Digging Through with Gessy Alvarez

In this episode, Gessy Alvarez talks with French writer, poet, and editor Marie Baléo. Marie's chapbook Submersion is the winner of our 2021 Digging Press Chapbook Series Award. The poetry collection articulates dignity, admiration, and a profound kinship for Beirut, Lebanon. Submersion is a subtle love letter exquisitely expressed in lyrical and narrative verse. Marie writes primarily in English, and her poetry, fiction, and nonfiction have appeared in literary magazines in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada. She is one of the Poetry Society's 2020 National Poetry Competition winners. She was raised in France, Norway, and Lebanon and now lives in Paris.

Marie treats us to readings of two poems from the collection, "Awakening" and "When you remember your exile in reverse, it always ends like this."

Submersion by Marie Baléo is available exclusively at DiggingPress.com

Intro and Closing Music Credits: John Sib for Pixabay. "Tropical House."

Gessy Alvarez talks to Digging Press author Abigail Carl-Klassen about her chapbook Ain't Country Like You available at DiggingPress.com.

About Ain't Country Like You

Winner of the 2019 Digging Press Chapbook Series Award, Abigail Carl-Klassen depicts rural spaces inhabited by a community dependent on the boom and bust cycles of oil fields and cash crop agriculture. The personal and confrontational voices in these eighteen poems, embody the constant tension of political rhetoric and social vulnerability in contemporary America. Unapologetically tender and with a hopeful nod to an elusive American ideal, these poems imbue a nation's struggles with culture, class, and identity.

Gessy Alvarez talks to Digging Press author Mandy-Suzanne Wong about her chapbook Awabi.

About Awabi: A Duet of Short Stories

Mandy-Suzanne Wong deftly explores the complex world of the ama — ocean women, mostly elderly, who eke out a living while diving deep to capture abalone, snails, and otherworldly sea creatures for food. Unlike the men of the fictional village of Kaiyono who fish from boats, the ama battle the cold currents without scuba tanks or snorkels. They do this while facing the threat of an ecological crisis they had no hand in causing. Suffused with lyrical imagery and profound longing, Mandy-Suzanne Wong creates evocative moments of love, pride, jealousy, misunderstanding, and sacrifice in this duet of short stories. Winner of the Digging Press Chapbook Series Award and a Wardrobe’s Best Dressed selection, Awabi is in its second edition.

About the Author:

Mandy-Suzanne Wong is a Bermudian writer of fiction and essays. Her debut novel, Drafts of a Suicide Note (Regal House, 2019), was a Foreword INDIES finalist, Independent Publisher Award winner, NextGen Indies Award winner, and PEN Open Book Award nominee. Listen, we all bleed (New Rivers, 2021), her first essay collection, was an ASLE Book Award finalist, an EcoLit Best Environmental Book of 2021, and a PEN/Galbraith nominee. Her fiction chapbook Awabi (Digging Press, 2022), winner of the 2018 Digging Press Chapbook Series Award, is now in its second edition. Her next novel, The Box (Graywolf), is forthcoming in 2023. You can find out more about Mandy-Suzanne at mandysuzannewong.com or follow her on Twitter @MandySuzanneW

Awabi is available to buy at DiggingPress.com.

Intro and Closing Music Credits: John Sib for Pixabay. "Tropical House."

In today's episode, I’m talking to a dear friend, writer Jenny Shank. Jenny’s short story collection Mixed Company won the George Garrett Fiction Prize and was published by Texas Review Press in November 2021.

From JennyShank.com:

In Mixed Company Jenny Shank reveals moments of grace and connection between people of her hometown, Denver, through stories that contrast the city during its oil-bust era of economic troubles and court-ordered crosstown busing for racial desegregation with the burgeoning and gentrifying city of recent years.

In "Hurts," a girls' basketball team at a majority Black Denver high school clashes with a white mountain team. In "Casa del Rey," a cautious pregnant woman must contend with her out-of-control and intrusive neighbor. In "La Sexycana," a bottom-feeding journalist ventures to a dance club to confront the young Latina woman she mentored as a teenager who then cut off all contact with her. "Lightest Lights Against Darkest Darks" follows a white middle schooler bused to a majority Black school who falls under the spell of her magnetic and racially ambiguous art teacher. In "Signing for Linemen," a graduate student in medieval literature takes a job as a summer tutor for a college football team and ends up learning more than she expected about athletes, American Sign Language, and herself. In "Local Honey," middle-aged white parents bring their adopted Black teenage son to a Wu-Tang Clan concert in an attempt to bond with him.

The characters find their initial perceptions and ideas overturned in these stories laced with humor, heart, and grit. Jenny Shank forges fiction out of the sparks that fly when diverse people encounter one another.

You can follow Jenny at:

Website: www.jennyshank.com

Twitter: @jennyshank

Intro and Closing Music Credits: John Sib for Pixabay. "Tropical House."

Gessy Alvarez talks to author Amanda Headlee about her new book, Till We Become Monsters published by Woodhall Press (June 1, 2021).

Amanda Headlee's Bio:

With a love of scary stories and folklore, Amanda Headlee spent her entire life crafting works of dark fiction. She has a fascination with the emotion of fear and believes it is the first emotion humans feel at the moment they are born. Most of her work focuses on dark fiction associated with folklore and cosmic horror. The fear of humanity’s insignificance in the vastness of the Universe intrigues her.

By day Amanda is a Program Manager; by night she is a wandering wonderer. When she isn't writing or working, she can be found logging long miles on one of her many bicycles or hiking the Appalachian Mountains. She’s one of those crazy people who love to compete in endurance sports.

You can follow Amanda at:

Website: www.amandaheadlee.com

Twitter: @amandaheadlee

Instagram: @amandaheadlee

Facebook: @authorAmandaHeadlee

Intro and Closing Music Credits: John Sib for Pixabay. "Tropical House."

Hello, every loving one of you. Welcome to Digging Through with Gessy Alvarez. A podcast celebrating the cultural omnivores in all of us. In this episode, Gessy looks back at Summer 2021. Doesn’t it feel like June was 20 years ago and not two months ago?. Hear her reminisce about those good old Summer 2021 days for a bit…she talks about the Alice Neel retrospective at the Met in NYC, Provincetown post July 4th outbreak, and finally finishing that damn novel.

Music Credits: John Sib for Pixabay. "Tropical House."

In this episode Gessy talks with Dimitri Reyes, a Puerto Rican multidisciplinary artist, content creator, organizer, and educator from Newark, New Jersey. Dimitri is the winner of the 2020 Digging Press Chapbook Award. His award-winning chapbook, Every First & Fifteenth is forthcoming June 30 2021. You can learn more about Dimitri at dimitrireyespoet.com. He also has a wonderful YouTube channel by that same name so do look for that as well.

Music Credits: John Sib for Pixabay. "Tropical House."

Roberto Carlos Garcia reads selected works from his new collection, Elegies (Flower Song Press). He talks about remembrance, life during the pandemic, matriarchy, history, feminism, The Black Jacobins, and the challenges of communicating hope in spite of racism.

Poet, storyteller, and essayist Roberto Carlos Garcia is a self-described “sancocho […] of provisions from the Harlem Renaissance, the Spanish Poets of 1929, the Black Arts Movement, the Nuyorican School, and the Modernists.” Garcia is rigorously interrogative of himself and the world around him, conveying “nakedness of emotion, intent, and experience,” and he writes extensively about the Afro-Latinx and Afro-diasporic experience. Roberto's third collection, [Elegies], is published by Flower Song Press and his second poetry collection, black / Maybe: An Afro Lyric, is available from Willow Books. Roberto’s first collection, Melancolía, is available from Červená Barva Press. He is founder of the cooperative press Get Fresh Books Publishing, A NonProfit Corp.

"Garcia’s third poetry collection, [Elegies], centers on love, grief, legacy, racism and history. These lyric poems range from an ode to Allen Iverson’s crossover on Michael Jordan, to an original form called a ‘mixtape’ featuring lines from today’s most well-known poets, to a twenty-poem sequence of elegies dedicated to his grandmother, to an essay on police terror, to name a few. The poet explores the complexities of modern life and death through his clear, unflinching, embodied perspective." - For more about Roberto, visit: https://www.robertocarlosgarcia.com

Intro and Closing Music Credits: John Sib for Pixabay. "Tropical House."

It's the end of 2019 and we feel fine. Listen to Gessy Alvarez read the last story she wrote in 2019. We'll be launching our monthly reading series in the Red Room at KGB Bar, NYC in 2020. Join us for our first reading event on January 14. For details go to DiggingPress.com/reading-series.

Happy New Year, all!

Opening and Closing Music Credit:

Dusk Cathedral by Lee Rosevere

RELEASED: April 2nd, 2019

GENRES: Electronic, Ambient, Hip-Hop Beats, Instrumental

LENGTH: 00:17:44

LABEL: Happy Puppy Records

freemusicarchive.org/music/Lee_Rose…Dusk_Cathedral

Interlude:

RELEASED: March 20th, 2019

GENRES: Electronic, Minimal Electronic, Instrumental

LENGTH: 00:41:43

LABEL: Happy Puppy Records

freemusicarchive.org/music/Lee_Rose…5_Where_Was_I-

Storyteller Series continues with a witty tale - Gummy Candies Maybe the Fourth State of Matter, But That’s Only After They’ve Been Admitted to the Union by David S. Atkinson.

David S. Atkinson is the author of books such as "Roses are Red, Violets are Stealing Loose Change from my Pockets While I Sleep," "Apocalypse All the Time," and the Nebraska book award-winning "Not Quite so Stories." He is a Prose Assistant Editor for "Digging Through The Fat" and his writing appears in "Spelk," "Jellyfish Review," "Thrice Fiction," "Literary Orphans," and more. His writing website is http://davidsatkinsonwriting.com/.

Opening and Closing Music Credit:

Dusk Cathedral by Lee Rosevere

RELEASED: April 2nd, 2019

GENRES: Electronic, Ambient, Hip-Hop Beats, Instrumental

LENGTH: 00:17:44

LABEL: Happy Puppy Records

freemusicarchive.org/music/Lee_Rose…Dusk_Cathedral

Interlude:

RELEASED: March 20th, 2019

GENRES: Electronic, Minimal Electronic, Instrumental

LENGTH: 00:41:43

LABEL: Happy Puppy Records

freemusicarchive.org/music/Lee_Rose…5_Where_Was_I-