Writer, poet, and painter Rikki Ducornet returns to Between the Covers to discuss her latest novel Trafik which is her first foray into science fiction. Ducornet’s body of work—surrealist, alchemical, gnostic, metamorphic—is sparked by the wonder and mystery of dreams, as well as by the shared company of the non-human other, the eels and butterflies and orcas and jaguars we share the earth with. What does it mean for such a writer to leave earth behind? To imagine herself into a post-earth (post...
Apr 18, 2021•1 hr 47 min
Today’s guest is poet Jorie Graham. We speak about her fifteenth book of poetry, Runaway . This latest book, along with the three that precede it— Sea Change , Place, and Fast —confronts our accelerating trajectory toward climate disaster. But as Lidija Haas says for Harper’s Magazine , Graham “in her poems remakes a world you can inhabit, one in which you can sense what it is you’re letting go of, now, before it’s gone.” We talk about what it means to engage with deep time as a poet, about (dis...
Apr 01, 2021•2 hr 46 min
Today’s Between the Covers conversation with Brandon Hobson is about his novel The Removed , his first book since his National Book Award finalist, Where the Dead Sit Talking . The Removed places us with the Echota family fifteen years after the death of their son Ray-Ray at the hands of the police, and in the long shadow of the forced removal of the Cherokee from their ancestral lands to modern-day Oklahoma where the book takes place. We talk about writing into the silence surrounding police ki...
Mar 16, 2021•1 hr 55 min
Today’s guest, Viet Thanh Nguyen, returns to Between the Covers after six years to discuss The Committed , his much-anticipated follow-up to the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Sympathizer. The second book in this trilogy finds our protagonist in the French Vietnamese community of Paris in the 1980s. We talk about the differences between France and the United States with regards to race and racism, communism, socialism, and revolution, and how that shapes the discourse within the Vietnamese com...
Mar 02, 2021•2 hr
Today’s Between the Covers conversation is with the poet Ross Gay about Be Holding , his book-length poem that emerges from a sustained meditation on a mere few seconds of the basketball career of Julius Erving (aka Dr. J). Be Holding is a finalist for this year’s PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, given to a work “which has broken new ground by reshaping the boundaries of its form and signaling strong potential for lasting influence.” (This year’s judges are Vievee Francis, Fred Moten, and Tommy Orange...
Feb 16, 2021•2 hr 1 min
Today’s guest is writer, photographer, critic, and curator Teju Cole. In this extended conversation, we use Cole’s latest photo book Fernweh as a lens through which to look at his entire career, from his novels to his essay collection, from his collaborative work of image-text to the curation of his Spotify playlists. “Who is a stranger? Who is kin? What do we owe each other? What, in the inferno, is not infernal?” he asks at the beginning of Human Archipelago . We explore how these questions ec...
Feb 01, 2021•2 hr 52 min
Today’s episode is with one of today’s great writers of science fiction and fantasy, Nnedi Okorafor. Using her new novella Remote Control (Tor Books) as a lens and a frame, we discuss the difference between Afrofuturism and Africanfuturism, questions of hybrid identity and home within her stories, her use of Nigerian, Namibian, and Ghanian cosmologies to build worlds, how she harnesses anger as a fuel and fear as a creative beacon, her pivotal phone call with Octavia Butler, and why LeVar Burton...
Jan 19, 2021•1 hr 49 min
Vanessa Veselka returns to Between the Covers, eight years after her first appearance, to discuss her new novel The Great Offshore Grounds. Longlisted for this year’s National Book Award in Fiction, Roxane Gay calls The Great Offshore Grounds epic, original, and “utterly engrossing.” Lidia Yuknavitch adds: “This novel is thrilling in its content, daring in heart, and makes a helix between a novel of ideas and the best damn story of women who forge their identities on their own terms that I’ve re...
Jan 01, 2021•2 hr 24 min
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...
Dec 23, 2020•1 hr 12 min
Today’s episode of Between the Covers is a first for the show, a return to and extension of a recent episode with Natalie Diaz. Today’s ‘part two’ does not entirely depend upon part one, but it does refer back to it with frequency. So if you would like to get the fullest experience begin here . In both episodes we take each of the three individual words in Natalie’s most recent National Book Award–shortlisted poetry collection Postcolonial Love Poem and look at Natalie’s work through the lens of...
Dec 10, 2020•1 hr 59 min
Today’s episode of Between the Covers is a conversation with poet and classicist Alice Oswald. Widely considered one of our great living poets, Oswald is the 46th professor of poetry at the University of Oxford, and the first woman to hold the poetry chair in its over three centuries of existence. Perhaps best known for Memorial , her radical revocalizing of the Iliad, Oswald speaks today of her latest book, Nobody, another engagement with and reimagining of Homer, this time the Odyssey. Origina...
Dec 01, 2020•1 hr 38 min
Join poet-essayists Hanif Abdurraqib & Shayla Lawson for an extended conversation on writing pop culture (and so much more). This conversation was recorded at the 2020 Tin House Writers Workshop. Shayla’s most recent book is This is Major: Notes on Diana Ross, Dark Girls and Being Dope & Hanif’s next book is A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance. Don’t miss Hanif’s first appearance on Between the Covers as well, for his most recent poetry collection from Tin Hou...
Nov 25, 2020•1 hr 13 min
“Amid impending disasters too vast even to be perceived, what can we do―cognitively, morally, and practically? Gabbert, a tenacious researcher and a ruthless self-examiner, probes this ultimate abstraction in her essays, goes past wordless dread and comes up with enough reasoned consideration to lead us through. Do you feel―and how can you not―as if your emotional endurance is exhausted by horrors already well underway? Then you should read this book.” ―Sarah Manguso
Nov 14, 2020•2 hr 19 min
“An urgent, intimate hybrid of memoir and fiction, Homeland Elegies lays bare the broken heart of our American dream turned reality TV nightmare. The book . . . brilliantly captures how we got to this exact moment in time and at what cost. Stunning.” —A. M. Homes “An unflinchingly honest self-portrait by a brilliant Muslim-American writer, and, beyond that, an unsparing examination of both sides of that fraught hyphenated reality. Passionate, disturbing, unputdownable.” —Salman Rushdie...
Nov 01, 2020•1 hr 59 min
Today’s conversation is with poet Natalie Diaz, author of the National Book Award shortlisted collection Postcolonial Love Poem. We talk today about questions of postcoloniality, about love and postcolonial love, about writing poetry under occupation, the fine line between participation and complicity, about empathy and what cannot be translated and about the sensuality that arises from what can’t be known of another. For the bonus audio archive Natalie talks about and reads from Jorge Luis Borg...
Oct 23, 2020•2 hr 40 min
In “Getting Past the Gatekeepers: How to Keep Writing in an Industry that Excludes Us,” Kaitlyn Greenidge and Mira Jacob discuss their combined 30+ years of experience navigating literary publishing. From the first feedback to the final copyedits, they discuss strategies to stay sane and keep writing when your story doesn’t fit the industry’s narrow bookshelf.
Oct 14, 2020•1 hr 2 min
“This collection of essays, memoirs and critical pieces forms an intellectual biography of Europe’s most history-obsessed writer. Beginning with her childhood in East Berlin in the early ’60s and ’70s, the book moves in concentric circles, from the intimate and understatedly moving to the moment History collides with her life. A powerful voice singing the past into the present’s melody.” —John Freeman, Lit Hub
Oct 02, 2020•2 hr 11 min
“In The Fish & The Dove , Mary-Kim Arnold’s lyrical scope sweeps across intersecting terrains, moving through time to capture the history of occupation and legacy war in Korea, through the delicate tethers between biological mother, adoptive mother, motherland and daughter, and through the permeable membranes which exist between person and place. . . . With this fiercely tender offering, she lays bare multiple wars: ones between countries, in memory, within a family, as well as the ones betw...
Sep 23, 2020•2 hr 11 min
A conversation between Brandon Taylor & Garth Greenwell about queer aesthetics, “problematic art,” representation, and much more.
Sep 12, 2020•1 hr 2 min
“It’s hard to overstate the importance of this gorgeous, harrowing, heartbreaking book, which tackles sexual violence and its aftermath while also articulating the singular pain of knowing—or loving, or caring for, or having a history with—one’s rapist. Vanasco is whip-smart and tender, open and ruthless; she is the perfect guide through the minefield of her trauma, and ours.” —Carmen Maria Machado “I wish everyone in this country would read it.” —Melissa Febos
Sep 03, 2020•2 hr 16 min
“Anatomy of Melancholy” is a conversation between Melissa Febos & Bassey Ikpi at the 2020 Tin House Summer Writers Workshop. Febos & Ikpi talk about making narrative (and aesthetic) sense out of the darkest parts of one’s past. Bassey Ikpi is the New York Times bestselling author of I’m Telling the Truth But I’m Lying and founder of The Siwe Project , a worldwide non-profit dedicated to promoting mental health awareness throughout the global black community. Melissa Febos is the author o...
Aug 27, 2020•1 hr 9 min
“In Lauren Camp’s Took House we are enveloped in a poetry both precise and mysterious, intimate and sublime. Reading through these poems, I was reminded of the tenet that poetry is not like the interior life, but is the interior life, the thing itself made flesh via language. . . . Here is a poet articulating her human existence . . . here is a particular heart and mind removing its shield in order to commune, to help us see the world again, more deeply and more strangely, and reader, I am grate...
Aug 20, 2020•1 hr 32 min
“ Sacco is a talent entirely unto himself, applying an exquisitely fine eye for detail to the urgent histories that define the world around us. . . . Now, Sacco brings that eye to the lives of the Dene people in the Canadian subarctic, getting the full picture as only he can.” —Jonny Diamond, Literary Hub “ A tour de force . . . luminous . . . What begins as an exploration of the effects of fracking on Native lands sprawls into a haunted history of an entire civilization.” —Ed Park, The New York...
Aug 01, 2020•1 hr 39 min
“ Verge is a bouquet of dynamite: explosive, deadly, and spectacularly beautiful. These stories captivated me like modern fairy tales, and like those dark lessons they showed me how resilience is forged through survival, beauty through brokenness, joy by fire. The women who occupy them are my favorite kinds of heroines: as flawed as they are furious, as bold as they are tender. I won’t soon forget them.” —Melissa Febos
Jul 20, 2020•1 hr 35 min
Today’s talk, “ On Likability” by Lacy M. Johnson, was given at the 2018 Tin House Writers Workshop. It later became an essay, one selected by Rebecca Solnit for The Best American Essays 2019 .
Jul 08, 2020•33 min
“Shrapnel Maps is so beautiful. Half dream, half nightmare, all real. Filled with the remnants of what people hope for and what they are willing to do, and everything that remains afterwards. It’s a confrontation to identity and it dares to conjugate love as a defiance to the capacity of violence. Extraordinary. . . . elegant and devastating and compelling and complex.” —Pádraig Ó Tuama, poet, theologian, and conflict mediator
Jul 01, 2020•2 hr 4 min
Lidia Yuknavitch gave this craft talk, “ Writing from the Deep Cut,” at the 2018 Tin House Writers Workshop. As Lidia says: “ We are (always) living in tumultuous times. The despair and trauma fracture our life narratives daily, culturally and personally. And yet we endure, make love, make art, we keep creating. There is so much to learn from the edge of things, from the cracks and cuts and fissures of the earth, of our hearts. What can writing become? What new narrative strategies are emerging?...
Jun 17, 2020•36 min
“ The City We Became is a wonderfully inventive love letter to New York City that spans the multiverse. A big middle finger to Lovecraft with a lot of heart, creativity, smarts and humor. A timely and audacious allegorical tale for our times. This book is all these things and more.” —Rebecca Roanhorse “The most important speculative writer of her generation . . . She’s that good.” —John Scalzi
Jun 11, 2020•1 hr 38 min
“Love Child’s Hotbed of Occasional Poetry is a 21st-century paean to the sterling love songs humming throughout four hundred years of black American life.” —Lit Hub “Her poems elide the generational and the personal with ample music. They are, therefore, more than taut with vital details; they are alive with nuance and contrast, where doom is rightfully proximate to creation and grace.” — Sewanee Review
Jun 01, 2020•2 hr 20 min
Given at the 2019 Tin House Summer Workshop, Rebecca Makkai’s craft talk “You Talkin’ to Me?: The ‘Ear’ of the Story” looks at an important but underappreciated aspect of story craft, the flip side of point of view, the point of telling. In her words, “Who is the story’s implied listener? Are you casting your listeners as people who already know this world or people who need to be filled in? And what are the political and artistic implications of glossing a culture or setting for readers who don...
May 25, 2020•54 min
