Story Behind the Story

Tedd Siegel retired from his career as an academic administrator in late 2019 after wrestling with extreme stress, burnout, and PTSD — caused, in part, by the conditions of work as it is formulated today. He wrote Signs of the Great Refusal: The Coming Struggle for a Postwork Society in part to work through his own experiences and, more broadly, to understand what it was about contemporary work that felt so untenable and unsustainable. Throughout the book, Tedd leans into his background as a political philosopher (he attended the Ph.D. program in philosophy at the New School), grounding his understanding of “work-as-we-know-it” in the political and economic critiques of capital going back to Marx in the 19th century, putting them into dialog with philosophical understandings of work and labor in the 20th century from Arendt and others. The result is an exploration not only of the role and function of work in contemporary society, but what it might take to build a post-work politics out of the nascent anti-work movements alive today.

Novelist, screenwriter, and translator Katya Apekina returns to Story Behind the Story to talk about her latest novel, Mother Doll — an intergenerational ghost story, tying together a Russian revolutionary and her great-granddaughter, adrift in her 20s in LA.

Special Guest: Katya Apekina.

Marcus Gazaway got his start as a writer right here on the central coast, when he joined the staff of CSU Monterey Bay’s student newspaper, The Otter Realm. Today, he works as a full-time author in Sarasota, Florida, where he can be seen reading and writing in coffee shops across the Gulf Coast. His first novel, the sci-fi thriller Bridgewater, follows a neurologist whose desperation to give his Deaf daughter a voice leads him down a dark and destructive path. It is the topic of our conversation today.

This month, host Clara Sherley-Appel talks to poet and educator Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo. A former Steinbeck Fellow and Poets & Writers California Writers Exchange winner, Xochitl’s writing has been featured in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, On Being’s Poetry Unbound, and Poetry Unbound: 50 Poems to Open Your World. She has received residencies from Hedgebrook, Ragdale, Yefe Nof, and the National Parks Arts Foundation in partnership with the Getty National Military Park and Poetry Foundation. In 2011, she co-founded Women Who Submit, a literary organization that uses social media and community events to empower women and non-binary authors to submit work for publication, with Ashaki Jackson and Alyss Dixon, and she currently serves as the organization’s director.

Xochitl wrote her debut collection, Posada: Offerings of Witness and Refuge, while living in a house in the shadows of Dodger Stadium in historic Solano Canyon. Today we are discussing her second collection, Incantation: Love Poems for Battle Sites, which explores US monuments, memorializes Black and brown bodies murdered by state-sanctioned violence, and shares love poems to family, friends, and dalliances in rituals of resistance and resilience.

Sam Sax is a queer Jewish poet, writer, and educator. Their debut poetry collection, madness, won the National Poetry Series Competition when it came out, and their second collection, bury it, won the 2017 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. They are the two time Bay Area Grand Slam Champion with poems published in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Poetry Magazine, and Granta, to give just a few highlights. Sam has received fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts, The Poetry Foundation, Yaddo, Lambda Literary, and MacDowell, and they are currently serving as an ITALIC Lecturer at Stanford University.

In this conversation, Clara talks to Sam about the purpose of filth in their poetry, their use of histories and etymologies as poetic techniques, and how to write a pandemic poem that doesn't feel dated.

Special Guest: Sam Sax.

Jenn Shapland's first book, My Autobiography of Carson McCullers, was a finalist for the 2020 National Book Award and the Southern Book Prize, and it won the 2021 Lambda Literary Award, the Judy Grahn Award, and the Christian Gauss Award. In her new essay collection, Thin Skin, Shapland explores the porousness of boundaries between humans and the environments we inhabit, between us and other people, and between us and the social constructs we create.

What does it mean to be sensitive when we live in a toxic environment? How do we navigate the difference between taking responsibility and assuaging our guilt? Between resisting injustice and coping with it? And how do we reckon with what's happening in the world when no one wants to talk about it? Shapland answers these questions and more in this month's episode of Story Behind the Story.

Special Guest: Jenn Shapland.

Host Clara Sherley Appel speaks with Brett Christophers, author of Rentier Capitalism.

A geographer based out of the Institute for Housing and Urban Research at Uppsala University, Brett's work focuses on various aspects of Western capitalism, both historically and in the present day. In 2018, he wrote The New Enclosure, about Margaret Thatcher’s immensely successful program to privatize land in the UK, for which he won the 2019 Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Memorial Prize. In 2020 he published Rentier Capitalism, which provides a framework for understanding the political economy of the 20th and 21st centuries in terms of the extraction of rents by the haves from the have nots, and explores the consequences of an economic system that incentivizes private ownership on a massive scale.

Though the focus of Christophers' book is on the UK, he extends his analysis to California's housing crisis as part of this conversation, making it essential listening for anyong seeking to understand the damage that has been done during the neoliberal era — and what is necessary to undo it.

Special Guest: Brett Christophers.

Cheryl Harawitz is an artist and retired social worker living in Alameda. A few years ago, she published her debut middle-grade novel, When the Magpie Calls, the story of a nine year old girl named Morgwyth with special abilities and a remarkable connection to animals, for which she is bullied by her peers and targeted by supernatural forces who see her as a threat. But as Morgwyth begins to accept herself and her differences, she discovers a wellspring of internal strength that serves her well in her adventures.

This month's conversation covers a range of topics, from Cheryl's process in writing and editing her novel to the purpose of art — literary and otherwise — in her life to the influence of her professional experiences as a social worker on the kinds of stories she seeks to tell.

Special Guest: Cheryl Harawitz.

This month, Clara talks to author Joss Lake. A trans writer and educator based in New York, Joss teaches critical and creative writing throughout the city and runs a literary sauna series called Trans at Rest. His work has been supported by the Queens Council of the Arts, the Women and Performance Studies Collective, the Watermill Center, and Columbia University. Joss's debut novel, Future Feeling, tells a story about an embittered dog-walker who accidentally puts a curse on a young trans man and has to embark on an adventure with his social media frenemy in order to save him, and it's the subject of this conversation.

Special Guest: Joss Lake.

In Elaine Hsieh Chou's 2022 debut novel, Disorientation, a Taiwanese-American graduate student named Ingrid Yang discovers that the subject of her dissertation is a fraud: Xiao-Wen Chou is not a Chinese-American poet, but is in fact a white man who built his career on stereotypes and yellowface. This discovery launches her own awakening to the racism she has faced her entire life and the many ways she's built her identity around what white people expect of her.

In our conversation, we talk about the real-life inspirations for Disorientation and the strangeness of the label "absurd" to describe a novel about these very real experiences. We also talk about the value of anger in writing and healing.