The ARTWIFE Book Club

It's our first-ever movie night on the pod! We're looking at Challengers, a perfect film about three self-loathing, deeply unwell people visiting psychosexual drama upon each other repeatedly for more than a decade. The stuff dreams are made of! But what does it have to do with writing? Well, everything. In this episode, we talk about the power of indoctrinating your audience/readers with sub-perceptual imagery and symbolism. We also look at the absolutely manic and a-chronological movement of this narrative through time and figure out how the hell it managed to work...and so successfully. Hop in!

There's still time to vote if you haven't yet done so! Find your polling place here: https://www.vote.org/polling-place-locator/. Learn about your rights and responsibilities if you need time off work to vote: https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/25/business/voting-during-the-work-day-employers-law/index.html.

This month, we're taking a field trip! Join us as we depart from our usual fare of writing & writers and romp instead into the realm of performance, performers, and the life of the artist. We're joined by astrologer Wonder Bright, who helps us understand how the astrological signatures in Barbra Streisand's birth chart are influencing and describing the way Barbra makes her art. Topics include the intersections and overlaps between astrology and storytelling; the merits of an artist's first instinct (a.k.a. first draft) versus their subsequent attempts (a.k.a. revisions); and the evolution(?) over time of one of our culture's recurring narrative fixations, A Star is Born.

Wonder Bright is an astrologer living in Portland, Oregon. She works with her clients to help them use whatever sliver of free will they possess to embrace their fates and step more fully into their lives. She uses traditional techniques to arrive at thoroughly modern conclusions and has written about this for The Mountain Astrologer and www.astro.com. For more you can find her at www.starsofwonder.com.

View Wonder's companion slide deck: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1hDsHrdr1BiBA1Z7ueKM-n-B3-qZmrPp_/view

We recorded this episode before we learned of Kris Kristofferson's passing. He was incredible—so moving and effective—in the role of John Norman Howard. Rest peacefully, Mr. Kristofferson.

This month we're back with another SHORTS episode...and we're doing things a little differently this time! Rather than look at the craft of an individual piece of work, we're turning our attention to the question of emotional depth & honesty in creative writing more generally. What does emotional presence *feel like* in a piece of writing? And what does it feel like when it's missing? Finally, and most importantly, how can writers avoid making work that relies on emotional approximation and instead create work with depth and longevity? Hop in and let's find out!

The hero's journey...reimagined! We're celebrating 1 year of The ARTWIFE Book Club with Sayaka Murata's novel about a protagonist who passes through all the stages of the traditional hero's journey—a foray into the unfamiliar, a dark night of the soul, a return bearing a hard-won treasure—all without ever leaving her hometown. Hop in!

Studying the craft of writing with the help of lyrics from Taylor Swift? Don't threaten us with a good time! This month, we do a close reading of the lyrics from the song My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys off of The Tortured Poets Department. The story of this song gives us an opportunity to look at how a narrator can effectively communicate their conflicted mental state and convince us of both their lucidity and delusion at the same time. With this example, we're continuing to circle around one of our primary writing obsessions here at the ARTWIFE Book Club: how do we as writers find a balance between being coy & withholding and didactic & excessive? As ever, Taylor Swift shows us. Hop in!

We read it, we loved it, and now we get to obsess over it...with the author! The book is Thieves, the writer is Valerie Werder, and Valerie herself joins us on this episode to talk about the creation of this astonishing book. We get practical (what can disciplines like sculpture and curation teach us about structuring a narrative?) and we get enigmatic (what the hell is a "self" anyway?) in equal measure, and ultimately we walk away from this inspiring episode with our favorite feeling in the world: the ache to sit down and write.

Read Thieves: https://fenceportal.org/book/thieves/

Find Valerie Werder: https://www.valeriewerder.com/

ARTWIFE is back from spring break with a close look at Vinson Cunningham Is a Ritualistic Eater, a sublime essay published in Grub Street (read it here: https://www.grubstreet.com/article/vinson-cunningham-grub-street-diet.html). We articulate the work's skillful balance of technical expertise and emotional presence and ask ourselves...how the hell can we learn to write like this? Plus, the life & creative lessons from one RuPaul's Drag Race figure in here, and yep, you already guessed it: we wouldn't be The ARTWIFE Book Club without a romp into a little (double!) album by the name of The Tortured Poets Department. Get in, honey!

Annnnd we're back with the spring episode of the SHORTS edition! This time, we look at The Ice-Cream Truck, a flash essay from Souvankham Thammavongsa. (Read it here: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/07/10/the-ice-cream-truck-souvankham-thammavongsa) Craft discussion topics include: a look at the way spacing and paragraph breaks help us manage pacing and emphasis, how to think about our written work like visual artists, and a short little addendum (AKA half the episode) about why you should definitely put what you learned in therapy into your artwork, but it functions best if you first digest it, interpret it, and make it your own.

Programming note! Team ARTWIFE will be away for parts of April, so there won't be an episode next month. Consider it the ARTWIFE Spring Break! See you back here on May 7.

Our very first venture into science-fiction-adjacent literature on the pod! In our discussion about Jacqueline Harpman's 1995 novel, we revel in a book that rejects many of the fundamental elements that make up the construct of a book in the first place. Chapters? Hard pass. Traditional plot structure? No. Characters? Barely!

We also make sure to carefully articulate all the ways in which human life is pointless and absurd! But also why that's perfectly okay and not at all nihilistic even though it seems like it should be! Join us.

TAYLOR SWIFT, EVERYBODY! In this episode, we learn from the master of storytelling *herself* about mood, manifesting a memorable atmosphere in our work, how distinct and specific imagery helps us experience even the most well-worn subject matter anew, and more. We also talk about how the structured nature of songwriting can serve as a guide when we're organizing our work in prose, so we can write stories that not only makes sense but make an impact. Here's to art and beauty in the new year and...~forevermore~.