F***ing Shakespeare

Corraling the myriad ways Sumita Chakraborty’s poetry collection gets at the heart of grief all but flummoxed me. Its meaning is still washing over me. But I’ll say that poet Rishi Dastidar did what I couldnt do when she wrote that it’s “a book to hold close, an amulet that transmutes the intensities of grief into something uplifting, the attempt to keep hold of wonder.” We are thrilled to get to talk to her today about this luminous debut collection and many other things, if we’re lucky.

We were surprised to hear that Sumita’s introduction to creative writing and literary studies was in college. In her 13 years at AGNI Magazine, she worked in many capacities, eventually serving as poetry editor. It was in these positions that became accustomed to every angle of poetry publication before venturing in as poet herself. Sumita’s time at AGNI provided her this comforting(?) insight: no matter how talented and brilliant you are, your poems might still be rejected because of reasons beyond your control. We talk about her decision to publish her collection Arrow with Alice James Books, what it means to be a “sad girl poet” trying to be a “happy girl poet,” and how to honor and dismantle grief while somehow still managing to be playful. (Spoiler alert: she does it!)

Honorable Mentions:

• Poet, Lucy Brach Breido

• Rachel Mennies’s The Naomi Letters from BOA

• Cortney Lamar Charleston’s Doppelgangbanger from Haymarket

• Taylor Johnson’s Inheritance from Alice James Books

• Alice Oswald’s Nobody from W.W. Norton and Company

• Bridget Kelly’s Song from BOA

• Lucille Clifton’s The Book of Light from Copper Canyon Press

Vanessa Garcia is a Miami-based novelist, playwright, journalist, and visual artist. Much of her work centers on her Cuban homeland, where her parents and grandparents were born. She is the author of incredible essays you can find all over the web and an immersive theater production called The Amparo Experience. She is the dreamer and 3D printer of so many incredible projects.

Shade Mountain Press saw the beauty in Garcia’s 2015 novel, White Light, which interrogates one of Garcia’s obsessions, color. What if this character was a color? What would it mean if a chapter is cardinal red?

We talk about the inspiration for that novel, as well as her most recent project, a radio play called Ich Bin Ein Berliner. This autobiographical story details her reaction to the fall of the Berlin wall and its rippling effect throughout Cuba. We explode the myth of the solitary writer and the rewards inherent in creating art in a collaborative fabric of creatives.

Honorable Mentions:

• Poet, William Blake

• FAU Theater Lab

• Director and Garcia’s creative partner, Victoria Collado

Photo credit: Mike Glier

Aimee Bender graduated from UC Irvine and teaches at USC. Her books have received accolades in all the major outlets: from the New York Times, LA Times, & MCSweeney’s, to Oprah. Her latest novel, published July 2020, is The Butterfly Lampshade. When I was rattling off the list of Bender’s books, Kate deadpanned, “So she’s basically taken all the best titles from the universe.”

In this episode, Bender reads from her latest novel. Of it, an astute reviewer wrote, “[it’s] as if we’d shrunk to fit inside a Joseph Cornell diorama... we feel as Francie does: that anything and anyone might be a two-way street, capable of passing from our side into theirs by means of illustration—or from their side into ours by means of emanation...and after ‘slipping into being...we really ought not to be here.’”

Listen as we discuss why exposing your kids to things like modern dance and The Blue Man Group is a good thing, how to keep your finger on the pulse of what’s going on but also feel confident enough to vary your form as a writer, and remembering the mindless goodness (and potential writing prompt) in just staring at an object in space. (N.B. Your phone’s screen does not count.)

Honorable Mentions:

• Flannery O’Connor’s reminder to us all:

  “There’s a certain grain of stupidity that the writer can hardly do without, and this is the quality of having to stare, of not getting the point at once.” (from O’Connor’s essay “The Nature and Aim of Fiction”)

• Best writer note to your younger self: “Write what you like, kid. Enough of this posturing.”

Aimee Bender’s Incredible Backlist:

• The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

• The Girl in the Flammable Skirt: Stories

• The Color Master

• An Invisible Sign of My Own

• Willful Creatures: Stories

Craig Santos Perez is a native Chamoru from the Pacific Island of Guam. He is the co-founder of Ala Press, and the author of three collections of poetry, most recently, Habitat Threshold. He’s the recipient of many prizes, including the 2011 PEN Center USA Literary Award. An assistant professor of English at the University of Hawai’i, Manoa, Santos Perez teaches Pacific literature and directs the Creative Writing program there. Also, shout-out to his gorgeous blog.

In this episode, we chat with Craig about his most recent poetry collection, published at the very beginning of the pandemic, which has as its core climate activism and anxieties about the future of the planet his daughters are inheriting. Perez gives his readers great insight into the connection between humans and their environments. In this collection, Perez uses what he coined as ‘recycled form’—taking the form of older poems and inserting his own content into it.

Perez’s Works:

Hacha

Saina

Guma’

Lukao

Undercurrent by Craig Santos Perez and Brandy Nālani McDougall

Crosscurrent

Honorable Mentions:

Pablo Neruda’s Sonnet 17

Wallace Stevens’s 13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird 

William Carlos Williams’s This Is Just To Say

Farid Matuk’s poetry, essays, and translations from Spanish appear in a wide range of publications and anthologies. He is the author of the poetry collection, This Isa Nice Neighborhood (Letter Machine), several chapbooks including My Daughter La Chola (Ahsahta), and The Real Horse (2018). He teaches in the MFA program at University of Arizona, where he is poetry editor for Fence, and serves on the editorial board for the book series Research in Creative Writing at Bloomsbury.

In this episode, we talk about Matuk’s newest collection of poetry, The Real Horse, and his intention behind not using punctuation throughout the book. Matuk passes on life-changing writing advice that he received about filling the negative space of a page and writing into the “weaving of self and other that’s always around us.” During his time as a professor at the University of Arizona, he was able to publish his poetry with the university press there. That’s also where he experienced, for the first time, the helpful process of the blind peer review. As we spoke about Matuk’s work at Fence, the phrase “mutual entanglement” came up to describe the work being done there. Matuk leaves us with the question, “Which phrases and ways of naming the world that feel really powerful today will end up with quotation marks around them?”

Honorable Mentions:

• University of Arizona Press

• Fence

• Fence founder and editor, Rebecca Wolff

• Visual Artist, Nancy Friedemann-Sanchez and her paintings of lace.

• Poet, Jorie Graham

• Poet, John Ashbery

We talked to Michael Zapata about his novel The Lost Book of Adana Moreau. It was the winner of the Chicago Review of Books Award for Fiction, an NPR Best Book of the Year, a Most Anticipated Book of 2020 from The Boston Globe and The Millions, and his debut novel. Zapata is a founding editor of MAKE Literary Magazine as well as on the core faculty of StoryStudio Chicago and the MFA faculty of Northwestern University.

This book is a wholly satisfying romp through the history of science fiction (even for the uninitiated!) with a healthy side-portion of theoretical physics. But please don’t be intimidated. Zapata’s prose is whimsical and yet gloriously skillful, encouraging us to “challenge our most potent ideologies.” Isn’t that what good art is supposed to do?

Honorable Mentions:

• The Yellow House by Sarah Broom

• We by Yevgeny Zamyatin

• Chilean author Roberto Bolaño

• Hungarian author László Krasznahorkai

Alison Deming is so prolific and has been writing for so long that it was a bit overwhelming to pack into a 20-minute interview, but we tried our best. Hawthorne is Regents Professor Emerita at the University of Arizona, where she founded the Field Studies in Writing Program in 2015. She has an MFA from Vermont College, a Stegner Fellowship, two poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and multiple other fellowships, residencies and prizes. Her new book, A Woven World: On Fashion, Fishermen, and the Sardine Dress, was released by Counterpoint Press in August.

Honorable mentions:

• Poet Pattiann Rogers

• Novelist and short story writer Andrea Barrett

• Scottish poet and essayist Kathleen Jamie

• Writer and curator Rebecca Senf

• Writer Pam Houston

• Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape by Lauret Savoy

• The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border by Francisco Cantu

• Guerilla Girls, an anonymous group of feminist activist artists

• Deming’s daughter, artist Lucinda Bliss

AWP 21 Episode—Jeffrey Colvin (Day 2, Episode 1)

We talk to Jeffrey Colvin about his stunning new book, Africaville. Jeffrey Colvin is a graduate of the United States Naval Academy, Harvard, and Columbia where he earned an MFA in fiction. He is also a member of the National Book Critics Circle and is assistant editor at Narrative Magazine. His debut novel, Africaville, is an expansive book, a genealogy of sorts that follows several family trees who have intertwined branches in an enclave in Halifax, Nova Scotia, called Woods Bluff and then later named Africaville.

Honorable mentions:

• The 2001 New York Times article about Africville that spurred Colvin’s novel

• Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God

Credit: Nina Subin

In honor of the launch of Catherine Baab-Muguira’s new book, Poe for Your Problems, we are re-releasing F***ing Shakespeare’s interview with her that we did back in 2019—where we talked about this book in its wee-baby stages. And now, here it is, all grown up like the big beautiful babe it is!

Get ready for some perfect hot takes. Kate, Jess, Phuc, and Cat look behind the curtain at the self-appointed guardians of world culture. Cat celebrates indulging a rabbit hole of eccentric ideas as a freelancer and we all have a laugh about how her outstanding personal essay on how her highlights helped propel her career.* Plus, we endlessly appreciate Cat for being real with us about writing, success, and mental illness as she crowns Poe, word for word, “the most likely self-help guru in history.”

Check out more of Cat’s work on her website, her Contently page, and her Twitter.

Cat’s essays that we discussed in the podcast:

• “Edgar Allan Poe Was a Broke-Ass Freelancer” in The Millions

• “Buy All Your Furniture at Target, For Tomorrow We Die” in The Billfold

• “I Spent $11,537 Becoming a Blonde” in The Cut

• “The Seductive Scamming of Theranos’s Elizabeth Holmes” in shondaland

Suggested Reads & Honorable Mentions

• Tigers are Better-Looking by Jean Rhys

• “Like This or Die” by Christian Lorentzen in Harper’s Magazine (we discuss this article at 10:55)

• “The Literati of New York City” by Edgar Allan Poe

• “The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe

• J.W. Ostrom’s works on Edgar Allan Poe’s letters

• Elizabeth Holmes’s net worth according to Forbes

*Please note, we went out of our way not to say “highlight of her career.” You’re welcome for the lack of bad puns.

Day 1, Episode 1

To kick off the podcast interviews at AWP, we were thrilled to talk to Lilly Dancyger. Her new memoir, Negative Space, comes out May 2021 with Santa Fe Writers Project. She’s the editor of the essay collection, Burn It Down: Women Writing About Anger, and a contributing editor at Catapult. Among the other fantastic things with which she’s involved, she founded and co-hosts a reading series and newsletter (which you should subscribe to) called Memoir Monday.

Honorable mentions:

• Artist Joe Schactman, Dancyger’s father whose story her memoir pieces together

• Writer Lidia Yuknavitch’s memoir The Chronology of Water

• Memoir Monday’s partner publications Catapult, Granta, Guernica, Narratively, The Rumpus, and Literary Hub