Commonplace Podcast

By Rachel Zucker

Intimate and compelling interviews by Rachel Zucker with poets and other artists. Become a Patron & support our growing podcast! www.patreon.com/commonplacepodcast

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FAQs about Commonplace Podcast:

How many episodes does Commonplace Podcast have?

The podcast currently has 229 episodes available.

Commonplace Podcast episodes:

January 22, 2020 Episode 80: Commonplace goes to Taiwan, Part 1
Relevant Links from Rachel’s Story
“Diane Wolkstein, Children’s Author Who Spurred a Storytelling Revival, Dies at 70” via the New York Times
Rachel on The Longest Shortest Time
Audio of Diane Wolkstein performing “The Monkey King”
Relevant Links from Doreen’s Story
Sarah Doyle Center for Women and Gender
Haunani Kay Trask (University of Hawaii)
Daniel Kim (professor at Brown)
Lois Ann Yamanaka
R. Zamora Linmark
Saigon Grill picket of 2008
Audre Lorde Project
Rockefeller Brothers Fund
Naomi Jackson (friend)
Sound Up Bootcamp
Betty Dodson’s female sexuality class
Kundiman
Museum of Chinese in America
BOOK CLUB
Hsia Yu’s SALSA (Zephyr Press)
Rachel Zucker’s MOTHERs (Counterpath)
Brenda Lin’s THE WEALTH RIBBON (courtesy of the author)
...more
1h 35min
January 21, 2020 Episode 80: Commonplace goes to Taiwan, Part 1
In 2019, Rachel traveled to Taiwan with her son Moses and met up with Commonplace team member Doreen Wang. In a conversation with Moses, Rachel discusses why they traveled to Taiwan in the first place and her late mother Diane Wolkstein’s special connection to the country. In a separate conversation, Doreen talks about why she chose to return to Taiwan after living in New York City for many years.
This is the first of a two-part series that takes place in Taiwan. The second part, featuring conversations with booksellers in Taipei, will post soon.
...more
1h 35min
December 19, 2019 Episode 79: Christine Larusso
Books by Christine Larusso
There Will Be No More Daughters (&Now/Lake Forest College Press, 2019)
Other Texts and Writers Mentioned in the Episode
Morgan Parker
Anne Boyer
Rachel Zucker
Home/Birth
Kimiko Hahn
Carmen Giménez Smith
Ada Limón
Victoria Chang’s twitter
Tommy Pico
Jakob Vala (designer)
Shira Erlichman
Sharon Olds
Juliana Spahr
Other Relevant Links
Madeleine P. Plonsker Emerging Writers Residency Prize at Lake Forest (currently on hiatus)
...more
1h 37min
December 18, 2019 Episode 79: Christine Larusso
Rachel Zucker speaks to poet and Commonplace producer Christine Larusso about Christine’s newly released poetry collection, There Will Be No More Daughters. They talk about how the manuscript changed over the years and even after it was accepted for publication. Larusso describes winning the Madeleine P. Plonsker Emerging Writers Residency Prize and the ancestral research she did during that residency. Larusso talks about the difficulty of protecting her writing life, her decision to move back to her hometown of Los Angeles, and her decision to be childfree. Zucker and Larusso talk about East Coast v. West Coast and the evolution of their relationship from teacher-student to boss-employee to friends.
...more
1h 37min
November 28, 2019 Episode 78: Anne Boyer
Episode transcripts available here.
Books by Anne Boyer
The Undying (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019)
A Handbook of Disappointed Fate (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2018)
Garments Against Women (Ahsahta, 2015)
The Romance of Happy Workers (Coffee House Press, 2008)
Other Texts and Writers Mentioned in the Episode
Cassandra Gillig
Siddhartha Mukherjee’s The Emperor of All Maladies (Scribner, 2011)
Bernadette Mayer
Patricia Lennox Boyd
Claudia Rankine’s Citizen (Graywolf, 2014)
Maggie Nelson
Arthur Rimbaud
Ocean Vuong
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Janet Holmes
Leo Tolstoy
Other Relevant Links
Excerpt of Anne Boyer’s The Undying in The New Yorker
Ferguson
Coupdizzle
Breast Cancer Action
Ashata Press
Jeremy Corbyn
Bernie Sanders
Elizabeth Warren
...more
2h 2min
November 27, 2019 Episode 78: Anne Boyer
Rachel Zucker speaks to poet Anne Boyer about The Undying, her recently published non-fiction book about having had highly-aggressive triple negative breast cancer. Boyer talks about a recent dream she had, the motivating fires of vengeance and love, and how to keep the door to hell open long enough to write one word at a time despite the disabling physical and emotional effects of cancer treatment. Zucker and Boyer discuss what happens when poets face the larger market, trusting readers, how to break out of the pressure to perform certain modes of self-expression, a feminist future where there can be more than one smart woman in a room, the pornography of authenticity, the relationship between poiesis and critique and why it’s important to resist the allure of criticism, resisting the pressure to create spectacles of suffering, how to find the least-alienating way to be inside alienating structures, the problem with pink-ribbon culture, the shortcomings of “empowerment feminism,” what real solidarity might look like, why Boyer loves to write but hates to publish and hates the work of being public, harassment and abuse in the literary world, and Tolstoy’s funeral.
...more
2h 2min
November 19, 2019 Episode 77: Tina Chang
Books by Tina Chang
Hybrida (W.W. Norton, 2019)
Of Gods & Strangers (Four Way, 2011)
Language for a New Century [Editor, alongside Nathalie Handal and Ravi Shankar] (W.W. Norton, 2008)
Half-Lit Houses (Four Way, 2004)
Other Texts and Writers Mentioned in this Episode
Kimiko Hahn
Aracelis Girmay
sam sax
Agha Shahid Ali
Mira Jacob
Toni Morrison
lucille clifton
Brenda Shaughnessy
Carolyn Forché
Michael Cunningham’s The Hours (Picador, 2000)
Edwidge Danticat
“With the Birth of My Son, I Stopped Hiding”—Tina Chang’s Modern Love Column
Other Relevant Links
Sarah Lawrence Poetry Festival
Napa Valley Writer’s Conference
The Case of Loving V. Virginia
...more
1h 48min
November 18, 2019 Episode 77: Tina Chang
Rachel Zucker speaks with poet and professor Tina Chang about her new book, Hybrida, how re-envisioning fairytales led to the writing of her new poems about raising a mixed-race black child in a post-Trayvon Martin era, about real and imagined fears of motherhood, and what it means to write in a language of mothers that is not a language of ownership. Chang talks about learning the rules of poetry (and traditional forms) and later searching for more flexible (female? maternal?) forms like the zuihitsu that might contain shopping lists and hyperlinks and also help us speak about race, history and violence. Chang and Zucker also discuss teaching, literary influences and the effect on their mothering of having been intermittently separated from their own mothers at a young age.
...more
1h 48min
October 30, 2019 Episode 76: Ada Limón
Books by Ada Limón
The Carrying (Milkweed, 2018)
Bright Dead Things (Milkweed, 2015)
Sharks in the Rivers (Milkweed, 2010)
lucky wreck (Autumn House, 2006)
This Big Fake World (Pearl Poetry Prize series, 2006)
Other Relevant Links
The theory and play of duende by Lorca
Adrian Matejka’s One Big Smoke
Nyorican Poetry
Episode 16: Jericho Brown
CD Wright
Bernadette Mayer’s conversation with Charles Bernstein
Episode 60: Robin Coste Lewis
Robin Coste Lewis’ acceptance speech for NBA
Ada Limon’s acceptance speech for NBCCA
One Art by Elizabeth Bishop
...more
1h 46min
October 29, 2019 Episode 76: Ada Limón
Rachel Zucker speaks with poet Ada Limón about her life as a poet, especially her two most recent books, The Carrying and Bright Dead Things. Limón speaks openly about contests and prizes, money, taboos around performance, her decision to stop trying to have children, writing about secrets, the privilege of being a writer, leaning toward gratitude, pinning the dragon of the mind to the page, writing as a shareable space and a form of connection and so much more.
Books by Ada Limón
The Carrying (Milkweed, 2018)
Bright Dead Things (Milkweed, 2015)
Sharks in the Rivers (Milkweed, 2010)
lucky wreck (Autumn House, 2006)
This Big Fake World (Pearl Poetry Prize series, 2006)
Other Relevant Links
The theory and play of duende by Lorca
Adrian Matejka’s One Big Smoke
Nyorican Poetry
Episode 16: Jericho Brown
CD Wright
Bernadette Mayer’s conversation with Charles Bernstein
Episode 60: Robin Coste Lewis
Robin Coste Lewis’ acceptance speech for NBA
Ada Limon’s acceptance speech for NBCCA
One Art by Elizabeth Bishop
Faint Music by Robert Hass
...more
1h 46min

FAQs about Commonplace Podcast:

How many episodes does Commonplace Podcast have?

The podcast currently has 229 episodes available.

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