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.

The post Laynie Browne : Apprentice to a Breathing Hand appeared first on Tin House.

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.

The post Martha Anne Toll : Duet for One appeared first on Tin House.

Today’s conversation with Rob Macaisa Colgate is about two books, his poetry collection Hardly Creatures and his verse drama My Love is Water. You could say these two books are approaching the same questions, but from opposite, if complementary vantage points. Questions of care and disability, of accessibility and community, of Filipino-American identity and the afterlives of colonialism, of queerness and its intersections with race, of selfhood in relation to psychiatric medications, of cross-species solidarity, of questions of language and form, freedom and love and much more. We explore a Crip Mad Poetics and Disability theory in relation to the syntax of the sentence, the body of the poem, and in relation to the world-at-large.

For the bonus audio Rob walks us through how he uses Google spreadsheets as a compositional tool. Reading down several rows of poetry drafts, cell by cell—cells full of recognizable lines of poetry, spontaneous asides, open questions, screenshots and more—he shows us how this process leads to the published poems we hear today. This joins an immense and ever-growing archive of bonus material, with contributions from everyone from Johanna Hedva and adrienne maree brown, to Layli Long Soldier and Victoria Chang. You can learn how to subscribe 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.

The post Rob Macaisa Colgate : Hardly Creatures & My Love is Water appeared first on Tin House.

Don’t miss today’s conversation with Robert Macfarlane. A polyvocal deep dive into the mysteries of words and rivers, of speech acts as spells, whorls as worlds, of grammars of animacy, of what it means to river, and to be rivered. From the Epic of Gilgamesh to Virginia Woolf’s wave in the mind to Ursula K. Le Guin’s fellow feeling to Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s notion of theory as embodied and  kinetic, we look at the role of the imagination, language and the body in reorienting ourselves to a world alive with us beholden to it. And we look to the water defenders and language revivers as part of together dreaming an otherwise.

The bonus audio archive contains many contributions from people mentioned today, from Alice Oswald to Natalie Diaz to Jorie Graham to Richard Powers. To learn more about how to subscribe to the supplementary material, and about all the 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 conversation.

The post Robert Macfarlane : Is a River Alive? appeared first on Tin House.

With the arrival of Ancestors, the third and final book in adrienne maree brown’s Grievers Trilogy, we take the iconic frames she has created in her nonfiction work—emergent strategy, pleasure activism, fractal responsibility, loving corrections and more—and look at how they are dramatized within this fictional near-future Detroit. Much as the three books do themselves, one to the next, we look at questions of care and solidarity at three different scales—the individual, the interpersonal, and the collective—and we explore how they relate to each other fractally, both within this imagined world, and within our own. We conjure the work and thought of everyone from Ursula K. Le Guin to Octavia Butler, Grace Lee Boggs to Saul Williams, Toni Morrison to Toni Cade Bambara, as we explore everything from the allure and dangers of utopias, to how to knit oneself into a larger collective as part of dreaming an otherwise.

adrienne’s first appearance on the show was for the 2022 series Crafting with Ursula, where we looked at questions of social justice and science fiction in adrienne’s work alongside that of Ursula K. Le Guin.

For the bonus audio archive, adrienne contributes the singing of two songs from the Grievers trilogy. This joins bonus audio from many other past guests, including Dionne Brand, Christina Sharpe, N.K. Jemisin, Daniel José Older and more. The bonus audio is only one of many things to choose from if you join the Between the Covers community as a listener-supporter. Find out more at the show’s Patreon page.

Finally, here is the BookShop for today’s conversation.

The post adrienne maree brown : Ancestors appeared first on Tin House.

The Book of Records is many things: a book of historical fiction and speculative fiction, a meditation on time and on space-time,  on storytelling and truth, on memory and the imagination, a book that impossibly conjures the lives and eras of the philosopher Baruch Spinoza, the Tang dynasty poet Du Fu and the political theorist Hannah Arendt not as mere ghostly presences but portrayed as vividly and tangibly as if they lived here and now in the room where we hold this very book. But most of all this is a book about books, about words as amulets, about stories as shelters, about novels as life rafts, about strangers saving strangers, about friendships that defy both space and time, about choosing, sometimes at great risk to oneself, life and love.

For the bonus audio Madeleine Thien contributes an incredible reading of the poem “Hold Everything Dear” by Gareth Evans. A poem that Evans himself wrote for John Berger. It joins a trove of bonus material, contributions from everyone from Omar El Akkad to Dionne Brand, Viet Thanh Nguyen to Danez Smith. To learn about how to subscribe to the bonus material and about all 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 conversation.

The post Madeleine Thien : The Book of Records appeared first on Tin House.

What would it mean for our writing, thinking, and living if we looked to land as pedagogy, or if we thought of theory as something embodied and kinetic? In Theory of Water Leanne Betasamosake Simpson takes us not only outside the academy, and away from our screens, but outside and into the world at large as part of a reconsideration of what and whom we consider teachers and mentors, of where and how we might learn and develop our thoughts, and of what the role of stories and storytelling might really be. Theory of Water ultimately explores what this reorientation might do, not only to our writing and our relation to language, but to our politics, our vision of a future world, and how we might arrive there together. Looking to water, to snow, to ice, to eels, to beavers, to bullfrogs, we explore what the more-than-human world can teach us about resistance and coexistence both.

For the bonus audio archive Leanne contributes a sneak peek at a song of hers, “Murder of Crows,” that will be on her upcoming album Live Like the Sky (which will likely be released some time this fall). To learn about the bonus audio archive and all the other potential rewards and benefits of joining the Between the Covers community, head over to the show’s Patreon page.

Finally, here is the BookShop for today.

The post Leanne Betasamosake Simpson : Theory of Water appeared first on Tin House.

From the craft of writing sex in poetry to the virtues of failing publicly, today’s conversation with poet Keetje Kuipers is not to be missed. We explore everything from storytelling within poems to the dialectic between control and wildness; everything from queerness and wilderness to fantasy as a portal to truth on the page.

Keetje’s contribution to the bonus audio archive is unusually generous. Part reading, part teaching meditation, she draws upon many of the themes we discuss in the main interview and finds a poem by another that exemplifies that theme, whether it be an example of what an embodied poem looks like, or who is in her lineage of nature poets of the Mountain West that are also queer women, or poems that exemplify a beautiful dance between control and wildness, and she reads these poems for us and talks about them. To find out how to subscribe to the bonus audio archive and about 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 episode.

The post Keetje Kuipers : Lonely Women Make Good Lovers appeared first on Tin House.

What does it mean to risk rupture for rapture, on the page, and in one’s life? Or for water to be one’s method, mode or muse? Are inherited forms (of womanhood, of sexuality, of national identity) a gift or are their borders meant to be crossed and breached? Together we look at forms and norms in Patrycja’s poetry, at bringing unruly forces into one’s work—eros, love, solidarity across difference—that, like a river, are summoned to a larger body.

If you enjoyed today’s conversation, consider joining the Between the Covers community as a listener-supporter. You can find out about all the potential benefits and rewards of doing so at the show’s Patreon page.

Finally, here is the BookShop for today’s conversation.

The post Patrycja Humienik : We Contain Landscapes appeared first on Tin House.

Four novellas, in four different genres—science fiction, horror, teen romance, and a western—Stag Dance not only interrogates genre, but gender through genre. Written over a ten year period, Torrey Peters’ new book spans a decade when her own views and insights about gender were themselves changing. Placing these four novellas in conversation with each other like this now, raises all sorts of questions about identity and the construction of a self, as Peters puzzles out, through genre, the inconvenient aspects of what she calls her “never-ending transition—otherwise known as ongoing trans life.”  We look at questions of audience and risk, of writing into the taboos within one’s own community, and what it means that Torrey is less interested in exploring the binary between men and women, masculine and feminine, than the one between cis and trans, raising the question whether it is even a binary at all. We discuss the overdetermined transition narrative within trans literature and look at limit cases of cis gender performance from Kim Kardashian to Karl Ove Knausgaard to Ernest Hemingway’s late-in-life exploration of gender fluidity within his work. Whether talking about  Shakespeare or Taylor Swift, this boundary-defying conversation explodes the distinctions between high and low culture, and like her work itself, it will make you laugh, make you think, and make you reconsider what is possible. 

For the bonus audio archive Torrey contributes a reading of the first thing she wrote after she transitioned: “How To Become A Really Really Not Famous Trans Lady Writer,”  This joins incredible readings from everyone from Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore to CAConrad and is only one thing to choose from when you join the Between the Covers community as a listener-supporter. You can check it all out at the show’s Patreon page.

Finally, here is the BookShop for today’s conversation.

The post Torrey Peters : Stag Dance appeared first on Tin House.