Tender Buttons

In this episode, we chat to author and essayist Rebecca May Johnson about what it means to bring critical ideas into the everyday. We discuss the radical potential of the recipe as a tool for performance and intergenerational exchange. We speak about the abjection of bodies by capitalist society and reclaiming pleasure as a means of feminist praxis. We discuss the isolation rendered by the privatisation of public spaces and the necessity for communal ways to gather and eat together. We chat about the ways in which theory can neglect visceral experience and the recipe as a living text which anchors us to our bodies and the world.

Rebecca May Johnson has published essays, reviews and nonfiction  with Granta, Times Literary Supplement, Daunt Books Publishing and Vittles,  among others. She was a creative writing fellow at the British School  at Rome in 2021. She earned a PhD in Contemporary German Literature from  UCL in 2016.She also uses online publishing to conduct stylistic  experiments: her essay ‘I Dream of Canteens’ was published via  TinyLetter and gained widespread acclaim, winning ‘The Browser’ prize  for the best piece on the internet in April 2019. Her anonymous  waitressing series was voted in the Observer Food Monthly ‘Top  50’ of 2018. She was finalist in the ‘Young British Foodies’ writing  prize judged by Marina O’Loughlin and Yotam Ottolenghi. She publishes a  newsletter called dinner document where she shares recipes and thoughts  about food every week. Small Fires is her first book.

References

Small Fires by Rebecca May Johnson

I dream of Canteens by Rebecca May Johnson

Dinner Document  by Rebecca May Johnson

Vittles newsletter

Abolish the Family by Sophie Lewis

Zami: A New Spelling of my Name by Audre Lorde

The Odyssey translated by Emily Wilson

In this episode, we chat to the award-winning writer, performer and theatre-maker Travis Alabanza about their non-fiction book on trans and non-binary identity, None of the Above. We discuss what it means to write anti-memoir, in relation to making work from a working-class, gender non-conforming perspective. We chat about what it means to claim your own narrative and how to write a theoretical text that is accessible outside of academia, as well as the necessity of artists' engagement with the communites around them. We talk about the process of moving from stage to page and the radical power of performance to create a temporary space where rules are suspended, giving us a glimmer of freedom.

References

Burgerz by Travis Alabanza

None of the Above by Travis Alabanza 

The Transgender Issue by Shon Faye 

As always, visit Storysmith for 10% discount on Travis' work.

In this special episode of Tender Buttons — the last of Season 2 — we share a live conversation between Jessica Andrews and Samantha Walton, recorded at the launch of Jessica's new novel Milk Teeth at Storysmith Books in Bristol.

Milk Teeth follows the story of a girl grows up in the north-east of England amid scarcity, precarity and a toxic culture of bodily shame, certain that she must make herself  ever smaller to be loved.

References

Milk Teeth by Jessica Andrews (Sceptre: 2022) 

Saltwater by Jessica Andrews (Sceptre 2019) 

Melissa Febos, Body Work (Manchester University Press: 2022)- and you can listen to our recent episode with Melissa here

Samantha Walton Everybody Needs Beauty (Bloomsbury: 2021)- check out our previous episode with Samantha here

Helene Cixous, The Laugh of the Medusa

Eimear McBride, The Lesser Bohemians (Faber: 2016) 

Andrea Ashworth, Once in a House on Fire (Picador: 2014)

Kim Ji-young, Born 1982 (Scribner: 2020) 

In this episode, we discuss what it means to write through the body with memoirist Melissa Febos. We speak about the power of articulation as a radical tool for feminist and queer liberation and the need to break away from the narratives we are handed by patriarchal society in an attempt to forge our own maps. We talk about the practicalities of writing memoir as a public archive of the self and the existence of multiple truths and perspectives within a narrative. We address the process of writing trauma and the political and personal implications of writing from lived experience.

References

Whip Smart by Melissa Febos

Abandon Me by Melissa Febos

Girlhood by Melissa Febos

Body Work by Melissa Febos

Uses of the Erotic by Audre Lorde

Listen for a 10% discount code on Melissa's work at Storysmith books.

In this episode, we discuss morality, religion and how to find space between conflicting social codes. We discuss the relationship between possibility, choice and criminality and the intersection of class and race in contemporary Bristol. We chat about what it means to write about a place that is not widely represented in fiction and developing a literary voice through hip-hop, grime and the Bible. We explore the potential of the novel to spark political change and the role of artistic responsibility.

References

An Olive Grove in Ends by Moses McKenzie

Bristol Cable interview with Moses McKenzie

In this episode, we chat to Yara Rodrigues Fowler about the possibilites of the revolutionary novel. We speak about the potential of art as a driving force for change in the world, providing a space to desire beyond the borders of neoliberalism, imperialism and patriarchy. We talk about the ways in which novels can hold multiple dimensions of time and space and the role of formal experimentation and translation. We also discuss queer families and sisterhood and the ways in which these relationships might act as a 'little communism' of love, hinting at the possibilities of a world which is more free. We talk about the experience of writing and releasing a second novel and how to move through the publishing world while staying true to your own ideals. Yara's new novel, There Are More Things is published on 28th April.

References

There Are More Things by Yara Rodrigues Fowler

Stubborn Archivist by Yara Rodrigues Fowler

Anne Boyer 

Saidiya Hartman

Emma Goldman

Lola Olufemi

Listen for a 10% discount code on Yara's books at Storysmith books.

In this episode, we chat to Lola Olufemi about the radical potential of imagination. We speak about the relationship between theory and lived experience and how to deconstruct linear narratives of history and time. We talk about the possibilites language and art can bring to political movements and revolutionary ideas, as well as their limitations. We discuss how to move beyond the trappings of crisis and the importance of re-discovering play, both in writing and in our communities. We explore the role of collaboration within art and the reconfiguration of history as a kind of process which is constantly being re-made, through ancestral connection and the reanimation of archives. 

References:

A FLY Girls' Guide to University by Lola Olufemi, Odelia Younge, Waithera Sebatindira, Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan

Feminism Interrupted by Lola Olufemi

Experiments in Imagining Otherwise by Lola Olufemi

Poetics of Relation by Edouard Glissant

Dialogic Imagination by Mikhail Bakhtin

June Jordan

bell hooks

Olive Morris

As a Tender Buttons listener you can get 10% discount on Lola's work at Storysmith Books. Listen to the episode for more details and then head  to our page on the Storysmith website: storysmithbooks.com/tenderbuttons

In our first episode of Season Two, we chat to the inimitable Max Porter about pushing the limits of language, the role of art in ritual and collective experience and a search for joy within the mundane. We discuss the relationship between novel and stage, as well as the dichotomies of guilt and shame, care and kindness and humour as a form of resilience in a changing world. We talk about Max's desire to 'capture the pulse of feeling' in his book The Death of Francis Bacon and explore how to reinstate ritual in the ways we relate to landscape and the nonhuman world. We talk about writing as a mode of time travel and mourning as a kind of love.

As a Tender Buttons listener you can get 10% discount on Max's work at Storysmith Books. Listen to the episode for more details and then head to our page on the Storysmith website: storysmithbooks.com/tenderbuttons

REFERENCES: 

Time Lived Without its Flow by Denise Riley

Grief is the Thing with Feathers by Max Porter

Lanny by Max Porter

The Death of Francis Bacon by Max Porter

In this final episode of 2021 and our first season we chat to poet and academic Samantha Walton about democratising nature and landscape writing; green deprivation and the policing of green spaces and the dangers of individualised neoliberal 'nature cures', as discussed in her recent book Everybody Needs Beauty: In Search of the Nature Cure (Bloomsbury: 2021). We speak about the need to carve out space for grief amongst the climate crisis, how to emasculate mountain literature via Nan Shepherd and the space that poetry allows for articulating ambiguity and discomfort, as found in Samantha's hallucinatory poetic sequence Bad Moon (SPAM Press: 2020). 

As a Tender Buttons listener you can get 10% discount on Samantha's book at Storysmith Books, listen in for more details and then head to our page on the Storysmith website: storysmithbooks.com/tenderbuttons

References: 

Everybody Needs Beauty: In Search of the Nature Cure (Bloomsbury:2021)

Bad Moon (SPAM Press: 2020)

Self-Heal (Boiler-House Press: 2018) 

The Living Mountain by Nan Shepherd (Canongate)

Samantha is also co-editor of Bristol-based small press SAD Press, whose work you can check out here. 

In this episode, we chat to author Jo Hamya about her brilliant novel, Three Rooms. We discuss her subversion of the bildungsroman narrative in order to interrogate the myth of linear progress and what it means to grow up in the wake of Blairism and the 2007-8 financial crash. We speak about the ways in which people might live in proximity to the upper echelons of society and yet never truly enter privileged spaces as a consequence of class, gender, race and politics. Through the lens of Brexit, Trump, Grenfell and the housing crisis, amidst soaring wealth inequality, Jo addresses the myth of meritocracy in contemporary Britain and interrogates the effects of social media upon our psyches. We chat about the notion of patriotism, the commodification of protest, the struggle to take up space in the modern metropolis and what it really means to inhabit a room of one's own in contemporary Britain. 

References:

Three Rooms by Jo Hamya

Outline trilogy by Rachel Cusk

As a Tender Buttons listener you can get 10% discount on Jo's book at Storysmith Books, listen in for more details and then head to our page on the Storysmith website: storysmithbooks.com/tenderbuttons

Our theme music is a sample from Flotation by Ben Vince from his album The Purge.