphors unmake the too-made,” what it means to write against the literal, with a folk sensibility and consciousness, and much more. How does elegy relate, formally and aesthetically, to water? What is the utility of poetry, its effect in the world? How can autobiography be a way to move beyond the self? Join Canisia for a deep exploration of these animating questions in her latest work. The first time Canisia was one the show, to discuss her book Code Noir, her contribution to the bonus audio archive was a reading of as-of-yet-unpublished works by Christina Sharpe and Dionne Brand, and a soundscape she stitched together from six years of touring, from Canada to Europe to the Caribbean. This joins an immense and ever-growing archive of supplemental material and is only one of many possible things to choose from when you join 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.  

Today’s episode is a classic from the archives, a conversation from 2019 with current Navajo Nation Poet Laureate Jake Skeets about his debut poetry collection Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers. Winner of the Whiting Award in poetry and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, there is no better time to revisit this remarkable collection, and this unforgettable conversation with Skeets, as we await his new book Horses coming this March from Milkweed Editions. For the bonus audio archive Jake contributed a reading and analysis of a poem by the first Navajo Nation Poet Laureate, Luci Tapahonso, a poem called “Hills Brothers Coffee.”  He talks about it in relation to his thoughts on Diné or Navajo poetics. This joins supplemental readings by many past guests including Tommy Pico, Layli Long Soldier, Brandon Hobson, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Natalie Diaz, Elissa Washuta, Morgan Talty and many others. To learn how to subscribe to the bonus audio and about the many other potential benefits and rewards of joining the Between the Covers community as a listener-supporter, head over to the show’s Patreon page.  

“When I tell you a story about my body, I cannot separate it from a story about water. And a story about water is also a story about family. And a story about family is rooted in the earth…,” opens Sangamithra Iyer’s Governing Bodies. What does it mean for a memoir to assume the elusive, ever-changing shape of water, to be the story of family but where the notion of family crosses the boundaries of blood, culture, nation and even species? Governing Bodies, as the Whiting judges said in their citation, is “a subtle, meditative exploration on grief and nonviolence, an international and intergenerational voyage through shared histories and a consideration of what we owe to each other and the natural world.” For the bonus audio archive, Sangu contributes a reading of her remarkable essay “Are You Willing?” which originally appeared in the anthology Writing for Animals: New Perspectives for Writers & Instructors to Educate & Inspire. This joins an ever-growing archive of contributions from past guests—from Richard Powers to adrienne maree brown, Forrest Gander to Arthur Sze, Natalie Diaz to Ada Limón. You can find out how to access the bonus audio and about the many other potential benefits and rewards to choose from, when you join the Between the Covers community as a listener-supporter, at the show’s Patreon page. Finally, here is today’s BookShop.

In Into Being Lily Dunn explores the ways in which writing one’s life has the potential to transform it; how writing, if done well,  can produce “symbolic repair.” We look at Virginia Woolf’s notion of “moments of being” as a means and method to find the form that best fits your specific story to tell. We look at different ways memoirists have used the imagination within their own work, and the various ethical issues that arise when writing about people close to you or about other peoples’ trauma. And from beginning to end, we look at Lily’s own remarkable memoir, Sins of My Father: A Daughter, A Cult, A Wild Unravelling, as a way into these questions as well. For the bonus audio archive Lily walks us through one of the writing exercises in the book. This joins a large and ever-growing archive, everything from craft talks by Marlon James and Jeannie Vanasco, to writing prompts from Danez Smith & Lucy Ives, to readings by everyone from Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore to Richard Powers. You can find out about how to subscribe to the bonus audio and about all the other potential benefits and rewards of joining the Between the Covers community at the show’s Patreon page. Finally here is the BookShop for today.

Randa Abdel-Fattah’s new novel Discipline is set in Sydney, Australia in 2021 during Ramadan. Discipline follows two Palestinians there, one in media and one in academia, where each has to confront questions of silence and complicity in their respective fields. As Israel intensifies its bombardment of Gaza, and as an eighteen-year-old student at a local Islamic school is arrested for protesting a university’s investment in an Israeli arms manufacturer—an arrest that results in an Islamophobic moral panic across Australia, our two Palestinian protagonists make very different decisions on how to engage with the power structures within their disciplines and within the country at large. What is the cost of staying and fighting within an organization that wants to silence you? What is the cost of walking way? In addition to being a riveting read on the level of story, Discipline is also a sort of primer on the weaponization of language, particularly liberal rhetoric employed to capture and domesticate radical movements of change. For the bonus audio archive Randa contributes a reading of excerpts from Chelsea Watego’s “Always Bet on Black (Power): The Fight Against Race.” This joins bonus readings from Dionne Brand, Danez Smith, Isabella Hammad, Natalie Diaz, Omar El Akkad, music from Leanne Betasamosake Simpson and much more. To learn about how to subscribe to the bonus audio and the other potential benefits and rewards 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.

Jorge Luis Borges called her the “Tolstoy of Mexico” and César Aira the “greatest novelist of the 20th century,” so why is it likely that you haven’t read or even heard of Elena Garro before now? And given that Garro was, like her fantastical stories,  not beholden to the truth when accounting her own life, and given that her own life was, in its radical shifts and contradictions, so wildly resistant to comprehension, how does one present her now to the world? Jazmina Barrera may be the perfect writer to do so as her new Garro-centric book The Queen of Swords is as unconventional as her subject. Full of cats and revolution, Tarot and the CIA, conspiracy and embroidery, this anti-biographical love letter to another writer also becomes a portrait of Jazmina as well. For the bonus audio archive Jazmina contributes a reading from Elena Garro’s story “When We Were Dogs,” in Christina MacSweeney’s translation. To learn how to subscribe to the bonus audio and the other potential benefits and rewards 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.

Caren Beilin’s first appearance on the show, in 2022 to discuss her book Revenge of the Scapegoat, was so unforgettable, and spurred so much enthusiasm and electrifying conversation in its wake, that I couldn’t say “no” to being in conversation with her again, this time live at Powell’s Bookstore, to discuss her latest book Sea, Poison out with New Directions. So get ready, as if you were a donkey dragged through a mossy ditch of Daniel Day-Lewis-ishness, for a conversation of stolen plots and stolen uteri, medical Oulipo, botched eye surgeries, dirty dancing, and more. If you enjoyed 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. Finally, here is the BookShop for today’s conversation.

Painter Stephen Hayes latest exhibition, “Elegy,” consists of twelve abstract paintings that engage with the genocide in Gaza. One of the twelve paintings was created while listening to the Between the Covers conversation with Omar El Akkad about his book One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. Because of this, instead of asking, as he usually does, an art curator or fellow painter to be in a public conversation with him as part of the exhibition, he asked me to interview him. Much as our conversation was surely different than the others he has had about his work over his nearly half-century of being a painter, his invitation also asked me to step into unfamiliar territory, to meet Stephen in this third space, unfamiliar to us both, and make something new together. The conversation was held at the Elizabeth Leach Gallery in Portland, Oregon. Head over to the gallery website to see images of the “Elegy” exhibition and to this post on their Instagram page to see the specific painting that was created under the aura of this podcast. If you enjoyed today’s conversation consider joining the Between the Covers community as a listener-supporter. You can find out about the potential rewards and benefits of doing so at the show’s Patreon page.

Archive of Desire: A Poem in Four Parts for C.P. Cavafy began as a collaborative multidisciplinary project between the poet Robin Coste Lewis, the composer Vijay Iyer, the cellist Jeffrey Zeigler and the visual artist Julie Mehretu. This multimedia quartet traveled to Athens together to engage with the Cavafy archives as part of the composition of their performance, a performance now rendered anew on the page in Robin’s new poetry collection. We look at the different ways Robin alchemizes archival material across her three books, at questions of selfhood and desire when engaging with the poetry of another, at her unique relationship to time, at how queerness informs her poetics and that of Cavafy’s, and much more. A conversation that conjures everyone from Anne Carson to Lyn Hejinian, Daniel Mendelsohn to Ross Gay, and roams from ancient Greece to modern Alexandria. If you enjoyed today’s conversation consider transforming yourself from a listener to a listener-supporter by joining the Between the Covers community. There are many potential rewards and benefits of doing so including the bonus audio archive which includes supplemental contributions by past guests, from Dionne Brand and Nikky Finney, to Ross Gay and Natalie Diaz. Learn how to subscribe to the bonus audio and about the other benefits to choose from at the show’s Patreon page. Finally, here if the BookShop for today’s conversation.

As an artist, how does one dive into the wreck of an archive, a canon, a shared collective memory, a history—one filled with silenced voices, distorted accounts, erasures and elisions—on behalf of those wronged by it? Poet Dionne Brand says “the salvage is the life which exceeds the wreck” and Diana Arterian’s work seems animated by this work of salvage and recovery. We look at her new poetry collection, Agrippina the Younger, about a Roman Empress who, today, is only known as the “daughter of,” “sister of,” “mother of,” “wife of ” various men of history; and also at Diana’s new work of translation (co-translated with Marina Omar) Smoke Drifts, the first time the Anglophone world is able to engage deeply with the work of the Afghan poet Nadia Anjuman, a rising literary star silenced in the prime of her life. We look at feminist practices and strategies of archival confrontation in these two very different contexts, Ancient Rome and modern Afghanistan, and the different considerations and choices Diana makes as she dives deep into the wreck and somehow resurfaces to re-present these lives, this art, shimmering with life, for us. For the bonus audio archive Diana contributes an epic medley of readings, everything from ancient Armenian poetry to some co-translations in-progress of contemporary Armenian poetry; from her memoir-in-progress to a hard-to-find 35 year old piece by Alice Notley called “Homer’s Art” which wonders how a women could write an epic and if “there might be recovered some sense of what the mind was like before Homer, before the world went haywire & women were denied participation in the design & making of it. Perhaps someone might discover that original mind inside herself right now, in these times.” To learn about how to subscribe to the bonus audio archive and about all the other potential benefits and rewards 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 conversation.    

Set during the 17th century witch trials in Denmark, and relayed to us through the voice of a magically animated wax child of one of the accused, Olga Ravn’s new book, which creates something uncannily other from primary sources, has been heralded as a “devilishly subversive feminist anthem” and speaks as much to the present moment as it does to the time of the witches. We explore how the witch hunts and trials were an important part of creating a notion of state, family and self that we still live under today. We look at the fear of women gathering, at folk magic and alchemy, at animating the archive through ritual and the imagination, and much more. If you enjoy today’s conversation consider transforming yourself from a listener to a listener-supporter by joining the Between the Covers community. There are lots of rewards and benefits of doing so and you can explore them all at the show’s Patreon page. Finally, here is the BookShop for today.  

Ten years in the making, poet Rickey Laurentiis joins us to talk about her much-anticipated remarkable new collection Death of the First Idea. “In the past decade, as Laurentiis has transitioned, her ideas of the lyric and poetry have transformed, as has the America in which she lives,” says the back copy on this book, whose poetry fittingly resists easy categorization. Oracular and lyrical, mythic and confessional, archaic and futuristic, personal and communal, Rickey’s poetry takes us far and wide, from Ancient Greece to New Orleans to Palestine, from Dante to Emily Dickinson to her own past and future selves. As Safiya Sinclair says: “Here is a poet in an ecstatic trance, dancing with the muses. Each page is an inferno of linguistic fervor, reforging trans identity and femme imagination. Deeply felt, rigorous, and erudite, these poems strike deep in the mind and stick to the soul. Startling and raw and exquisitely fearless, above all, these poems choose to live.” For the bonus audio archive Rickey contributes a reading of a new poem, written just two days before this conversation was recorded, entitled “Second Nature.” This joins bonus audio from everyone from Danez Smith to Torrey Peters, Jorie Graham to Dionne Brand. To learn how to subscribe to the bonus audio and about the other potential benefits and rewards of joining the Between the Covers community head over to the show’s Patreon page. Finally, here is the BookShop for today’s episode

What does it mean to write toward or under the aura of another poet one admires, to write in homage, as a celebration of another? What happens to language when it hovers between two writers, between how they each separately inhabit it? What does it say about the self, or is discovered about it—within the poem and in the world at large—when that self works through a devotional practice of homage? Today we look at one of Laynie Browne’s homage books, her most recent collection Apprentice to a Breathing Hand which is in deep engagement with the poetry of Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge. Fittingly, the conversation becomes a deep exploration of both Laynie and Mei-Mei’s poetry, their animating questions and concerns, and the work that arises when their work is placed alongside, nested within, in dialogue, in this way. For the bonus audio Laynie reads for us from another one of her homage books, this one to Alice Notley, called Everyone and Her Resemblances to demonstrate a very different aesthetic and syntactic, formal and thematic project. To learn about how to subscribe to the bonus audio archive, and the other benefits and rewards to choose from when joining the Between the Covers community, head over to the show’s Patreon page. Finally, here is the BookShop for today.  

Today’s guest is writer and critic Martha Anne Toll. Through a discussion of her latest novel Duet for One we explore the perennial mystery of writing and art-making, namely how to render something that lives beyond representation, and how words can become a vehicle to evoke what words themselves cannot adequately describe. In this case, we look at how to bring music into language, the experience of making it and hearing it into the realm of words. We explore Martha’s lifelong journey toward becoming a writer, through music and law and social justice, ultimately debuting as a novelist in her sixties. And how her mentorship as a musician affected and shaped her writing life, from craft and form to failure and perseverance. If you enjoyed today’s conversation consider joining the Between the Covers community as a listener-supporter. Find out about all the rewards and benefits of doing so at the show’s Patreon page. Finally here is the BookShop for today’s episode.