Between The Covers : Conversations with Writers in Fiction, Nonfiction & Poetry

Today’s guest is Chilean novelist, essayist, literary critic, and poet Alejandro Zambra, talking about his latest novel Chilean Poet , a novel brimming over with, yes, Chilean poets and poems, but also with love and laughter, artistic dreams and failures, and the desire to find language for things deeply felt that have no name. This conversation, one about everything from writing itself to transla...

Today’s “Crafting with Ursula,” a conversation with nature writer Isaac Yuen, explores Le Guin’s writing of the nonhuman other in her fiction. Why might we consider decentering the human within our stories and how do we do so? How does one evoke a truly alien intelligence (i.e. that of a plant or an insect) but using human language for a human readership? Looking closely at three of Le Guin’s shor...

It’s been five years since Solmaz Sharif’s first appearance on Between the Covers, for her National Book Award–finalist debut collection Look.  Since then, many listeners have pointed to this conversation as one of the most memorable episodes to date. Solmaz returns today to discuss her much-anticipated follow-up, Customs.  We talk about belonging, exile and language, about what it means to write...

Writer and performance artist Gabrielle Civil talks about her latest book the déjà vu: black dreams & black time, as well as her chapbook ( ghost gestures ) , chosen by Bhanu Kapil for the Gold Line Press Nonfiction prize. What does Civil mean by “Black time” and how does she enact this in the déjà vu ? What is “performance writing” or “performance memoir” and how do her work on the stage and...

Today’s guest on the second episode of Crafting with Ursula , Molly Gloss, the acclaimed writer of both award-winning science fiction and fantasy as well as feminist Westerns, has a particular insight into the work and writing life of Le Guin. Gloss’ writing career began as a student of Le Guin’s in a workshop in the 1980s. And yet they soon became friends, were friends and writing peers for thirt...

Writer, critic, performer, & visual artist James Hannaham talks about his latest and most uncategorizable book Pilot Impostor. This book slips between the borders of prose and poetry, fiction and nonfiction, image and text, facts and fake news, selfhood and persona, pretending and privilege. And Pilot Impostor  comes into being piece by piece through an engagement with the work, poem by poem,...

Rabih Alameddine talks about his new novel The Wrong End of the Telescope , which is set on the island of Lesbos amidst the medical personnel and tourist-volunteers involved with helping the arriving Syrian refugees. Interestingly, the writer, one suspiciously similar to Rabih himself, is a secondary character in this novel, a character who asks Mina, a Lebanese-American doctor, to tell this story...

Today’s guest, Becky Chambers, discusses her own work, and her own considerations when imagining alien cultures and the beings that inhabit them. She does this in light of Le Guin’s novel The Left Hand of Darkness and Le Guin’s short story, “Coming of Age in Karhide,” written by Le Guin 25 years later, but within the same world as the the novel. What does putting these two narratives side by side...

Poet Victoria Chang talks about her latest and most uncategorizable book Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief. A book composed largely of essay-like letters, Dear Memory also contains collages by Victoria, created from the artifacts (mementos, documents, photographs) found in her family’s storage locker, and short poems which she places among the images. What does this formal shapes...

Today’s guest, Mexican poet, painter, and translator Valerie Mejer Caso talks about her latest book, the bilingual publication of poetry, collage, and photography Edinburgh Notebook , translated by Michelle Gil-Montero for Action Books. What does it mean to write something both autobiographical and surreal, both dream-like and real? How can questions of selfhood and identity (the identity of natio...

British poet, educator, and writer Raymond Antrobus has two poetry collections out this year. The US release of his award-winning debut The Perseverance and his follow-up, just out now, All The Names Given . We discuss both books in relation to Antrobus’ own particular deaf poetics. What questions do his poems raise about audience and accessibility, about the written, the heard, the signed, the pe...

Tice Cin’s debut novel Keeping the House is set within the Turkish Cypriot community of North London. But while it is also set within the heroin trade there, this book is not a crime novel, or if it is, it is like no crime novel you’ve read before. Keeping the House  is a book, by Cin’s own description, for people who feel “glitched.” The book “glitches” between past and present, between prose and...

Today’s guest, poet and translator Rosmarie Waldrop, is best known for her prose poetry and for good reason. Waldrop is one of the great prose poetry practitioners and innovators over the course of the last half century. We speak about her latest collection, The Nick of Time , through the lens of the themes, questions, and poetics that animate her work across the decades: her attraction to between...

Today’s guest, Percival Everett, author of twenty-one novels, four short story collections, six collections of poetry and a children’s book, has also been a horse and mule trainer, a jazz guitarist, a fly fisherman, a rehabilitator of mandolins, and an abstract painter. He is, however, best known for his “gleefully unhinged” ( New York Times ) hard-to-categorize novels, books that engage with the...

Haitian-Canadian-American writer Myriam Chancy is an acclaimed novelist but she is also a literary scholar who studies, among other things, storytelling. As a scholar instrumental in inaugurating Haitian women’s studies as a contemporary field of specialization, and one who has argued that much of Haitian women’s literature should be viewed through the lens of the novel as revolutionary tool, we t...

“Negotiating the Love and Renouncing the Rest,” today’s Tin House Live conversation between poets Destiny O. Birdsong & Donika Kelly, was recorded at the 2021 Tin House Summer Writers Workshop. Among many other things, they ask what it would mean to center yourself in your own work, in your own story. How would that look, and what would need to be decentered to make that happen on the pa...

Irish theologian, storyteller, poet, conflict mediator, and host of the podcast Poetry Unbound  Pádraig Ó Tuama joins David to discuss the role of both narrative storytelling and poetry in relationship to encountering ‘the other.’ How can the stories we tell about ourselves prevent us from seeing who we are, from being open to accountability and change, open to encounter and transformation? How ca...

The latest book by Palestinian novelist Adania Shibli, Minor Detail , was a finalist for the National Book Award for Translated Literature, and longlisted for the International Booker Prize. Shibli talks about what it means that she doesn’t write about Palestine but rather from Palestine. And why for her, as a writer, so many of the questions of colonization, dehumanization, and ethnonationa...

Originally delivered at the 2021 Tin House Summer Writers Workshop, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore’s electrifying talk “Writing On Your Own Terms” explores what it means to write against the canonical imperative, to write against the world as it is, to instead write on your own terms, toward community, and specifically toward the community of people who might truly appreciate and understand your work...

Today’s guest, poet Kaveh Akbar, discusses his latest poetry collection Pilgrim Bell. Given that Akbar once suggested that syntax was identity, how do the changes in Akbar’s own poetry, from his first collection to now, reflect changes in himself as a person? Akbar talks about the ways in which poetry can be a spiritual technology, about the qualities poetry and prayer share, about the language an...

Callum Angus’s A Natural History of Transition is described as a collection of short stories “that disrupts the notion that trans people can only have one transformation.” Angus talks about trans narratives, both the ones most commonly seen in the culture at large, and his notion of transness, not as a journey between two static gender poles, by a person “trapped in the wrong body,” but one of con...

Today’s episode with poet Douglas Kearney is about his latest book of poetry, Sho, and the poetry-performance album (with Haitian sound artist Val Jeanty) Fodder. Throughout Kearney’s career he has engaged with the tension between the stage and the page, the eye and the ear, the word and the body, all as a means to explore the contradictions of being Black in America. What does it mean to make the...

Arthur Sze, winner of the 2019 National Book Award in Poetry for Sight Lines , joins David Naimon to discuss his latest book, The Glass Constellation: New and Collected Poems. Together they step back to take in a half century of Arthur’s work, not only how it has changed and why, tracking the growth of a poet and person across time, but also what animating questions, despite all the changes, have...

Today’s guest, Irish Canadian writer Anakana Schofield, joins us to talk about her latest novel, Bina,  winner of the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year. Bina was also shortlisted for the 2020 Goldsmith Prize, awarded to fiction that pushes the boundaries of form (in the spirit of  Walter Benjamin who said “All great works of literature either dissolve a genre or invent one”). We talk about form...

Irish poet Doireann Ní Ghríofa joins us to talk about her latest poetry collection, To Star the Dark, and her prose debut, A Ghost in the Throat , a debut that has captured the imaginations (and all the awards) in Ireland and the UK and is just out now in North America. A Ghost in the Throat  is wonderfully hard to categorize: a memoir, a work of historical fiction, an autofiction, a translation,...