This Tin House Live conversation between Leni Zumas and Janice Lee, “Publishing, Power Structures, and Creative Practice,” was recorded at the summer 2020 Tin House Writers Workshop.

Leni Zumas is the author most recently of the novel Red Clocks, a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and winner of the Oregon Book Award for Fiction. She is also the author of Farewell Navigator: Stories (Open City) and The Listeners (Tin House). Leni has appeared on Between the Covers twice previously. Her first appearance was also the show’s first discussion of hybrid and/or genre-indeterminate writing and the only episode that interviews a collaborative pair, Leni Zumas (writer) and Luca Dipierro (artist), about their work A Wooden Leg: A Novel in 64 Cards. Leni returned to the program more recently to discuss Red Clocks.

Janice Lee is the founder and executive editor of Entropy, contributing editor at Fanzine, co-founder of The Accomplices, and co-publisher of the press Civil Coping Mechanisms. She is also the author of seven books of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, including The Sky Isn’t Blue, Reconsolidation, and Damnation, a book-length meditation on the films of Hungarian director Béla Tarr. Her latest novel, Imagine A Death, whose publishing journey they discuss in today’s episode, a novel about inherited trauma, the apocalypse, and interspecies communication, will be published in 2021 by Texas Review Press.

Leni Zumas and Janice Lee both teach in the MFA program at Portland State University. At the beginning of this conversation they reference, and Janice reads from, her 2019 essay “Books Are Not Products, They Are Bridges: Challenging Linear Ideas of Success in Literary Publishing.”

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