LitFriends Podcast

Join co-hosts Annie Liontas and Lito Velázquez in conversation with Paula Saunders & George Saunders about why we bother with writing, blowing up, truth, beauty, the spiritual life, and nearly 40 years of marriage. Our next episode will feature Yiyun Li & Edmund White.   Links Libsyn Blog https://georgesaundersbooks.com/ https://paulasaundersbooks.com/   www.annieliontas.com www.litovelazquez.com LitFriends LinkTree LitFriends Insta LitFriends Facebook  

Join co-hosts Annie Liontas and Lito Velázquez in conversation with Liz Moore & Asali Solomon about being iconic Phily literary friends and co-conspirators in The CLAW, Philly's literary salon for women, non-binary, and genderqueer writers. Our next episode will feature George & Paula Saunders.   Links Libsyn Blog www.annieliontas.com www.litovelazquez.com https://www.lizmoore.net/ https://www.asalisolomon.com/   LitFriends LinkTree LitFriends Insta LitFriends Facebook  

Join co-hosts Annie Liontas and Lito Velázquez in conversation with LitFriends Melissa Febos & Donika Kelly about their grand statements, big revelations, sentential seduction, queering forms, the power of vulnerability, and love poems. We're taking a break and will be back for our next episode with guests Yiyun Li & Edmund White on January 16,  2024. Happy Holidays, LitFam!   LINKS Libsyn Blog www.annieliontas.com www.litovelazquez.com www.melissafebos.com www.donikakelly.com LitFriends LinkTree LitFriends Insta LitFriends Facebook TRANSCRIPT Annie: (00:00) This episode is dedicated to Chuck, a dog we have loved, and Donika and Melissa's sweet pup.   Annie & Lito: Welcome to LitFriends! Hey Lit Friends!   Annie: Welcome to the show.    Lito: Today, we're speaking with memoirist Melissa Febos and poet Donika Kelly, lit friends in marriage,   Annie: About seduction, big boss feelings, and sliding into DMs.   Lito: So grab your bestie,   Annie & Lito: And get ready to fall in love!   Annie: What I love about Melissa Febos, and you can feel this across all four of her books, is how she declares herself free. There's no ambiguity to this. This is her story, not your telling of it, not your telling of her. I meet her on the page as someone who's in an act of rebellion or an act of defiance. And I was not really surprised but delighted to find that, when I read Donika Kelly, I had sort of the same reaction, same impression. And I'm wondering if that's true for you, and, Lito, what your understanding of vulnerability and its relationship to power is.   Lito: The power for me in these conversations, and the power that the authors that we speak with possess, seems to me, in the ways that they have found how they are completely unique from each other. And more so than in our other conversations, Donika and Melissa, their work is so different. And yet, as you've pointed out, the overlap, and the fire, the energy, the defiance, the fierceness is so present. And it was present in our conversation. And so inspiring.   Annie: Yeah. I'm thinking even about Melissa Febos has this Ted Talk. (01:54) Where she says "telling your secrets will set you free." And it feels that not only is that true, but it's also very much an act of self reclamation and strength, right? Where we might read it as an act of weakness. It's actually in fact, a harnessing of the self.   Lito: Right, it's not that Melissa has a need to confess. It's that she really uses writing to find the truth about herself and how she feels about something, which that could not differ more from my writing practice.   Annie: How so?   Lito: I find that I sort of, I write out of an emotion or a need to discover something, but I already sort of am aware of where I am and who I am before I start. I find the plot and the characters as I go, but I know sort of how I feel.   Annie: Yeah, I think for me, I do feel like writing is an act of discovery where maybe I put something on the page, it's the initial conception, or yeah, like you coming out of a feeling. But as I start to ask questions, right, for me, it's this process of inquiry. I excavate to something maybe a little more surprising or partially hidden or unknown to myself.   Lito: That's true. There is a discovery of, and I think you're, I think you've pointed to exactly what it is. It's the process of inquiry, and I think both of them, and obviously us, we're doing that similar thing. This is about writing, about this, this is about asking questions and writing through them.   Annie: Yeah, and Donika Kelly, we feel that in her work, her poetry over and over, even when they have the same recurring, I would say haunting images or artifacts. Each time she's turning it over and asking almost unbearable questions.   Lito: Right.   Annie: And we're joining her on the page because she is brave enough and has an iron will and says, no, I will not not look this in the eye.    Lito: That's the feeling exactly that I get from both of them is the courage, the bravura of the unflinching.   Annie: I think something that seemed to resonate with you was (03:58) how they talk about writing outside of publishing right? Yeah.   Lito: Yeah, I love I love that they talk about writing as a practice regardless, they're separated from The need to produce a work that's gonna sell in a commercial world in a capitalist society. It's more about the daily practice, and how that is a lifestyle and even what you said about the TED talk, that's just her. She's just talking about herself. Like that she's just telling an absolute truth that people don't typically talk about.   Annie: Right. And it's a conscious, active way to live inside one's life. It's a form of reflection, meditation, and rather than just moving through life, a way to make meaning of the experience.   Lito: I love that you use the word meditation because when you talk about meditation, you think of someone in a lotus position quietly being, but the meditations that both of them do, these are not quiet.   Annie: No. And of course we have to talk about how cute they are as married literary besties.   Lito: Oh my god, cute and like, they're hot for each other.   Annie: Oh my god.   Lito: It's palpable.   Annie: So palpable, sliding into DMs, chatting each other up over email.   Lito: They romanced each other, and I hope—no—I know they're gonna romance you, listener.   Annie: We'll be right back.   Lito: (05:40) Back to the show.   Annie: Melissa Febos is the author of four books, including the best-selling essay collection Girlhood, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, was a Lambda finalist, and was named a notable book by NPR, Time Magazine, the Washington Post, and others. Her craft book Body Work is a national bestseller and an Indie's Next Pick. Her forthcoming novel The Dry Season is a work of mixed form nonfiction that explores celibacy as liberatory practice. Melissa lives in Iowa City with her wife, the poet Donika Kelly, and is a professor in the English department at the University of Iowa, where she teaches creative writing.   Lito: Donika Kelly is the author of The Renunciations, winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in poetry and Bestiary, the winner of the 2015 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, a Hurston Wright Legacy Award for poetry, and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Donika has been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Publishing Triangle Awards, the Lambda Literary Awards, and was long listed for the National Book Award. (06:00) Donika lives in Iowa City with her wife, the writer Melissa Febos, and is an assistant professor in the English department at the University of Iowa, where she teaches creative writing.   Annie: Well, thank you for joining us for LitFriends to talk about the ultimate lit friendship. It does seem like you've won at the game of lit friends a little bit, having married your lit friend. I think of you both as writers who are in the constant act of subversion and resisting erasure. And that's the kind of work that Lito and I are drawn to, and that we're trying to do ourselves. And your work really shows us how to inhabit our bravest and most complex selves on the page. So we're really grateful for that.   Melissa: Thanks.   Annie: Yeah, of course. I mean, Donika, I think about poems of yours that my friends and I revisit constantly because we're haunted by them in the best way. They've taken residence inside of us. And you talk about what it means to have to do that work. And you've said, "to admit need and pain, desire and trauma and claim my humanity was often daunting. But the book demanded I claim my personhood."   And Melissa, I think you know how much your work means to me. I mean, as someone who is raised as a girl in this country and writing creative nonfiction, Body Work should not be as revelatory as it is. Yet what I see is that you're shaping an entire generation of nonfiction writers, many of them women. So, you know, also very grateful for that. And you've talked about that in Body Work. You've said "the risk of honest self-appraisal requires bravery to place our flawed selves in the context of this magnificent broken world is the opposite of narcissism, which is building a self-image that pleases you." So we'll talk more in a bit about courage and vulnerability and how you all do the impossible things you do, but let's dive into your lit friendship.   Melissa: Thank you, Annie, for that beautiful introduction.   Donika: Yeah, thank you so much. I'm excited to talk about our friendship.   Lito: We're so excited to have you here.   Melissa: Talk about our special friendship.   Annie: Very special friendship. Friendship with benefits.   Lito: So tell us about your lit friend, Melissa, tell us about Donika.   Melissa: (09:07) Tell us about her. Okay, she's fucking hilarious, like very, very funny and covers a broad spectrum of humor from like, there's a lot of like punning that goes on in our house, a lot of like silly wordplay, bathroom humor, and then like high level, like, literary academic sort of witticism that's also making fun of itself a lot. And we've sort of operated in all of those registers since like the day we met.   She is my favorite poet. There's like those artists that whose work you really appreciate, right? Sometimes because it's so different from your own. And then there are those artists whose work registers in like a very deep sort of recognition where they feel like creative kin, right? And that has always been my experience of Donika's work. That there is a kind of creative intelligence and emotionality that just feels like so profoundly familiar to me and was before I knew anything about her as a human being.   Okay, we also like almost all the same candy and have extremely opposite work habits. She's very hot. She only likes to watch

Join co-hosts Annie Liontas and Lito Velázquez in conversation with LitFriends Lucy Corin & Deb Olin Unferth about their travels in the Sahara, ancient chickens, disappointments, true love, and why great books are so necessary. Our next episode will feature Melissa Febos & Donika Kelly, out December 22, 2023.   Links Libsyn Blog www.annieliontas.com www.litovelazquez.com https://www.lucycorin.com https://debolinunferth.com LitFriends LinkTree LitFriends Insta LitFriends Facebook   Transcript Annie Lito (00:00.118) Welcome to Lit Friends! Hey Lit Friends!   Lito: Welcome to the show.    Annie: Today we're speaking with Lucy Corin and Deb Olin Unferth, great writers, thinkers, and LitFriend besties.    Lito:  About chickens, the Sahara, and bad reviews.    Annie: So grab your bestie   Annie & Lito: And get ready to get lit!   Lito: You know those like stones that you can get when you're on like a trip to like Tennessee somewhere or something, they're like worry stones? Like people used to like worry them with their thumb or something whenever they had a problem and it would like supposedly calm you down. Well, it's not quite the same thing, but I love how Deb describes her and Lucy's relationship is like, “worry a problem with me.” Like let's, let's cut this gem from all the angles and really like rub it down to its essential context and meaning and understanding. And I think essentially that's what like writers, great writers, offer the world. They've worked through a problem and they have answers. There's not one answer, there's not a resolution to it, but the answers that lead to better, more better questions.    Annie: Yeah, and there's something so special about them because they're, worry tends to be something we do in isolation, almost kind of worrying ourselves into the ground.   Lito: Right. Annie: But they're doing it together in collaboration.    Lito: It's a collaborative worry. Yes, I love that.    Annie: A less lonely worrying.    Lito: It's a less lonely place to think through these things. And the intimacy between them is so special. The way I think they just weave in and out of their lives with each other, even though they're far away from each other.   I think there's a romantic notion that you're tuned into about Lucy and Deb's trip to the desert. Do you want to say something about that? There's a metaphor in it that you really love, right?    Annie: (1:52) Yeah. Well, so I remember when we first talked about doing this podcast and invited them, we were at a bar at AWP, the writer's conference. And they were like, oh, this is perfect. We just went to the Sahara together. And I was like, what? You writers just decided to take a trip together through the desert? And they said, yeah, it was perfect. And they have adorable photos, which we of course are going to share with the world. Um, but it felt like such a, I mean, the fact that they would go on that kind of adventure together and didn't really plan ahead, I think it was just Deb saying, I really want to go to the desert. And Lucy saying, sure, let's go. Which feels very much a kind of metonym of their friendship in some ways.    Lito: Absolutely.    Annie: (2:42) Yeah. That they wandered these spaces together. They come back to art, right? Art is a way for them to recreate themselves and recreate their friendship. And they're doing such different things on the page.    Lito:  Oh yeah, no, they're very different writers but they do share a curiosity that's unique I think in their friendship, then unique to them.    Annie: Yeah and a kind of rigorousness and a love for the word.    Lito: (3:10) Oh and a love for thinking and reading the world in every capacity.    Annie: Tell me about your friendship with Lucy because you're quite close.   Lito: I was at UC Davis before it was an MFA program. It was just a Master's. After undergrad, I went to the master's program because I wasn't sure if I wanted to be an academic or do the studio option and get an MFA. I loved how Lucy and the other professors there, Pam Houston, Yiyun Li, showed us the different ways to be a writer. They couldn't be more different, the three of them. And, I particularly was drawn to Lucy because of her sense of art and play and how those things interact.    Lito: (03:59) And here was someone that was extremely cerebral, extremely intelligent, thinking through every aspect of existence. And yet it was all done through the idea of play and experimentation, but not experimentation in that sort of like negative way that we think of experimentation, which is to say writing that doesn't work, but experimentation in the sense of innovation. And. Lucy brought out my sense of play. I got it right away, what she was going for, that there is an intellectual pleasure to the work of reading and writing that people in the world respond to, but don't often articulate. Lucy's able to articulate it, and I admire her forever for that.    Lito: (4:52) And perhaps I'm not speaking about our friendship, but it comes from a place of deep admiration for the work that she does and the way she approaches life. You have a special relationship with Deb. I would love to hear more about that.    Annie: (5:04) Yeah, I think I've been fangirling over Deb for years. Deb is such a special person. I mean, she's incredibly innovative and has this agility on the page, like almost no other writer I know. Also quite playful, but I love most her humanity. Deb is a vegan who, in Barn 8, brings such life to chickens in a way that we as humans rarely consider. There's an amazing scene which she's like with a chicken 2000 years into the future. Also, I know Deb through my work with Pen City, her writing workshop with incarcerated writers at the Connally Unit, a maximum security penitentiary in Southern Texas.   Lito: How does that work? Is it all by letter or do you go there?    Annie: (5:58) Well, the primary program, you know, the workshop that Deb teaches is on site, and it's certified. So students are getting, the incarcerated writers, are getting now college credit because it's an accredited program. So Deb will be on site and work with them directly. And those of us who volunteer as mentors, the program has evolved a little bit since then, (06:22) but it’s kind of a pen pal situation. So I had a chance to work with a number of writers, some who had been there for years and years. And a lot of folks are writing auto-fiction or fiction that's deeply inspired by the places they've lived and their experiences. It's such a special program, it's such a special experience. And what I saw from Deb was just this absolute fierceness. You know, like Deb can appear to be fragile in some ways (06:53.216), and it's her humanity, but actually there's this solid steel core to Deb, and it's about fortitude and a kind of moral alignment that says, we need to do better.    Lito: We have this weird connotation with the word fragile that it's somehow bad, but actually, what it means is that someone's vulnerable. And to me, there is no greater superpower than vulnerability, especially with art, and especially in artwork that is like what she does at the penitentiary. But, can I ask a question?    Annie:  Sure.   Lito: Why is it so special working with incarcerated folks?    Annie: (7:27) Oh, that's a great question. I mean, we need its own podcast to answer it.   Lito: Of course, but just sort of the...    Annie:  I think my personal experience with it is that so many incarcerated writers have been disenfranchised on all levels of identity and experience. Voting rights, decent food, accommodations, mental health, physical, you know, physical well-being. And we can't solve all those problems necessarily, at least all at once, and it's an up, it's a constant battle. But nothing to me offers or recognizes a person's humanity like saying, "tell us your story. Tell us what's on your mind. We are here to hear you and listen."  And those stories and they do come out, you know, there have been other programs that have done this kind of work, they get out in the world and there's, we're bridging this gap of people we have almost entirely forgotten out of absolute choice.  (8:27) And Deb is doing that work, really, I mean she's been doing that work for a long time and finally got some recognition for it, but Deb does it because she's committed.   Lito: That is really powerful. Tell us your story. Tell us your story, Lit Fam. Tell us your story. Find us in all your social media @LitFriendsPodcast or email us at LitFriendsPodcast@gmail.com   Annie: We will read all your stories. We'll be right back with Lucy and   Deb.   Lito: (09:00) And now, our interview with Lucy Corrin and Deb. Lucy Corin is the author of two short story collections, 100 Apocalypses and Other Apocalypses and The Entire Predicament, and two novels, Everyday Psychokillers and The Swank Hotel. In addition to winning the Rome Prize, Lucy was awarded a fellowship in literature from the NEA. She is a 2023 Guggenheim Fellow and a professor of English in the MFA program at UC Davis.    Annie:  Deb Olin-Unferth is the author of six books, including Barn 8, and her memoir, Revolution: The Year I Fell in Love and Went to Join the War, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Deb is an associate professor in creative writing at the University of Texas at Austin. She founded and runs Pen City Writers, a two-year creative writing certificate program at Connally, a maximum security prison in southern Texas. For this work, she was awarded the 2017 Texas Governor's Criminal Justice Service Award.   Lito: (09:58) Annie and I thought this up a year ago, and we were talking about what is special about literary friendships and how writing gets made, not as we all think, totally solitary in our rooms alone, but we have conversations, at least I think this way. They're part of long conversations with our friends, our literary friends and living and dead, and you know,

In the first episode of Season 1, co-hosts Annie Liontas and Lito Velázquez speak with LitFriends Angela Flournoy & Justin Torres about their enduring friendship, writing in a precarious world, and chosen family. Links https://sites.libsyn.com/494238 www.annieliontas.com www.litovelazquez.com https://linktr.ee/litfriendspodcast https://www.instagram.com/litfriendspodcast/ https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61553436475678 https://justin-torres.com/ https://www.angelaflournoy.com/ https://www.asalisolomon.com/ Transcript Annie & Lito (00:01) Welcome to LitFriends! Hey LitFriends! Annie: Welcome to the show. Lito: Today we're speaking with the great writers and LitFriends, Justin Torres and Angela Flournoy. Annie: About chosen family, the dreaded second novel, and failure and success. Lito: So grab your bestie and— 
 Both: Get ready to get lit! Lito: That's so cute. Annie: It's cute. It's cute. We’re cute! Lito: Cute, cute… So you had a question? Annie (00:29) I do. I have a question for you, Lito. Are you a cat or an ox? Lito: I mean, I would hope that the answer is so obvious that it almost bears not asking the question. I'm a cat. Annie: Okay, so Asali Solomon at The Claw asked us all, are you an ox or a cat? Lito: That's a great question. Annie: And as a writer... You know, the oxen are the people who work every day in the field, clock in, clock out, pay themselves a quarter an hour. I'm literally talking about me. The cats are people who are playful, exploratory, when the mood strikes them… Lito: Why are you looking at me when you say that? Annie Lito (01:26) So are you an ox or a cat? Lito: I’m a cat. I think anyone who's ever met me would say I'm a cat. Annie: How does that show up in your writing? Lito: Well, I mean, play is so important to me—she'll be on the  podcast in a couple of episodes, but when I first...was studying with Lucy, that was one of the first things that she spoke about in our class, and it kind of blew up my whole world. I had been writing for a long time already, but I hadn't thought of it as play, or there was some permission I needed or something. So the idea of play is really central to what I do and love. You wouldn't necessarily know that from the novel that I'm writing, which is sort of a dark book. Um, but it did start out with a lot of play and, I'm also, as you could probably just hear, my cat is coming into the room. Annie: Your cat is like, yes, Lito is us. RiffRaff is like, "Lito is cat." Lito: My cat Riff Raff, yes. Smarty pants. Um, he needed to join in on this conversation. Anyways, I'm a cat. I, I'm fickle when it comes to my work. Um. I don't want to work on my novel all the time, which is great because life has found so many ways to prevent it from happening. So in the new year, in 2024, it will be 7 years since I've started writing this book, and it's still, it's going to take a few more months at least. And what about you? Annie:  (03:09) I’m four oxen pulling a cart carrying all of my ancestors. I am very much the immigrant who says, get up, go do the work, come back, go do the work. And believe it or not, for me, there is a lot of joy in that. It's a... It allows, you know, it’s Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow, actually. So it doesn't feel like drudgery, usually. It does feel like joy. And I'm actually curious for all you LitFriends out there, if you're an ox or a cat. Lito: Yes, that's such a great idea. Please email us at litfriendspodcast@gmail.com, and tell us if you're a cat or an oxen or share on all your socials. Annie: Yeah, maybe we should poll them. That would be fun. Lito: That's a good idea. #LitFriendsPodcast. Annie: The reason I'm asking is because, of course, both Justin and Angela, who we speak with today in this episode, talk about what it's like to go for 10 years between books. "A banger a decade," is what Angela says. Lito: It's so funny. Annie: And you, you know, part of that, they have this very rich conversation about how, when you put everything into the first book, it takes a lot to get to the second book. But I think also there's a lot of play, right? And there's a lot of understanding that writing appears in different forms. And it might be the second novel, but it might be something else. Lito: For sure. I really like how they talk about— that the practice of writing is actually a practice of reading. And I think that any serious writer spends most of their time reading. And not just reading books, but texts of all kinds, in the world, at museums, as Justin points out, art, television, even the trashiest TV show has so much to offer. Annie: (05:12) And there's such a generosity to the way they think of themselves as artists, and also generosity in how they show up for one another as friends, and acknowledging when they fail one another as we as we see in this episode. And I remember my introduction to Justin when I was a grad student at Syracuse. I read We the Animals and fell in love with it, asked him to come do a reading at Syracuse, which was wonderful. And my wife who, at that time was my Bey-ancé, she was turning 30. We had no money. I couldn't buy her anything. Not in grad school. So I asked Justin if he would autograph his story, "Reverting to a Wild State," which is about a breakup in reverse, for Sara. Lito: Oh, I love that story. Annie: And he did, and he thought it was so beautiful, and I was like, "let me send it to you." He's like, "no, I've got it." He just shipped it to me. He didn't know me. We didn't know each other. Lito: He knew you because of books. He knew you because he loved literature. Annie: Yeah. And I remember that in it. I held on to it at a time when that act really mattered. Lito: One of the things I love about our interview with Justin and Angela is how much all of us talk about generosity, and how Justin and Angela display it in their conversation with each other and with us. And I'm just curious, how do you see that coming through also in Angela's work? Annie: (07:00) You know, I remember her talking about how the idea for the book began with this image of people moving around a house at night. This is The Turner House. And she says this image opens up a lot of questions. And one of the things that really stays with me about that book is how masterful she is at shifting perspective, particularly between siblings, which I find to be such a challenge for writers, right? Like your siblings are the people who are closest to you and sometimes also the farthest away. And she gets that so intimately on the page. And of course, in our conversation with Angela and Justin, one of the things they talk about is being family, essentially being siblings. And that's one of the most powerful echoes of the conversation. They talk about being a chosen family and having to choose again and again and again. And that spirit of consciousness and connection, I feel that very much in Angela's work, and of course in Justin's too. Lito: Oh Annie, I choose you again and again, I choose you. Annie: Oh, I choo-choo-choose you! Lito: So stupid. Annie: (08:05) After the break, we'll be back with Justin and Angela. Annie: (08:24) And we're back. Lito: I just wanted to mention, too, that we spoke with Angela and Justin in October during the writer's strike in Hollywood, and just before Justin's new book, Blackouts, was released. And just last week, as you're hearing this podcast. Annie: Just last week. Lito: Just last week! He won the National Book Award for a book that took him 10 years to write. Annie: Absolutely. Annie: Justin Torres is the author of Blackouts, a novel about queer histories that are hidden, erased and re-imagined. Blackouts won the 2023 National Book Award for fiction. His debut novel, We the Animals, has been translated into 15 languages and was adapted into a feature film. He was named National Book Foundation's Five Under 35. His work appears in the New Yorker, Harper's, Granta, Tin House, Best American Essays, and elsewhere. He lives in Los Angeles and teaches at UCLA. Lito: Angela Flournoy is the author of The Turner House, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, won the VCU-Cabel First Novel Prize, and was also a finalist for both the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and an NAACP Image Award. Angela is a contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine, and her nonfiction has appeared in The Nation, the Los Angeles Times, The New Yorker, and elsewhere. Angela is a faculty member in the low residency MFA program at Warren Wilson College. Lito: (10:36) I'm so grateful that you guys found time to meet with us today, and I've thought about you two as friends since I think this is like the first time you've done something like what you did in 2017, the "Proper Missive"—do you remember that—you published in Spook? And it stuck with me. I was like a big, nerding out, and I bought it and I have it still. And I thought about that. And Justin, you know that you're very personal— there's a personal connection with me because I found your book on my way to my first master's program. No one had said anything about it to me where I was coming from, and it was really great. And Angela, I first found your book. I was so amazed and moved by the talk you don't remember at Syracuse. Angela: I don't remember the lunch. I remember being at Syracuse, and there being a talk, yes. Lito: You inscribed your book, "Here's to Language," which I think is hilarious and also really sweet. And I think we must have said something about language at some point. But anyways, thank you so much both for being here. Justin: Thank you for having us. Angela: Very happy to be here. Lito: So let's start. Why don't you tell us about your friend in a few sentences? So Angela, you can go first. Tell us about Justin. Angela: (11:23) Justin is the first person that I met in Iowa City when I was visiting and deciding if I was going to go there, but was I really deciding no? I'll let you go there. But that I could like, deciding whether I woul

Show Notes On our inaugural episode, co-hosts Annie Liontas and Lito Velázquez introduce LitFriends, a podcast.  Each week, we welcome two literary friends to discuss the writing life, how literary friendships get us through tough times, and what they love about their literary bestie. Join Annie and Lito for Season One as they speak with today's most engaging literary talents and their lit friends. Coming up this season, conversations with: * Justin Torres & Angela Flournoy * Lucy Corin & Deb Olin Unferth * Melissa Febos & Donika Kelly * Yiyun Li & Edmund White * George Saunders & Paula Saunders * Liz Moore & Asali Solomon * CJ Hauser & Marie-Helene Bertino * and more! Links https://sites.libsyn.com/494238 www.annieliontas.com www.litovelazquez.com https://linktr.ee/litfriendspodcast https://www.instagram.com/litfriendspodcast/ https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61553436475678 https://justin-torres.com/ https://www.angelaflournoy.com/ https://www.lucycorin.com/ https://debolinunferth.com/ https://www.melissafebos.com/ https://www.donikakelly.com/ https://georgesaundersbooks.com/ https://paulasaundersbooks.com/ https://www.lizmoore.net/ https://www.asalisolomon.com/ https://cjhauser.com/ https://www.mariehelenebertino.com/   Transcript Annie & Lito: (00:01) Hey, LitFriends! Annie: Thanks for joining us for episode zero. This episode is a little special because we'll introduce you, our LitFam, to the LitFriends podcast. We'll talk about our origins, our season one guests, and how much I love Lito. Aww, and how much I love you, Annie. Annie:  This is Annie Liontas. Lito: And I'm Lito Velázquez. Welcome to LitFriends, a podcast in which we speak with novelists, poets, memoirists, writers, and thinkers of all kinds about the great work that they do in the world, on and off the page, and about their great literary friendships. Annie: This show has everything, British nicknames, e-flirtations, picking up fam when they're down, literary competition, rooting for one another, and more. Lito: And much, much more. Join us this season as we welcome the amazing writers: Annie & Lito: * Marie-Helene Bertino and CJ Hauser * Liz Moore and Asali Solomon * George Saunders and Paula Saunders * Yiyun Lee and Edmund White * Melissa Febos and Danika Kelly * Deb Olin-Unferth and Lucy Corin * Justin Torres and Angela Flournoy Annie & Lito: Get ready to get lit! Lito: Welcome to the show. I'm so glad we're here, Annie. It's been a long time coming. We've been thinking about– Annie: Ages! Lito: …making this show for over a year and a half, pretty much since the pandemic, though. So maybe more like two or three years. Annie: Yeah, I feel like I've waited my whole life to do this show with you, Lito. Lito: I know I've been wanting someone to collaborate with, and you're the perfect friend to do this with. A show about two of our greatest loves, writing, literature—  Annie: Friendship! Lito: And friendship. Yeah, I guess that's three things. Annie: The more the merrier. Lito: The more the merrier. Every week we're going to have writers on the show who we admire, whose work has moved us deeply, and whose friendships we think are really impressive and interesting. Annie: Yeah, we're going to talk about literary competition between friends, hardships, how you pick one another up when you're down. Heartbreak. Lito: Big wins, like celebrating things. It's amazing the stories that have come out of these conversations because people get to talk about their friends, and how great is that? Annie: They really talk about parts of their friendship that they don't even talk about with one another.  Lito: That's right, because when do you get a chance to really talk to your friend about them. Annie: (02:20) When do you say to your friend, I love you? Lito: I love you. But beyond just I love you, like, here's all the reasons why I love you. Here's what you do in my life. That's really great. Here's why you're beautiful, not just in the work that you do, but how you show up as a person. And that's not how writers get portrayed. We were looking for a project to interview people who we thought were great and interesting. And you were already doing that, right? Annie: Yeah, I was doing that with the Gloss interview series with Marie-Helene Bertino, and a number of others, through Electric Lit, Bomb, The Believer. That really arose out of pandemic, when I saw all of these amazing writers who weren't really able to share their work because of the pandemic. Lito: So, one day we were sitting at your house, Annie, I don't know if you remember this, on your couch and we were talking about writing podcasts and making podcasts. I've been wanting to do one for a really long time and I've been writing for a long time, and I’ve spoken with different people about it, and it's never quite worked out. This is the first time when we both came up with a great idea. I said, "I think it would be really great to talk to people about their friendships, because no one really does that enough." And then you said, I don't know if you remember, you said, "what if we got literary friendships? Because they're so special, like ours." Ours is a friendship on a deep, deep level, but we’re like family, but we're also in this very unique world, which is the writing world. Annie: In the struggle. Lito: In the struggle! Annie: In the never ending struggle! Yes. In the never ending struggle that is writing. We know a lot about the industry. We both got our MFA at Syracuse University, though at very different times. And we love people, we love friends, and we love great writing. And so it made perfect sense to make a podcast about it. Annie: You know, and I don't think I could do this with anybody else. I have a lot of lit friends—making this with you is has been so special. It's something I'm going to hold on to forever. Lito: It's such a pleasure and a joy. Annie: One of the great similarities and worldviews that we share. I mean, we're both queer. We both have the immigrant experience. Lito: That's right. Annie: (04:39) And I think that a lot of what literary friendships are, are in fact quite queer, right? Like there is a there's a queering of the experience simply in recognizing. This is chosen family and this is how we get through. Lito: The thing that surprises me the most and you'll see when you hear these interviews is the material that comes out. It's like nothing else. And people want to get so intimate and so comfortable because they're speaking about their favorite person who's intimate in their lives, but in a special way that has to do with writing. Annie: Yeah. You know, and this for me came out of thinking a lot about the function and the role of literary friendships. I mean, we can all remember back to Bad Art Friend and other pieces that were run in places like the New York Times, maybe unnecessarily glorifying and dramatizing the kinds of drama, just straight drama between former friends, right? And there's a whole lot of, I mean, there's an entire lineage and inheritance of this. And the writer, Isle McElroy writes about this in Esquire and talks about, you know, there are like all those great historical feuds, usually between straight white dudes. Like— We're not wrong. Like when Mailer headbutts Gore Vidal or Gabriel Garcia Marquez gets punched out by Mario Vargas Llosa because he told his wife to divorce him. You know, and so that's what we remember culturally. That's sort of what we glorify. But the reality, and what we're hearing in all of these conversations is what feeds us and what nourishes us is actually these friendships that pick us up when we're down, that celebrate us when we have these successes, without limitation or inhibition, really allow us to rise to our better selves to put our egos and fears and insecurities about our own writing success down so that we can do that for one another. And so for me, this podcast is actually the reality. This is the reality of how writers get by, and how they get through. Lito: (07:02) That's right. I think we have this idea in our cultural imagination that writers sit in a room by themselves in the dark or with a candlelight and a pencil, and they just, from their brain, pull out a story out of nowhere because they are "inspired to." Whereas actually all writing is generated, I think from lots of conversations with people living and dead, but especially close literary friendships in which the intimacy revolves around writing. It's a community practice, but it's a friend practice. We don't show our work to just everyone. We show it to our literary friends, our first readers. And we talk about literature in a certain way with other writers who we admire and whose work we think is somehow symbiotic with our own, even if we're doing completely different practices. Annie: Yeah, it's about sharing the work, but it's also about sharing the vulnerabilities. I'm thinking about Asali Solomon and Liz Moore, who will have later this season, who are both part of the Claw, a writer's salon for women and non-binary writers in Philadelphia. And, you know, they don't necessarily share work, but they share experiences. They commiserate, they talk about their anxieties, they talk about their successes. And it really makes me think about the industry necessity of having mutual knowledge like this. When publishers want to keep us really divided as writers and artists, right? If we are quiet in our corners and not collaborating, then we actually don't have the kind of collective understanding of how to advocate for ourselves, how to protect our work, and how to support one another. Lito: Yes, and I'm thinking of Angela Flournoy, whose first novel was shortlisted for the National Book Award, and Justin Torres, who just won the National Book Award. And their conversation with us, in which they really get into the boostering of each other, the promoting of each other, the helping each other through, the counseling each other through, tha