Writer, teacher, and psychoanalytic candidate Claire Donato joins Naomi for a discussion on the convergences between psychoanalytic process and writing, reading, editing, and teaching. They discuss the capacious rigors of a reading practice, the remixing and revising of our writing and the stories we tell about our lives, and the shock of a book project emerging from one's analysis.

Claire Donato is the author of three full-length books, most recently Kind Mirrors, Ugly Ghosts (Archway Editions). Her poetry chapbook, Woebegone (Theaphora), was released this year with an accompanying adventure-puzzle video game Donato co-wrote. Other recent writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Parapraxis, Soft Union, The Brooklyn Rail, The Chicago Review, The Car Crash Collective Anthology, and Forever, and she has contributed essays to anthologies included The One on Earth: Selected Works of Mark Baumer and The Mystery of Perception: A Conversation with Lynne Tillman. She lives in Brooklyn and currently serves as Assistant Chairperson of Writing at Pratt Institute, where she independently supervises MFA and BFA candidates and also teaches group courses including Autofiction, Poetry and Psychoanalysis, and The Oceanic Feeling. She is a first-year candidate in psychoanalysis at the Contemporary Freudian Society.

Bach's essay "On Being Forgotten and Forgetting Oneself" can be found in his book Chimeras and Other Writings: Selected Papers of Sheldon Bach. Claire and Naomi also discuss Jamieson Webster's book Conversion Disorder.

To pre-order Naomi's new title, Marginalia: an autobiography, from Autofocus Books, please click here.

Writer and professor Sara Levine joins Naomi for a conversation on Toni Morrison's Sula, in which they discuss tracking prepositions, the use of vowel sounds in influencing readerly movement, lobbies, and the traces of different readings in oft-re-read books.

To pre-order Naomi's new title, Marginalia: an autobiography, from Autofocus Books, please click here.

Sara Levine is the author of the novel Treasure Island!!! and the short story collection Short Dark Oracles. Her new novel, The Hitch, published by Roxane Gay Books, comes out in January. She also writes the Substack, Delusions of Grammar, which you can read here. She teaches creative writing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

And to read "The Sentence Is a Lonely Place" by Garielle Lutz, mentioned by Sara during the podcast, click here.

Writer and publisher Deborah Shapiro joins Naomi in a conversation on The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh. From that starting point, they discuss the desire to create, underlining versus annotating, and the importance of lamps, physical and metaphorical.

To preorder Naomi's new title, Marginalia: an autobiography from Autofocus Books, please click here.

Deborah Shapiro is the author of the novels The Sun in Your Eyes (2016, a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice), The Summer Demands (2019), and Consolation (2022). Her writing has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Sight Unseen, Chicago Magazine, Literary Hub, Washington Square Review, and elsewhere. She's the founder of the occasional press, B-Side Editions, an editor-at-large at Sight Unseen, and lives with her family in Chicago.

Episode 3: “Rebecca van Laer on Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse and theorizing one’s own writings on love”

Naomi is joined by the writer Rebecca van Laer. They discuss Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse, writing as self-annotation, how to Pale Fire oneself, and more.

To preorder Naomi’s new title, Marginalia: an autobiography from Autofocus Books, please click here.

Rebecca van Laer is a writer based in the Hudson Valley. She is the author of a novella, How to Adjust to the Dark (Long Day Press, 2022), and a memoir, Cat (Object Lessons/Bloomsbury, forthcoming in October 2025).

Music: lofi london by snoozy beats is licensed under a Attribution 4.0 International License.

In this second episode of Reading Around the Margins, Naomi is joined by Claire Foster, a reader, writer, and literary translator from French. In what is truly a wide-ranging conversation, they discuss frank: sonnets by Diane Seuss, Roland Barthes on Roland Barthes, projects inspired by the act of underlining, and more.

To preorder Naomi’s new title, Marginalia: an autobiography from Autofocus Books, please click here.

Claire Foster is a reader, writer, and literary translator from French, most recently of Pierre Clémenti’s 1973 prison memoir, A Few Personal Messages. Her writing and translations have been published or will soon appear in The Hopkins Review, Public Books, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Full Stop Quarterly, and The Kenyon Review. Her translation of Valérie Manteau's novel The Furrow (Prix Renaudot, 2018) is forthcoming from Invisible Publishing. She also works as manager, events coordinator, and bookseller at Type Books, an independent bookstore in Toronto.

Music: lofi london by snoozy beats is licensed under a Attribution 4.0 International License.

Episode 1: “Marina Blitshteyn on Theory, A Sunday”

In this first episode of Reading Around the Margins, Naomi is joined by the writer Marina Blitshteyn. They discuss the, perhaps unexpected to Marina, marginalia Marina added to her copy of Theory, A Sunday from Belladonna Press. Their conversation explores books as bodies, how trauma lives in the body, how our selves resurface and reemerge through reading and deep periods of not reading, and much more.

To preorder Naomi’s new title, Marginalia: an autobiography from Autofocus Books, please click here.

Marina Blitshteyn is the author of two poetry collections, Two Hunters (Argos Books, 2019) and i take your voice (Switchback Books, 2022), Winner of the Gatewood Prize. Her chapbooks include Russian for Lovers (Argos Books), Nothing Personal (Bone Bouquet Books), $kill$ (dancing girl press), and Sheet Music (Sunnyoutside Press). Forthcoming titles include Landguage from Bunny Presse.

Music: lofi london by snoozy beats is licensed under a Attribution 4.0 International License.