61: Iman Mersal

This month we are speaking with international prize-winning novelist and former Edinburgh Makar / Poet Laureate (2008-2014), Ron Butlin. In 2009 he was made the first-ever Honorary Writing Fellow (together with Ian Rankin) at Edinburgh University. Much of his work — novels, short stories and poetry — has been widely broadcast and translated. In addition to his plays for BBC radio and theatre, he has written seven opera libretti, three of them for Scottish Opera. He also writes for children. Ron has given countless readings worldwide — from a one-roomed Shetland primary school to an Arab tent in the desert (most wonderfully accompanied by a Bahraini oudplayer), from the Queen’s Hall in Edinburgh to the House of Lords in London, the Centre Pompidou in Paris and to a waterfront festival in Sydney. Personal Bio: I was brought up in a small Borders village, quit school at sixteen and hitchhiked down to London. A brief period of life on the streets, (see my recent novel So Many Lives and All of Them Are Yours, 2023) came to an end when I secured the positions of valet-footman (see Billionaires’ Banquet, 2017), then barnacle scraper on Thames barges, labourer, barman, computer operator and city messenger. Becoming an associate member of a short-lived pop group started me writing song lyrics. My longest-ever job, as a model for art students, allowed me to sit (usually more or less naked) and do nothing for hours, leaving my imagination completely free. My earliest published poems date from this period. Later, while living in Paris, in the hills above Barcelona and a commune in the Australian outback (see Belonging, 2006), I began writing fiction. My first novel, The Sound of My Voice won the Prix Mille Pages 2004 and Prix Lucioles 2005 (both for Best Foreign Novel). For the last thirty years, my marriage to the writer and poet Regi Claire has brought stability to my life — and about time too! We live in Edinburgh (the setting for GhostMoon, nominated for the International Impac Dublin Literary Award 2016). I love the music and magic of words and am as excited now to begin writing every morning as when I first started. I also teach a course in Music Appreciation at the University of Edinburgh. Currently I am working on The Diary I Didn't Keep. This novel-in-progress is being serialised in fortnightly instalments on Substack as I write it. This new and rather alarming venture certainly keeps me on my toes. The novel is loosely autobiographical and the first instalment was released only recently, on 12 October. Here it is: The Diary I Didn't Keep ronbutlin.substack.com - - - - Find us on Twitter: @UnsoundMethods - @JaimieBatchan - @LochlanBloom Jaimie's Instagram is: @jaimie_batchan Or at jaimiebatchan.com and lochlanbloom.com We have a store page on Bookshop, where you can find our books, as well as those of previous guests: https://uk.bookshop.org/shop/unsoundmethods Thanks for listening, please like, subscribe and rate Unsound Methods wherever you get your podcasts. Our website is: https://unsoundmethods.co.uk/

This month's episode features our chat with novelist and short story writer Amina Cain, the author of the novel Indelicacy, a New York Times Editors’ Choice and finalist for the Rathbones Folio Prize and the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, published in 2020 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, and two collections of short stories, Creature and I Go To Some Hollow. Her latest book, A Horse at Night: On Writing, came out in October of 2022 with Dorothy, a publishing project in the US and Daunt Books in the UK. In 2021, she was longlisted for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize. Her writing has appeared in Granta, The Paris Review Daily, BOMB, LA Times, Tate Etc. and other places.   Amina has also co-curated literary events, such as When Does It or You Begin?, a month long festival of writing, performance, and video at Links Hall in Chicago; Both Sides and The Center, a summer festival of readings and performances enacting various levels of proximity, intimacy, and distance at the MAK Center/Schindler House in West Hollywood; and the Errata Salon, a talk/lecture series at Betalevel in LA’s Chinatown. Joining us towards the end of last year, Amina talked to us about writing in between teaching, using reading and looking at paintings/images to open things up, pushing through a false starts, and why she will always return to Marguerite Duras. You can find out more about Amina and her writing here: https://aminacain.com/ - - - - Find us on Twitter: @UnsoundMethods - @JaimieBatchan - @LochlanBloom Jaimie's Instagram is: @jaimie_batchan Or at jaimiebatchan.com and lochlanbloom.com We have a store page on Bookshop, where you can find our books, as well as those of previous guests: https://uk.bookshop.org/shop/unsoundmethods Thanks for listening, please like, subscribe and rate Unsound Methods wherever you get your podcasts. Our website is: https://unsoundmethods.co.uk/

This month’s episode is our chat with the late Christopher Priest, who sadly passed away on 2nd February 2024. In what will have been one of his last interviews, we spoke to Christopher on 3rd November 2023, where he talked us through his development as a writer, his skepticism about using notebooks, dealing with dreadful editors,  not writing for nine years, and how writing is like walking to Doncaster. Christopher was a hugely acclaimed writer, and having written for nearly 60 years, his work spanned a vast universe, from hard science fiction to high profile Hollywood film adaptation by Christopher Nolan. His works include The Affirmation, Fugue for a Darkening Island, The Inverted World, The Glamour, The Prestige, and The Separation. It was an honour to get to speak to Christopher. For those interested in his writing, his website is still online, containing a treasure trove of articles, links to all his works and his thoughts on a range of subjects: https://christopher-priest.co.uk/ - - - - Find us on Twitter: @UnsoundMethods - @JaimieBatchan - @LochlanBloom Jaimie's Instagram is: @jaimie_batchan Or at jaimiebatchan.com and lochlanbloom.com We have a store page on Bookshop, where you can find our books, as well as those of previous guests: https://uk.bookshop.org/shop/unsoundmethods Thanks for listening, please like, subscribe and rate Unsound Methods wherever you get your podcasts. Our website is: https://unsoundmethods.co.uk/

This month we return to our first in-person recording for way too long, as we sat down with writer, musician and all-round cultural agitator Bill Drummond. As half of the KLF, Bill produced some of the finest singles of the 1990s, before dumping a dead sheep at the door of the Brit Awards, deleting the group's back catalogue and burning a million quid on a Scottish Island. But he has a writing life so rich and interesting that we don't ask him a single question about any of that. You can access Bill's series of spoken novels and associated material at Penkiln Burn: https://www.penkilnburn.com/home/ - as discussed, they can't be binged and are on a rotation with a new one each day. You can read a bit more of Bill's writing about the Curfew Tower in Cushendall, and see some photos, here: https://visualartists.ie/ask-for-zippy-bill-drummond-tells-the-tale-of-how-and-why-he-established-the-artists-residency-in-a-tower-on-the-antrim-coast/ Thanks to the School of Advanced Study, University of London, for providing use of their new podcast studio to record this episode. UPDATE 7/5 For any listeners noticing that the headshot has changed. Bill sent the following update on the new image.... Sunday the 5th of May 2024 Folks, Anyone who grew up in the same culture as I did would know who Oor Wullie was and still is. This is along with knowing all about the dynamics of the Broon family. If I had been a generation older, instead of Bill being the hypocorism of my name (William) it would have been Wullie. That said, if my parents had been of Irish descent, it might have been Liam. Anyway... Last week for my 71st birthday, my youngest son drew a picture of me for a birthday card. This picture was more of a caricature than a life like image of me. But this caricature triggered a chain of thoughts that led me to discover an inner Wullie. Maybe not the Oor Wullie of my childhood but maybe the Your Wullie of my old age. Anyway... A few weeks ago, I agreed for the first time ever, to be the guest on a podcast. For this they wanted a contemporary headshot of me that they could use on their site. I did not have one, so they just grabbed one off the internet.  My son’s caricature of me made me think, I should ask him to do a picture of me that I could use as my official headshot. And that every year around my birthday, for however many birthdays I have left, he does another picture of my head. Thus, the picture both reflecting me getting older and the way he makes pictures evolves. Of course... By the time he turns 13 (in just over a year and three months) drawing a picture of his dad might be the last thing he will want to do. But... Putting that to one side and allowing the construct of The Life Model to have influence, I like the idea of inviting anyone to re-interpret the picture my son has done. And this re-interpretation to be in whatever way they feel like (except of course not AI created). And for this re-interpretation to be used in whatever way they feel like. As in tear it up or use it to replace whatever headshot is being used on the Wikipedia page that has my name at the top.  I embrace lack of control, thus... I like the idea of their being numerous versions of this image my youngest son has created and for them to evolve in different directions at the same time. From ten second scribbles to a detailed woodcut... From oil on canvas to reductive screen print. From a Steve Ditko to a Naoki Urasawa. Thus... Freeing me up from the vanity we might be hardwired to carry, when attempting to choose a photograph of ourselves to go public. Also... If you do one, please feel free to share it with [email protected] for a future joint Your Wullie outing. I am... Or at least for now... Your Wullie Post Script: Your Wullie might be the latest inner self to reveal itself to me, but... There is this other rather deranged and aging inner self that has been lurking the back lanes of my mind. He goes by the name of King Boy D. This King Boy D suffers from delusions that he once was something that existed on the pages of music papers in the late 1970s or was it the late 1980s (he gets confused). And in turn in the minds of those backward looking and aging individuals, that read those long-forgotten music papers.  Like other aging characters that can be found on the pages of those music papers, he shares the delusion that things, or at least music was better then, and that their genius might be rediscovered by future generations. But all this means is that they in general are tempted to plunder their so-called legacy for short term gain. Thus, be warned, if you ever come across anything being marketed to exploit whatever that King Boy D ‘legacy’ might be, ignore it...  Delete it...  Unsubscribe it... To Unsubscribe is one of the most rewarding things you can do.  I like to unsubscribe from at least one thing every week of the year. Maybe this should be National Unsubscribe Week, where we unsubscribe from everything we have ever subscribed to. And remember, and to quote my various other selves... ‘If you can buy it, it is not worth having.’ As in the only things that one can truly have, thus own, is one’s birth and one’s death.  ‘One’s birth and one’s death’ might be the cause of others’ actions but it is only you that can ever truly have, own or experience them. - - - - Find us on Twitter: @UnsoundMethods - @JaimieBatchan - @LochlanBloom Jaimie's Instagram is: @jaimie_batchan Or at jaimiebatchan.com and lochlanbloom.com We have a store page on Bookshop, where you can find our books, as well as those of previous guests: https://uk.bookshop.org/shop/unsoundmethods Thanks for listening, please like, subscribe and rate Unsound Methods wherever you get your podcasts. Our website is: https://unsoundmethods.co.uk/

This month, we are speaking to the Egyptian poet and author Iman Mersal. We talk about the genesis of ideas, structure and form when writing in Arabic, and the importance of urgency in directing your writing. Iman's work includes the creative non-fiction work Traces of Enayat (2023, And Other Stories https://www.andotherstories.org/traces-of-enayat/), and her poetry  has been featured in numerous publications such as Blackbird, The American Poetry Review, Parnassus, The New York Review of Books, and Paris Review. - - - - Find us on Twitter: @UnsoundMethods - @JaimieBatchan - @LochlanBloom Jaimie's Instagram is: @jaimie_batchan Or at jaimiebatchan.com and lochlanbloom.com We have a store page on Bookshop, where you can find our books, as well as those of previous guests: https://uk.bookshop.org/shop/unsoundmethods Thanks for listening, please like, subscribe and rate Unsound Methods wherever you get your podcasts. Our website is: https://unsoundmethods.co.uk/

Episode 60 with Natasha Soobramanien and Luke Williams This month, we are speaking to not one but two authors as we discuss collaborative writing with Natasha Soobramanien and Luke Williams. Natasha and Luke are the joint authors of Diego Garcia, winner of the 2022 Goldsmiths Prize. We talk about their unique approach to crafting a novel and the differences between empathy and solidarity, as well as the current situation for the displaced Chagossian people, a key focus of their novel.  An update from the authors: This podcast was recorded on 13 October when the UK was in active negotiations to hand back the Chagos Archipelago to Mauritius, whose sovereignty over the islands is internationally recognised. The then UK Foreign Secretary James Cleverly’s announcement on 3 November 2022 included a statement of the UK’s will to "resolve all outstanding issues" in relation to Chagos, indicating recognition of the Chagossian people’s right to return. In January 2024, in a Foreign Affairs Committee Meeting discussion of defence issues in relation to current world events, including Israel’s continuing violation of international law in relation to its occupation of Palestine, and its genocidal assault on the Palestinian people, the recently appointed Foreign Secretary David Cameron strongly indicated that the return of the Chagossian people to their islands was no longer a possibility, and that “the overriding question must be the safety, security and usability of this base”. You can find out more about the Chagossian struggle for reparations and the right to return here: thechagosrefugeesgroup.com https://chagossianvoices.org/ - - - - Find us on Twitter: @UnsoundMethods - @JaimieBatchan - @LochlanBloom Jaimie's Instagram is: @jaimie_batchan Or at jaimiebatchan.com and lochlanbloom.com We have a store page on Bookshop, where you can find our books, as well as those of previous guests: https://uk.bookshop.org/shop/unsoundmethods Thanks for listening, please like, subscribe and rate Unsound Methods wherever you get your podcasts. Our website is: https://unsoundmethods.co.uk/

We're opening 2024 with our chat with David Shields: David is the internationally bestselling author of twenty-five books, including Reality Hunger (which, in 2020, Lit Hub named one of the most important books of the past decade), The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead (New York Times bestseller), Black Planet: Facing Race During an NBA Season (finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and PEN USA Award), Remote: Reflections on Life in the Shadow of Celebrity (PEN/Revson Award), and Other People: Takes & Mistakes (NYTBR Editors’ Choice). The Very Last Interview was published by New York Review Books in 2022. The recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, two NEA fellowships, and a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship, Shields—a senior contributing editor of Conjunctions—has published essays and stories in the New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, Esquire, Yale Review, Salon, Slate, Tin House, A Public Space, McSweeney’s, Believer, Huffington Post, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Best American Essays. His work has been translated into two dozen languages. The film adaptation of I Think You’re Totally Wrong: A Quarrel, which Shields co-wrote and co-stars in, was released in 2017 (available on Vudu). Shields wrote, produced, and directed Lynch: A History, a 2019 documentary about Marshawn Lynch’s use of silence, echo, and mimicry as key tools of resistance (streaming on Prime Video, Peacock, AMC, Sundance Now, Apple TV, Tubi, Kanopy, Google Play, and YouTube).  In June 2023, I’ll Show You Mine, a feature film that Shields co-wrote and was produced by Mark and Jay Duplass, was released theatrically nation-wide and distributed digitally on Prime Video, iTunes, YouTube, Google Play, Vudu, and Vimeo. A new film, How We Got Here, which Shields wrote and directed and which argues that Melville plus Nietzsche divided by the square root of (Allan) Bloom times Žižek (squared) equals Bannon, is streaming now on Tubi, OTT Studio, and Cineverse; the companion volume is forthcoming in January 2024. The text of the passage that David reads out in this episode is as follows: When a “colleague” asked if I have “any sort of tried-and-true compositional methodology when it comes to literary collage,” I found myself emailing back, in about five minutes, this curiously complete summary: “I’ll stumble into a metaphor that in my grandiosity I think explains the universe, at least for me, at least for the moment. Some large subject will represent for me a personal, cultural, and human ‘crisis’: something about which I’m confused, ambivalent, embarrassed, ashamed, excited. I’ll then ‘shoot a lot of film’—gather hundreds or even thousands of pages over years, sometimes over decades. Just stuff: stuff I’ve read, old stuff I wrote, new stuff I’m writing, emails from friends, research, etc., all of which puts ‘pressure’ on the ‘material’ (some supposedly enormous subject). I won’t really know what I want to say about it. I just know it’s tugging at me and I need to explore it and I’ve convinced myself I have something or other to add to the conversation.  “At a certain point, I’ll no longer be surprised by shooting more film. It will all be telling me the same thing. So I’ll stop and read and reread and reread what I have. Often the page count goes down very quickly—from, say 3,000 pages to, say,1000, then 500, then 300, then 140. At 140, maybe it’s a book. No literary collage can be longer than 120 pages. (Joke.) (Sort of.) “To mix metaphors: you’re getting rid of all the dross, all the easy things, all the obvious things. You keep only what scares you. Then you start pouring the paragraphs you like into different thematic silos, different rubrics. And you organize each of these rubrics so that each of these silos or rubrics or holding tanks has its own trajectory. Each one is in a way its own mini-essay. Then you arrange the silos either vertically or horizontally. I.e., as consecutive chapters going downward—as, say, Jean Toomer does in Cane (I think of that as vertical)—or you arrange it horizontally—across space—as, say, Amy Fusselman does in The Pharmacist’s Mate. Basically, it’s either AAAAA, BBBBB, CCCC, DDDDD or A/B/C/D/A/E/B/B/D/B/C/A/D. Easiest thing in the world (nothing is more difficult and more beautiful).” Find us on Twitter: @UnsoundMethods - @JaimieBatchan - @LochlanBloom Jaimie's Instagram is: @jaimie_batchan Or at jaimiebatchan.com and lochlanbloom.com We have a store page on Bookshop, where you can find our books, as well as those of previous guests: https://uk.bookshop.org/shop/unsoundmethods Thanks for listening, please like, subscribe and rate Unsound Methods wherever you get your podcasts. Our website is: https://unsoundmethods.co.uk/

In this episode we're joined by Johanna Hedva, a Korean American writer, artist, and musician who was raised in Los Angeles by a family of witches, and now lives in LA and Berlin. Johanna is the author of the essay ‘Sick Woman Theory’, originally published in 2016, which has now been translated into ten languages. Hedva is also the author of the novel On Hell, which was one of Dennis Cooper’s favourite books of 2018, and the nonfiction collection Minerva the Miscarriage of the Brain. 'Your Love is Not Good' is out now, available from And Other Stories: https://www.andotherstories.org/your-love-is-not-good/ Johanna's website: https://johannahedva.com/ Johanna’s Nine Inch Nails piece in the White Review is here: https://www.thewhitereview.org/feature/theyre-really-close-to-my-body/ Johanna's latest record: https://bighedva.bandcamp.com/album/black-moon-lilith-in-pisces-in-the-4th-house  A new piece called "scream demo": https://www.amant.org/publications/10-scream-demo "Why it's taking so long" (essay): https://topicalcream.org/features/why-its-taking-so-long/ "Sick Woman Theory" (essay): https://topicalcream.org/features/sick-woman-theory/ Author photos credit: Ian Byers-Gamber Find us on Twitter: @UnsoundMethods - @JaimieBatchan - @LochlanBloom Jaimie's Instagram is: @jaimie_batchan Or at jaimiebatchan.com and lochlanbloom.com We have a store page on Bookshop, where you can find our books, as well as those of previous guests: https://uk.bookshop.org/shop/unsoundmethods Thanks for listening, please like, subscribe and rate Unsound Methods wherever you get your podcasts. Our website is: https://unsoundmethods.co.uk/

For episode 57 we caught up with the Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, author of 8 novels, 3 collections of short stories, numerous plays and pieces of non-fiction and 5 memoirs. An indefatigable defender and promoter of African literature and language, Ngũgĩ’s writing spans from the early 1960s onwards. He talked to us about his journey to becoming a writer, from having friends who proved he didn’t need to wait for permission, then being a central figure in the emergence of African writing’s recognition across the world, being imprisoned for writing a play in his native Kikuyu language, to then receiving a medical diagnosis that meant he had a very short amount of time to write his ‘final’ book. It’s quite a ride. Technical note: Due to some kind of infrastructural fault at his home, Ngũgĩ spoke to us from a hotel room and we had to record via MS Teams, so the audio is not quite up to our usual standards. There's also something odd with the audio at the very beginning, apologies!   Find us on Twitter: @UnsoundMethods - @JaimieBatchan - @LochlanBloom Jaimie's Instagram is: @jaimie_batchan Or at jaimiebatchan.com and lochlanbloom.com   We have a store page on Bookshop, where you can find our books, as well as those of previous guests: https://uk.bookshop.org/shop/unsoundmethods Thanks for listening, please like, subscribe and rate Unsound Methods wherever you get your podcasts. Our website is: https://unsoundmethods.co.uk/

For episode 56 we're joined by Daisy Hildyard, the author of two novels – Emergency (2022) and Hunters in the Snow (2013) – and one work of nonfiction, The Second Body (2017). Daisy’s first novel, Hunters in the Snow, received the Somerset Maugham Award and a ‘5 under 35’ honorarium at the USA National Book Awards. Her essay The Second Body, a brilliantly lucid account of the dissolving boundaries between all life on earth, was published by Fitzcarraldo Editions in 2017. She lives with her family in North Yorkshire, where she was born. Emergency was published last year by Fitzcarraldo Editions: https://fitzcarraldoeditions.com/books/emergency This episode took us on a ride through shutting out the world during your writing time, having a spouse as your first reader, how notes come together, and the different nudges that fiction and non-fiction give you as a writer. Find us on Twitter: @UnsoundMethods - @JaimieBatchan - @LochlanBloom Jaimie's Instagram is: @jaimie_batchan Or at jaimiebatchan.com and lochlanbloom.com We have a store page on Bookshop, where you can find our books, as well as those of previous guests: https://uk.bookshop.org/shop/unsoundmethods Thanks for listening, please like, subscribe and rate Unsound Methods wherever you get your podcasts. Our website is: https://unsoundmethods.co.uk/