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

Ten years in the making, poet Rickey Laurentiis joins us to talk about her much-anticipated remarkable new collection Death of the First Idea. “In the past decade, as Laurentiis has transitioned, her ideas of the lyric and poetry have transformed, as has the America in which she lives,” says the back copy on this book, whose […] The post Rickey Laurentiis : Death of the First Idea appeared first on Tin House.

What does it mean to write toward or under the aura of another poet one admires, to write in homage, as a celebration of another? What happens to language when it hovers between two writers, between how they each separately inhabit it? What does it say about the self, or is discovered about it—within the […] The post Laynie Browne : Apprentice to a Breathing Hand appeared first on Tin House.

Today’s guest is writer and critic Martha Anne Toll. Through a discussion of her latest novel Duet for One we explore the perennial mystery of writing and art-making, namely how to render something that lives beyond representation, and how words can become a vehicle to evoke what words themselves cannot adequately describe. In this case, […] The post Martha Anne Toll : Duet for One appeared first on Tin House.

Today’s conversation with Rob Macaisa Colgate is about two books, his poetry collection Hardly Creatures and his verse drama My Love is Water. You could say these two books are approaching the same questions, but from opposite, if complementary vantage points. Questions of care and disability, of accessibility and community, of Filipino-American identity and the afterlives […] The post Rob Macaisa Colgate : Hardly Creatures & My Love is Water appeared first on Tin House.

Don’t miss today’s conversation with Robert Macfarlane. A polyvocal deep dive into the mysteries of words and rivers, of speech acts as spells, whorls as worlds, of grammars of animacy, of what it means to river, and to be rivered. From the Epic of Gilgamesh to Virginia Woolf’s wave in the mind to Ursula K. […] The post Robert Macfarlane : Is a River Alive? appeared first on Tin House.

With the arrival of Ancestors, the third and final book in adrienne maree brown’s Grievers Trilogy, we take the iconic frames she has created in her nonfiction work—emergent strategy, pleasure activism, fractal responsibility, loving corrections and more—and look at how they are dramatized within this fictional near-future Detroit. Much as the three books do themselves, […] The post adrienne maree brown : Ancestors appeared first on Tin House.

The Book of Records is many things: a book of historical fiction and speculative fiction, a meditation on time and on space-time,  on storytelling and truth, on memory and the imagination, a book that impossibly conjures the lives and eras of the philosopher Baruch Spinoza, the Tang dynasty poet Du Fu and the political theorist […] The post Madeleine Thien : The Book of Records appeared first on Tin House.

What would it mean for our writing, thinking, and living if we looked to land as pedagogy, or if we thought of theory as something embodied and kinetic? In Theory of Water Leanne Betasamosake Simpson takes us not only outside the academy, and away from our screens, but outside and into the world at large […] The post Leanne Betasamosake Simpson : Theory of Water appeared first on Tin House.

From the craft of writing sex in poetry to the virtues of failing publicly, today’s conversation with poet Keetje Kuipers is not to be missed. We explore everything from storytelling within poems to the dialectic between control and wildness; everything from queerness and wilderness to fantasy as a portal to truth on the page. Keetje’s […] The post Keetje Kuipers : Lonely Women Make Good Lovers appeared first on Tin House.

What does it mean to risk rupture for rapture, on the page, and in one’s life? Or for water to be one’s method, mode or muse? Are inherited forms (of womanhood, of sexuality, of national identity) a gift or are their borders meant to be crossed and breached? Together we look at forms and norms […] The post Patrycja Humienik : We Contain Landscapes appeared first on Tin House.