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

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.

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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.

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.

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.

Today’s guest, one of Australia’s most celebrated and daring writers, Michelle de Kretser, discusses her latest uncategorizable book Theory & Practice (one she describes as 80% fiction, 15% essay and 5% memoir). Theory & Practice is a book that is wildly erudite and erotic at the same time, both an engrossing, immersive read and one that is constantly experimenting with and breaking form. A book that dwells in the contradictions between what we believe and what we do. And one that uses, as a lens, the liberatory power of Virginia Woolf’s published words alongside her often snobbish, racist, and antisemitic private ones, not only to explore this contradiction but also questions of gender, race, class and colonialism more broadly. You’d be just as correct, however, to call it a book about love, sex, shame and jealousy, set on a university campus in the 1980s at the height of deconstruction’s hold on the minds of its thinkers there.

If you enjoyed today’s conversation consider joining the Between the Covers community, receiving supplemental resources with each and every episode, and being able to choose from a wide variety of other gifts and rewards as well. You can check it all out at the show’s Patreon page.

Finally, here is the BookShop for today’s conversation with books from everyone from Ursula K. Le Guin to Shirley Hazzard to Virginia Woolf.

In late October 2023, weeks into Israel’s bombing of northern Gaza, the novelist Omar El Akkad retweeted a video taken by a Gazan man. This video showed a lifeless moonscape with endless empty streets of rubble, every building, one to the next, a hollow blown-out shell of itself. No people, no animals, the only sound the strained breath of this man stumbling through this indiscriminately obliterated city that was once a home. El Akkad captioned his tweet with the words: “One day, when it’s safe, when there’s no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it’s too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this” a tweet that has now been viewed over ten million times. Despite El Akkad’s past as a journalist, one who reported on some of the most notorious and fraught moments in recent U.S. history—whether embedded in Afghanistan, down at Guantanamo Bay, or reporting from Ferguson, Missouri—it was the aftermath of October 7th that was a turning point for him in relation to the West and its notions of humanism and liberalism. Together we discuss his debut work of nonfiction that resulted from this, that many characterize as his breakup letter to the West. We look at the role of language in providing cover for the middle, the centrist, the well-meaning liberal to look away and the power of language to create a climate of dehumanization, allowing the unspeakable to seem tragic but necessary.

For the bonus audio archive Omar contributes a reading of one of his favorite poems by Jorie Graham. This joins everyone from Isabella Hammad reading Walid Daqqa to Roger Reeves reading Ghassan Kanafani, to Zahid Rafiq reading Franz Kafka. If you enjoyed today’s conversation consider joining the Between the Covers community as a listener-supporter. You can find out about all the benefits and rewards of doing so, including how to subscribe to the bonus audio, at the show’s Patreon page.

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Feminist and literary theorist, playwright, philosopher, memoirist and novelist Hélène Cixous returns to the show to discuss her latest genre-defying hybrid work of prose. Written during the first year of the pandemic, Rêvoir explores the effect of pandemic confinement on time, the effect of pandemic time on writing, and what plagues and confinement show us about the nature of time, memory, dreams, history, language, home, flight, cats, love and death. Struggling to find purchase on her own writing within the timelessness of that year, she conjures and contemplates the works of everyone from Thucydides to Kafka, Shakespeare to Shackleton, to uncover how literature always begins with an ending, always opens with no way forward. What does Cixous mean that language is haunted by writing? That it is not just the writer who writes, but the words themselves?  Join us to find out!

For the bonus audio, enjoy a long-form conversation with Cixous’ translator, the poet Beverley Bie-Brahic. Given that Cixous breaks the norms of form, syntax and punctuation, not in predictable or consistent ways, but from a place of instinct and intuition, and given that her playful use of homophones in French, an essential quality of her writing that often leads where her writing ultimately goes, Cixous’ writing presents some unusually difficult challenges for a translator. Something we explore with Bie-Brahic in this conversation. To learn 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 episode.

Poet Aria Aber’s debut novel Good Girl , set in the club scene of Berlin, is a book brimming over with sex and drugs and music, true. But really at its heart it is a book of self-making and unmaking, of self-destruction and self-discovery, where 19 year old Nila navigates the irresolvable dialectics of being a second generation Afghan-German immigrant, finding home neither in the world of her family nor in Germany at large. A book coursing with desire and shame, flight and pursuit, Good Girl is ultimately about the desperate need to find oneself and one’s home, whatever the cost. Where home might not be a place or a people at all, but the world of art and literature itself.

For the bonus audio archive Aria contributes a reading from Palestinian writer Yasmin Zaher’s debut novel, The Coin. This joins Isabella Hammad reading from Walid Daqqa’s prison writings, Zahid Rafiq reading Kafka, Rabih Alameddine reading Fernando Pessoa, Dionne Brand reading Christina Sharpe and much more. To learn how to subscribe to the bonus audio and the other potential benefits and rewards available when you join 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.

Today’s guest Zahid Rafiq discusses his debut short story collection The World With Its Mouth Open, eleven remarkable stories set in modern-day Kashmir. Prior to writing fiction Rafiq was a journalist and we explore the ways the stories he tells now, and the stories he wrote then, differ and overlap, We look at how fiction can contain the unsaid, the unknown even; how it can create space for silence, and, unlike journalism, tell the stories behind the stories. We explore the relationship of art and politics, especially when writing stories about ordinary lives and ordinary days, stories often described as quiet and understated, when they are, at the same time, set in one of the most contested and militarized places on earth.

For the bonus audio archive Zahid contributes a reading from the writings of one of the most important writers for him, Franz Kafka. He reads from the chapter “Waiting for Klamm” from his novel The Castle. To learn how to subscribe to the bonus audio archive 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.

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

We started 2024 with an archival recording of Denis Johnson from the first ever Tin House Writers Workshop in 2003. That episode was a three-part episode: Denis Johnson reading from the manuscript of his novella Train Dreams, then being interviewed by Chris Offutt, and finally, Denis, Chris and Charles D’Ambrosio performing the first act of his play Psychos Never Dream. It turns out Denis returned to the Tin House workshop the following year, the summer of 2004. It seems a fitting way to round out the year to have the last episode of 2024 be an archival recording of his return. This episode is a two-part episode. The first half is a reading from the manuscript of what would become his National Book Award-winning novel Tree of Smoke. The second half is an extended interview of Denis by Charles D’Ambrosio. A deep dive into Johnson’s process and philosophy, and into questions of craft and influence.

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