Rippling Pages: Interviews with Writers

By ripplingpagesArts Books

Rippling Pages: Interviews with Writers episodes

October 24, 2024 Friða Ísberg and THE MARK
“The book is me trying to have a conversation with my father and reach a middle ground.”

Friða Ísberg is here to talk about THE MARK (Faber and Faber) translated by Larissa Kyzer. The book centres on a referendum in Iceland about whether mandatory tests should be imposed on its citizens. Friða talks about writing over the divide, arguments with her father, and Icelandic literary culture and how they have all shaped the book.
Rippling Points
02:05 - what is the mark?
04:12 - where are the divides?
06:30 - working in London while Brexit happened
08:07 - Frida's relationship with her dad and how it informed The Mark
11.15 - feeding emotion into a novel
13:46 - is it easier to write characters we agree with?
18:31 - Icelandic meaning of The Mark and how it relates to divides.
21:25 - why an empathy test?
25.51 - who is profiting from the mark?
28:30 - is one in ten a published writer in Iceland?
31:22 - do writers have a public duty?

Reference Points
Writers
Fernanda Melchor
Jacqueline Rose
George Saunders
Ali Smith
Films
There's Something About Mary (1998, dir: Peter and Bobby Farrelly)

34 min
September 19, 2024 Naomi Wood and THIS IS WHY WE CANT HAVE NICE THINGS
“Some people have been, oh these women are so grotesque. I don’t think they are! They’re quite relatable.”

Naomi Wood joins me to discuss THIS IS WHY WE CANT HAVE NICE THINGS (Published by Orion)
It’s a collection that features the BBC Short Story Prize winner, Comorbidities. We talk about different kinds of intimacy in the stories, and how or why Naomi often writes about mothers in the . Naomi also talks about the craft and how she clashed registers to dazzling effect.

Naomi Wood is the bestselling author of The Godless Boys, Mrs. Hemingway and The Hiding Game. As a novelist, her books have won a Jerwood Award, the British Library Hay Festival Prize, and been shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize, the Dylan Thomas Prize, and the Historical Writers Golden Crown. Mrs. Hemingway was a Richard and Judy Bookclub pick in 2014 and a Chanel Bookclub pick in 2023.

for details about Naomi’s short fiction course, visit www.naomiwood.com

Rippling Points

1.45- comorbidities and winning the bbc short story prize award
5.34 - pie charts’
8.17 - on writing about mothers
10.29 - transgressive actions in characters
12.07 - complicated or bad?
15.48 - what’s a register clash?
18.54 - are they healing?
23,20 - influence of the pandemic and previous novels
27.30 - what do we do with old me?
29.04 - what’s next for Naomi?

Reference Points

Rachel Cusk
Yan Ge
Ernest Hemingway

Elizabeth Morris’ Crib Notes: https://cribnotesbookclub.substack.com
33 min
August 22, 2024 Sam Sax and YR DEAD
"I think their experience in the bookstore is trying to think literary inheritance and spiritual and intellectual experience."

Sam sax is here to discuss YR DEAD, their debut novel about Ezra, a queer, non-binary 27-year-old of Jewish heritage, whose life we see in fragments and flashbacks when they self-immolate outside trump tower.

We talk about qualities of wandering, the multiplicities of Jewish identities, and what second hand bookstores can tell us about legacies and life.

Sam's PIG was named one of the best books of 2023 by New York Magazine and Electric Lit. They're also the author of Madness, winner of The National Poetry Series and ‘Bury It’ winner of the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets

YR DEAD is published by McSweeney's in the US and Daunt Books in the UK
Reference Points

01.30 - who is Ezra
02.20 - is Ezra a flaneur?

04.53 - why the novel is set on this day

06.28 - the multiplicity of Jewish identity

09.40 - how death or organises or doesn’t organise the novel

15:00 different desires

19:20 - Ezra’s mother and her absence

24.25 - second hand bookshops and legacies

29.00 - the hopeful message of Sam’s novel

Reference Points

Hervé Guibert
Andrea Lawlor
Virginia Woolf

34 min
July 23, 2024 Jennifer Lucy Allan and CLAY: A HUMAN HISTORY
"I'd done a lot of clay-making...you can spend a lifetime and only get good at one technique!"

Jennifer Lucy Allan joins me to talk about her second book, CLAY: A HUMAN HISTORY (White Rabbit Books). After Jennifer's exploration and writing about sound in The Foghorn's Lament (White Rabbit Books), Jennifer has, quite literally, turned her hand to a more physical and enduring substance in clay. From Japanese Tea Ceremonies, to humans making their own image, to life on Mars, clay is seemingly everywhere. Jennifer is also a presenter on BBC Radio 3's Late Junction.

Rippling Points
1.20 - How Jennifer’s early experience with clay led to her enchantment of it and then writing this boundless history

6.04 - How the book on clay differs to Jennifer’s previous book on foghorns

10.30 - Ephemerality of sound and permanence of clay - the writing challenges.

13.40 - Clay: its history compared with human history

15:15 - Who is Marija Gimbutas, and why is she important

21:15 - Language and touch

24.40 - Climate change and how it's revealing more about clay

28.00 - How clay becomes an object

Reference Points
Marija Gimbutas.
Ladi Kwali
Maria Martinez

35 min
June 20, 2024 Bruce Omar Yates and The Muslim Cowboy
"This book is begging to be written...It has this a frontier-ness to it..."

Bruce Omar Yates is here to discuss his upcoming novel published by Dead Ink Books, THE MUSLIM COWBOY .
In a contemporary and entertaining novel set in aftermath of the Iraq war, a man who is obsessed with old Western movies dresses in double denim and roams a lawless landscape in search of his own Western story.

Rippling Points

1.32 - Bruce's family and how these fed into ideas about a 'muslim cowboy'
4.30 - Nameless and speechless: playing with the archetype of the cowboy
6.20 - Song writing in Nashville to writing this novel
8.40 - Iraq as the setting for the novel
12.00 - Removing binaries around what is good and not good
17.33 - A camel and child - the other characters
20.53 - The novel as a sandbox
25.30 - The act of making his characters watch westerns

Reference Points

Aladdin (1992. Dir: John Musker and Ron Clements)
David Foster Wallace
Don Quixote - Miguel de Cervantes
Lucky Luke - Goscinny
Once Upon a Time in the West (1969. Dir: Sergio Leone)
The Road - Cormac McCarthy (2006)
Shane (1953. Dir: George Stevens)
True Grit (1969. Dir: Henry Hathaway)
Zadie Smith

33 min
May 24, 2024 Claire Carroll and The Unreliable Nature Writer
"The smotheringly neutral voice"

Claire Carroll is here to talk about her new and debut collection of short stories THE UNRELIABLE NATURE WRITER. A truly candid insight into the workings of craft and being a writer from one of the most exciting and upcoming fiction writers today.

THE UNRELIABLE NATURE WRITER is published by Scratch Books - more here

Rippling Points

2.00 - Claire's dreams and reading.

4.55 - The different personal and impersonal voices in Claire's work

10:37 - Being a writer and knowing or not knowing answers

13:12 - Unreliable narrators and what they mean to Claire

18:00 - How and why Claire writes about animals.

24:30 - The challenge of having 'authority' on the climate crisis

28.40 - Giving the stories a sense of wonder

30:00 - Claire's book tour!

Reference Points
Franz Kafka
Cormac McCarthy - The Road
Ben Pester
Saba Sams
Samantha Walton - The Nature Cure

32 min
April 24, 2024 Marchelle Farrell and By the River
"The garden is a co-author"

Marchelle Farrell is here to talk about her essay in a new anthology from Daunt Books, BY THE RIVER: ESSAYS FROM THE WATER'S EDGE. I've wanted to talk to Marchelle since the publication of UPROOTING: FROM THE CARIBBEAN TO THE COUNTRYSIDE - Canongate Books), so it was great to have her here when she's part of an anthology featuring the likes of Caleb Azumah Nelson and Tessa Hadley.

Marchelle, a consultant psychiatrist as well as a writer, often blends personal history with reflections on how colonial history has shaped the world and behaviour

Rippling Points

1.25 - The rivers that Marchelle writers about in her essay, 'Memory River
4.06 - the noise of the river and how it infiltrated Marchelle's dreams
7.08 - A sense of renewal and writing about childhood
9.00 - The pain and joy in revisiting childhood
12.34 - Marchelle's belief on balancing both pain and joy in life.
15.04 - The story of Marchelle's family and forgotten stories
18.23 - Can anything ever be permanently erased?
20.22 - Leaving space for the reader to make interpretations.
22.13 - The river and its links to colonial history.
25.22 - How the 'English' garden isn't so English.
28.20 - What is play and why is it important

Reference Points

Jo Hamya
Amy Key
Donald Winnicott
33 min
March 13, 2024 Marianne Brooker and Intervals
"I wanted to be talking choice in a way that was routed in a social context, and that was true to the particularity and intimacy that I shared with my mum at the end of her life."

Marianne Brooker is here to talk about her Women's Prize for Non-Fiction shortlisted essay, INTERVALS, published by Fitzcarraldo Editions.

Marianne talks about her life and living with her mother who was diagnosed with primary progressive multiple sclerosis. The book is a blend of memoir, philosophy, literary criticism, and politics.

It's a tough but incredibly beautiful read.

Rippling Points

2.05 - When Marianne decided this story about her mother was going to be a book

3.40 - 'Trying, circling, avoiding' - setting down to write a book like this

4.30 - How Marianne would categorises this book

7:00 - On planning or not planning the book

8:44 - When Marianne's mother developed primary progressive multiple sclerosis

10:20 - Finding a voice and coming up with a 'vocabulary'

12:20 - The 'forces' in the book and Marianne's mother

16:10 - Marianne's relationship with her mother.

20:00 - What primary progressive multiple sclerosis is.

22:20 - Marianne on 'choice'

25:21 - When Marianne found a video of her mother.

Reference Points

Writers
Roland Barthes
Annie Ernaux
Clarissa Pinkola Estés - Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype
Saidiya Hartman
Alice Hattrick
Sophie Lewis
Sam Mills
Margery Williams - The Velveteen Rabbit

Filmmakers
Chantal Akerman
33 min
February 21, 2024 Dawn Garisch and Breaking Milk
"That whole question of the invisible life...that there's something going on we cannot see that determines our health and the future of the planet."

Dawn Garisch, one of South Africa's most pre-eminent writers, joins the Rippling Pages to talk about Breaking Milk, published in the UK by Heloise Press. Shortlisted for the prestigious Sunday Times South Africa/CNA Literary Awards '21, it finally lands on our shores.

Dawn is also a doctor and a CEO of the Life Righting Collective, a non-profit organisation aiming to provide creative practice as a low-cost resource for humane, responsible and compassionate attitude in institutions and society as a whole.

Find out more here: https://liferighting.com/

Rippling Points
1.40 - Who the narrator (Kate) of this novel is, and why Dawn chose to write about her at this point in the narrator's life.
7.00 - Why Dawn spent some time making cheese for the book
8.40 - what separates us from our parents and other people
11.43 - Kate's former job as a geneticist
14.26 - The voice of the inner critic
17.54 - The benefits of the life writing collective
21.00 - Kate's husband, the other writer in the book.
27.30 - Dawn's work as a doctor.

Reference Points
Christa Wolf - Accident: A Day's News
J.M. Coetzee Disgrace
Dawn Garisch - Eloquent Body
Bessel Van der Kolk - The Body Knows the Score
Jaakp Panksepp
Donald Winnicott
Virginia Woolf - Mrs Dalloway
Virginia Woolf - A Room of One's Own.
33 min
January 25, 2024 Rachel Mann and Eleanor Among the Saints
"Wounds, whilst they open us to the world...they can be points of infection."

Welcome to 2024 and a new episode of the Rippling Pages. Rachel Mann is a poet, scholar, novelist and Anglican priest. She is Rachel Mann is here to talk about her new collection, Eleanor Among the Saints (Carcanet), which takes inspiration from the life of Eleanor 'John' Rykener. A trans woman, seamstress, embroider, and sex worker who lived in medieval England.

More info about the book here

This is Rachel's second collection after Kingdom of Love (also Carcanet - and which I reviewed here!)

The book is a Poetry Book Society recommendation and you kind find tickets to her launch here.

Tickets to the Carcanet launch of the book here: https://www.carcanet.co.uk/cgi-bin/events?showpage=913

This show comes with a content warning - we do talk about some sensitive topics, such as domestic violence, so please do take care of yourself when listening.

Rippling Points
5.05 - Poetry and embroidery
8.03 - What Eleanor's story, and Rachel's poetry, tells us about embodiedness
11.45 - Society and Eleanor's story
14.54 - How details about Eleanor's life helped in writing the collection.
18.30 - 'Violence' in craft and the writing process.
21.45 - How themes of violence and the body converge in Rachel's poems.
28.20 - 'Fear' of working with heavy and sensitive topics

Reference Points
Gilles Deleuze
Umberto Eco
33 min

About Rippling Pages: Interviews with Writers

From the publisher's feed

Liam Bishop having a coffee with the world's most interesting writers to inspire your reading and writing on the podcast where writers get real about writing.