The Write Question

“Without the portraits, the bar was just another place”: Celebrating ‘A Corner of Space and Time’ with Jean Belangie-Nye, Ben Ferencz, and Aaron Teasdale

What does it mean to want it all? In the first of this two-part conversation, Andrea Abi-Karam and Kay Gabriel, the editors of We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics, discuss poetry’s role in political movement, the anthology’s collective language, and its many threads of abundant desire.

This week on The Write Question, Shakespeare scholar Gretchen E. Minton dives into, well, Shakespeare! The Montana State University professor chats about her newest book, Shakespeare in Montana: Big Sky Country’s Love Affair with the World's Most Famous Writer, and about nostalgia, surprise, and climate change.

This week on The Write Question , poet and scholar Heather Cahoon talks about the ways her poetry and tribal policy intersect and how her new book of poetry, Horsefly Dress , addresses issues of suffering, danger, and — ultimately — transformation.

Kerri Arsenault's Mill Town is a book of narrative non-fiction, investigative memoir, and cultural criticism that illuminates the rise and collapse of the working-class, the hazards of loving and leaving home, and the ambiguous nature of toxics and disease with the central question: Who or what are we willing to sacrifice for our own survival?

The Cold Millions is something of a hybrid text—fiction, yes, but also history. Combining imaginative storytelling with the lives of real, historical figures, Jess Walter has written a captivating story of Spokane, Washington, a place-based history of the region’s labor movements and of the free speech riots in the Pacific Northwest at the turn of the twentieth century.

In the second of their two-part conversation , host Lauren Korn and author and cultural critic Anne Helen Petersen continue their chat about Anne’s newest book, Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation , from research methodology and mutual aid to hope in the time of COVID.

This week for Honor, Hope and Healing Week, listen to host Lauren Korn read “ Elegy for the Disappeared ,” by Forrest Gander, which was written in collaboration with Kay Rosen (see “Phantom Limb”). The poem was originally published with the Shelter in Poems initiative on poets.org .

This week for Honor, Hope and Healing Week, listen to host Lauren Korn read "Hey Nonny Nonny," by Canadian poet Sue Sinclair.

This week for Honor, Hope and Healing Week, listen to host Lauren Korn read "Winter Field," by former University of Montana professor Joanna Klink. This poem was published both in the Boston Review and in her collection, Circadian , out from Penguin Poets.