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

Danez Smith’s poetry is so many things, a poetry of resistance, of elegy, of joy, of care, of repair. Their poetry is Afrofuturist and Afropessimist. It’s nature poetry, decolonial poetry, queer poetry, a poetry that is archival and documentary. And it is also a poetry that questions poetry itself and even more so, questions the poet, a poetry that is continually in the process of self-remaking and unmaking, of forging and severing allegiances, a shapeshifting poetry, a poetry of mutual aid, a poetry reaching toward, and already singing from, an elsewhere and an otherwise. Nam Le for the New Your Times, speaking of Smith’s new book Bluff, doesn’t just suggest that this book is a major turning point for the poet, a volta within this poet’s evolution, but also suggests that Danez’s volta might also represent a turning point for American poetry at large. This twinning, of the self that is Danez to the poetry collective, feels prescient, as their poetry contains so much, and so much powerful self-examination, that it becomes an examination of all of us, for all of us, of what it means to be an “I” and what it means to be a “we.” Who better to lead us through than a poet like this?

For the bonus audio archive, Danez contributes something really special for us. As one of the six members of the Dark Noise Collective (along with Fatimah Asghar, Aaron Samuels, Franny Choi, Nate Marshall, and Jamila Woods), Danez reads a favorite poem from each of their five peers and follows each reading with a writing prompt designed for us and related to the poem just read. After five poems and five writing prompts, Danez reads a poem of their own too. This joins an ever-growing archive of supplemental material from Ross Gay reading Jean Valentine to Dionne Brand reading Christina Sharpe to Nikky Finney reading from the diaries of Lorraine Hansberry. To learn how to subscribe to the bonus audio and about all the other possible benefits 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.

The post Danez Smith : Bluff appeared first on Tin House.

Today’s conversation with Kenzie Allen, about her debut poetry collection Cloud Missives, is unusually wide-ranging. We look at the influence of archaeology, anthropology and cartography on her poetry, and on her notion of gaze within her work. We explore the fraught colonial history of these fields, and how, as an indigenous poet, she orients herself to her own work in this regard. We look at questions of identity, representation and stereotype both in the realm of language and art-making, and also in the realm of tribal sovereignty, looking at the colonial history of  blood quantum and its repercussions today. We also look at questions of form, both inherited forms and the creation of new ones, of both poetry on the page, and multimodal works that live off of it, from visual poetry to literary cartography to the wampum belt as an ancient form of hyper-text.

For the bonus audio archive, Kenzie contributes an extended reading of a sequence poem that she calls Love Songs to Banish Another Love Song. By reading this, she gives us a peek behind the curtain of the process of revision, because this sequence is an earlier, very different version of a much shorter poem in Cloud Missives. This joins many other supplemental readings in the archive from everyone from Jake Skeets to Layli Long Soldier, Elissa Washuta to Natalie Diaz, Brandon Hobson to Tommy Pico to Terese Marie Mailhot. You can find out how to subscribe and check out the many other possible 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.

The post Kenzie Allen : Cloud Missives appeared first on Tin House.

Today’s craft talk—by Torrey Peters on “Strategic Opacity”— was recorded at the 2024 Tin House summer writers workshop. Peters explores the elements in works of fiction that actually don’t make sense—from William Shakespeare to Elena Ferrante —and how, paradoxically, it is these very elements, the unexplainable ones, that can make a work of art great. Given that most actual humans make nonsensical choices and can’t be fully known as people, Peters discusses how we might write lifelike characters who don’t make sense either—but in a strategic way—writing them so that they begin to feel like the real people all around us: “the friends who make strange and frustrating decisions in their worst interests, the parents who act with sudden arbitrariness, the lovers who just won’t accept the care they need and want.” Peters then looks at the ways this revelation has deeply changed her own work.

If you enjoy today’s conversation consider joining the Between the Covers community as a listener-supporter. Head over to the show’s Patreon page to learn more.

Finally, here is the BookShop for today’s talk, which includes many of the books mentioned.

The post Tin House Live : Torrey Peters on Strategic Opacity appeared first on Tin House.

As part of Jewish Currents Live: A Day of Politics & Culture, I moderated a conversation between Adania Shibli and Dionne Brand this September in New York City. Both Dionne and Adania have been on the show individually, and part of why I was hoping to bring them together this way was because of just how unforgettable my conversations with each of them respectively were. Together we look at questions of home and belonging, nations and mapping, humans and animals, as well as at Dionne and Adania’s shared desire to write against grand narratives and to imagine an otherwise for how we might live together. We do all of this within the aura of the eleven months of genocidal assaults on Palestinian life, and how the resistance to it connects us to other struggles around the world.

Jewish Currents is offering two things to entice listeners to become supporters of Between the Covers, one is a Jewish Currents sampler of back issues, the other is their After October 7th compendium of essays, poems and reports with writings by genocide scholar Raz Segal, Peter Beinart’s essay “Teshuvah: A Jewish Case for Palestinian Refugee Return,” poems by Hala Alyan, Fady Joudah and more.  To learn about these and the many other things available 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 Jewish Currents Live : Dionne Brand & Adania Shibli in Conversation appeared first on Tin House.

Today’s conversation with Isabella Hammad is truly like no other on the show in its fourteen year history. The main text of her book is the speech she delivered for the Edward Said Memorial Lecture in September of 2023. A remarkable speech called “Recognizing the Stranger” which looks at the middle of narratives, at turning points, recognition scenes and epiphanies; which explores the intersection of aesthetics and ethics, words and actions, and the role of the writer in the political sphere; and which complicates the relationship between self and other, the familiar and the stranger. It does all of this in the spirit of Said’s humanistic vision, reaching for narrative forms that can best reflect Palestinian lived experiences. Hammad delivered this speech, however, nine days before October 7th. The response of Israel, and the West at large, prompted her to write an afterword, an afterword that is a third of the book entire. Hammad herself had had her own turning point, her own recognition scene, where the terms of her own analysis had irrevocably changed. The afterword reflects this change, sitting at a right angle to the speech itself. The book as a whole captures this turning point within a writer in real time, preserving the gap between two selves, and we explore both on their own terms.

If you enjoyed today’s conversation, consider joining the Between the Covers community as a listener-supporter. One possible supporter benefit to choose from is access to the bonus audio archive. Isabella Hammad has contributed an extended reading from writer and political prisoner Walid Daqqa’s letter “Parallel Time.” This letter hasn’t been published in English but it was, in 2014, adapted to the stage in Haifa under the same name. The Israeli culture ministry, in response, defunded the theater. To learn how to subscribe to the bonus audio, and about the many other possible rewards to choose from, head over to the show’s Patreon page.

Finally here is today’s BookShop.

The post Isabella Hammad : Recognizing the Stranger : On Palestine and Narrative appeared first on Tin House.

Today’s episode is an archival recording of poet Frank Bidart from the 2008 Tin House Writers Workshop. It begins with an introduction by the poet Brenda Shaughnessy, followed by an extended poetry reading by Frank Bidart. After the reading is a not-to-be-missed substantive and remarkable craft interview of Frank by Brenda. They look at how he approaches revision, the ways teaching students influences his own writing, and about his early years as a student of, and ultimately friend and early reader for, Robert Lowell.

If you enjoyed today’s conversation, consider joining the Between the Covers community as a listener supporter. One possible benefit to choose from is the ever-growing bonus audio archive which includes a reading of and meditation on a Frank Bidart poem by Garth Greenwell. To learn more head over to the show’s Patreon page.

You can also find a playlist of past conversations with some of the most iconic poets writing today, from Layli Long Soldier to Jorie Graham, Carl Phillips to Dionne Brand, at the show’s YouTube Channel.

Finally here is the BookShop for today’s episode.

The post Tin House Live : Frank Bidart appeared first on Tin House.

Todays’ guest is Grand Master of science fiction and fantasy Nalo Hopkinson. Together we center her first novel in over a decade, the remarkable Blackheart Man, and look at what it means to not only write an alternate Caribbean history, but within that history conjure an entirely new culture, one with its own language, sexual norms, family and gender dynamics, and racial politics. And yet a culture that remains, for all its invented differences, deeply Caribbean. Blackheart Man is a book exploring the “what-ifs” in the histories of marronage (autonomous fugitive communities of escaped enslaved peoples) and of what can be recovered from the ruptures and erasures in the archive. Nalo’s latest novel becomes the lens through which we explore everything from the use of vernacular speech in one’s work to the reckonings around race that have rocked the SFF community in recent years.

Nalo’s appearance on the show joins many archival conversations with touchstone writers of SFF today, from Nnedi Okorafor and N.K. Jemisin to Ted Chiang and Kelly Link, from Kim Stanley Robinson and Jeff Vandermeer, to William Gibson, China Miéville and Ursula K. Le Guin. I’ve created a “Legends of Sci-Fi and Fantasy” playlist on the show’s YouTube channel so they are easily found in one place but you can also sort for “SFF” at the show’s home page as well.

If you enjoyed today’s conversation, consider joining the Between the Covers community as a listener-supporter. There are an incredible number of rewards and gifts to choose from when you do. You can check it all out at the show’s Patreon page. 

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

The post Nalo Hopkinson : Blackheart Man appeared first on Tin House.

Sri Lankan writer Vajra Chandrasekera’s first novel, The Saint of Bright Doors, was shortlisted for or won nearly every major SFF award there is. Much of the buzz around this book circled the question:”what exactly is this?” Saints not only didn’t fulfill the expected tropes of the genre, but seemed to be actively working against them, subverting them. Vajra’s new book Rakesfall, however, makes his debut, for all its innovation, seem normative by comparison. Rakesfall is set both in an ancient mythic past and a far distant post-human future, calling into question where the past and the future begin and end. Rakesfall is a book with two characters (or maybe one) who are constantly dying and being reborn, changing names, changing bodies, where it isn’t always clear who is who, or where self and other begin and end. Rakesfall is continually changing shape, style and form, with stories within stories within stories, a rabbit hole of stories, a wormhole of stories, where you are never sure you will ever resurface into the “real world” again. Of course, we talk about form and trope and genre, but we also talk at-length about Sri Lankan Buddhism and how, as a political force, it has woven its own story into a mythos of nation-state and race. And how this very storytelling has led to violence, from the everyday and bureaucratic to outright genocide. Vajra’s books can be engaged with and enjoyed without any knowledge of this, but the more we explore his own interrogations of Buddhist hegemony in Sri Lanka the more the subtext of his books feels central, the more his subversion of form and genre feels outright political. In one of his essays he asks ‘how do we write in a monstrous world?’ How do we write toward liberation, toward solidarity, whatever the odds? Today’s conversation provides one great example of just that.

For the bonus audio archive Vajra translates an excerpt of a story by an award-winning Sri Lankan writer, a writer who, when he posted this story on his Facebook page, was arrested and imprisoned under the accusation that the story was anti-Buddhist. Vajra translates this excerpt and reads it for us while also contextualizing why he thinks this story was seen as blasphemous. To learn how to subscribe to the bonus audio archive and the other potential benefits of joining the Between the Covers community as a listener-supporter head over to the show’s Patreon page.

Finally, here is today’s BookShop.

The post Vajra Chandrasekera : Rakesfall appeared first on Tin House.

Today’s guest is one of the most singular and celebrated Anglophone poets writing today, Carl Phillips. We center his latest collection, Scattered Snows, to the North, his first since winning the 2023 Pulitzer prize in poetry. But we also use his three craft books written over the decades (in 2004, 2014 and 2023 respectively) to look at his body of work across time. We spend time attending to language, to syntax, to form. And equally, we look outward toward questions of voice, community, identity and more.

For the bonus audio, Carl contributes a reading of a medley of poems about black swans, poems by James Merrill, Randall Jarrell and Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, which he comments on as he goes. He ends this remarkable reading with a black swan poem of his own. You can find out how to subscribe to the bonus audio and about all 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 Carl Phillips : Scattered Snows, to the North appeared first on Tin House.

Today’s guest, Shze-Hui Tjoa, has written a book that is remarkably unique. Is it an essay collection or a memoir? A detective story or a fantasy? A journey of self-individuation or an examination of power and control? Improbably it is all of these things, and perhaps more than any of them, it is the record of a writer finding her form by breaking form, but doing so in a way that invites us into the process as it unfolds. T Kira Madden declares: “The Story Game introduces a major debut work from a most astounding talent. Shze-Hui Tjoa’s memoir not only challenges genre, it upends and splits it wide open. In meditations on grief, displacement, mental health, and family, Tjoa will have you wondering how and why we remember, and what we can’t forget. The Story Game is hypnotic, wise, and thunderously innovative. I will teach this book, I will treasure it, and I will continue to learn from its astute and hopeful insights.”

For the bonus audio, Tjoa contributes a 30-minute video reading of a favorite childhood picture book that she translates for us from Chinese to English. To learn how to subscribe to the bonus audio archive and to explore the other potential benefits of joining the Between the Covers community as a listener-supporter, head over to the show’s Patreon page.

Finally, here is the BookShop for today.

The post Shze-Hui Tjoa : The Story Game appeared first on Tin House.