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

Latest Episodes:

Hanif Abdurraqib : A Fortune For Your Disaster May 08, 2020

Show notes

“A Fortune for Your Disaster proves that, if you pay attention, Black people have defined and still define themselves for themselves amid roses and dandelions, cardinals and violets, the blues of music and police uniforms, prayer and swagger. . . . The disaster is not us or ours but what we endure, forced and as a matter of course, whether our presence is acknowledged or not, on our terms or not. As death insists on invading our lives, we keep making more and more beauty in order to survive it. . . . The beauty of our excellence is soundtracked by love and violence. . . . The fortune is us and it is ours. With a music as richly profound as we are, Abdurraqib makes it undeniably so.” —Khadijah Queen

Tin House Live : How to Write a Hoax Poem with Kevin Young May 01, 2020

Show notes

The New Yorker poetry editor and host of The New Yorker poetry podcast, Kevin Young, delivered this talk, “How to Write a Hoax Poem,” at the 2014 Tin House Writers Workshop. He discusses some of the more notable modern poetry hoaxes, glimpsing into the secret history of the poem as something conceived to tempt or even trick. By understanding the ways the hoax works, Young suggests that we may better know our own assumptions, habits, and hurts, and how to subvert them in our writing.

Rachel Zucker : SoundMachine Apr 24, 2020

Show notes

“Whether speaking about motherhood, grief, or poetry, Zucker’s unrelenting eye and wittily critical voice peel back these experiences to reveal insights that are both deeply human and uncompromisingly analytic. . . . Above all, this book is open—open about difficult subjects, open in the way its language operates, open in its willingness to create a psychological intimacy between the speaker and the reader.” —Morgan Levine for The Columbia Review

Tin House Live : Power & Audience, On Not Writing for White People with Ingrid Rojas Contreras Apr 15, 2020

Show notes

Ingrid Rojas Contreras’ talk “Power & Audience: On Not Writing for White People” was given at the 2019 Tin House Summer Workshop in Portland, Oregon. In this talk she references a 2019 Publishing Industry Survey and a series of pie charts showing the racial, gender, sexual orientation, and ability breakdown of various subsets of the publishing industry. Contreras also further discusses these themes, in relationship to the recent controversy over the book American Dirt, in her new essay at The Cut called “There’s Nothing Thrilling About Trauma.”

Tin House Live : On Dialogue with Dorothy Allison Apr 08, 2020

Show notes

Dorothy Allison treated the participants of the 2011 Summer Workshop to a spirited discussion of how characters should speak on the page. Not only “he said, she said, none of them said a thing,” but a whole range of language issues—what is said and not said, dialect and rhythm, pacing, patterns in speech, and most importantly, the language of gesture and avoidance.

Mark Haber : Reinhardt’s Garden Apr 01, 2020

Show notes

“Reinhardt’s Garden is one of those perfect books that looks small and exotic and melancholic from the outside but, once in, is immense and exultant in the best possible way. Think Amulet by Roberto Bolaño, think Nightwood by Djuna Barnes, think Train Dreams by Denis Johnson, think Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys, think Zama by Antonio Di Benedetto, think The Loser by Thomas Bernhard. Think.” —Rodrigo Fresán

Jenny Offill : Weather Mar 11, 2020

Show notes

“Novelists don’t need to dream the end of the world anymore—they need to wake up to it. Jenny Offill is one of today’s few essential voices, because she writes about essential things, in sentences so clipped and glittering it’s as if they are all cut from one diamond.” –Jonathan Dee

Lance Olsen : My Red Heaven Mar 02, 2020

Show notes

“Lance Olsen locates his porous, alluring, heartbreaking, and haunted narrative in Berlin on a day in 1927. Poised at a moment of such hope and doom, it is a ravishing meditation on history, on time, and on what it is to be alive.” —Carole Maso

Tin House Live : “From First Draft to Plot” with Alexander Chee Feb 21, 2020

Show notes

Alexander Chee delivered this craft lecture, from “First Draft to Plot,” at the 2016 Tin House Summer Workshop. Chee is the author most recently of the essay collection How to Write an Autobiographical Novel.

Garth Greenwell : Cleanness Feb 14, 2020

Show notes

“Garth Greenwell, whose first book is a masterpiece, amazingly has written a second book that is also a masterpiece. The great enterprise that Joyce and Lawrence began—to write with utter literal candor about sex, grounding one’s moral life and philosophical insight in what that candor reveals about us—finds fulfillment, a late apotheosis, in Greenwell’s work. Cleanness is the act of a master.” —Frank Bidart