F***ing Shakespeare

In honor of the launch of Catherine Baab-Muguira’s new book, Poe for Your Problems, we are re-releasing F***ing Shakespeare’s interview with her that we did back in 2019—where we talked about this book in its wee-baby stages. And now, here it is, all grown up like the big beautiful babe it is!

Get ready for some perfect hot takes. Kate, Jess, Phuc, and Cat look behind the curtain at the self-appointed guardians of world culture. Cat celebrates indulging a rabbit hole of eccentric ideas as a freelancer and we all have a laugh about how her outstanding personal essay on how her highlights helped propel her career.* Plus, we endlessly appreciate Cat for being real with us about writing, success, and mental illness as she crowns Poe, word for word, “the most likely self-help guru in history.”

Check out more of Cat’s work onher website,her Contently page, andher Twitter.

Cat’s essays that we discussed in the podcast:

• “Edgar Allan Poe Was a Broke-Ass Freelancer” in The Millions

• “Buy All Your Furniture at Target, For Tomorrow We Die” in The Billfold

• “I Spent $11,537 Becoming a Blonde” in The Cut

• “The Seductive Scamming of Theranos’s Elizabeth Holmes” in shondaland

Suggested Reads & Honorable Mentions

• Tigers are Better-Looking by Jean Rhys

• “Like This or Die” by Christian Lorentzen in Harper’s Magazine (we discuss this article at 10:55)

• “The Literati of New York City” by Edgar Allan Poe

• “The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe

• J.W. Ostrom’s works on Edgar Allan Poe’s letters

• Elizabeth Holmes’s net worth according to Forbes

*Please note, we went out of our way not to say “highlight of her career.” You’re welcome for the lack of bad puns.

Day 1, Episode 1

To kick off the podcast interviews at AWP, we were thrilled to talk to Lilly Dancyger. Her new memoir, Negative Space, comes out May 2021 with Santa Fe Writers Project. She’s the editor of the essay collection, Burn It Down: Women Writing About Anger, and a contributing editor at Catapult. Among the other fantastic things with which she’s involved, she founded and co-hosts a reading series and newsletter (which you should subscribe to) called Memoir Monday.

Honorable mentions:

• Artist Joe Schactman, Dancyger’s father whose story her memoir pieces together

• Writer Lidia Yuknavitch’s memoir The Chronology of Water

• Memoir Monday’s partner publications Catapult, Granta, Guernica, Narratively, The Rumpus, and Literary Hub

If you have yet to read guest Mira Jacob’s 2019 memoir in conversations, Good Talk, we’re jealous. Praised for her “disarming wit,” Jacob achieves this by welcoming you into her indecision, her confusion, her wonder at raising a child against the backdrop of that tender point where politics meets the personal in 2016 America. In addition to it being hilariously funny and a master class in dialogue writing, the turn of Good Talk (and for that matter her exquisite novel The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing), is that she doesn’t flatten the world to make sense of it — she complicates it. She explains the stuff she knows, as well as the stuff she doesn’t know, about a world we think we know but don’t really. Before long, you’re laughing, crying, and struggling to figure it out right along with her.

In a talk she gave to young women writers at the NYC non-profit “Girls Write Now,” Jacob said that early on she didn’t know why she wanted to be a writer, she just wanted to make words that made worlds. In the podcast, we talk about how Jacob taught herself how to draw for Good Talk, her publishing journey in an industry that still caters to an imaginary white audience, discussing race with people you love, and the importance of maintaining curiosity as a parent. For the rich conversations that come out of the worlds she has wrought, we are so lucky.

Work by Mira Jacob:

• Good Talk: A Memoir in Conversations (2019)

• The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing (2014)

Honorable mentions:

• Jason Reynolds

• Chris Jackson’s work with Ta-Nehisi Coates, Victor LaValle, and Mat Johnson

Things we learned:

• Jacob’s cat is named Samuel L. Jackson

• If her characters remind you of your own Malayali mother so much that you need to tell her in a drunken letter, She WILL read and in fact cherish it

• If you don’t tell the people you’re pitching your graphic novel to that you can’t draw, they most likely won’t ask, and then you can teach yourself to do it anyway

• We should drop the word panache from our collective vocabularies ASAP

Photo credit: In Kim

The one and only Jia Tolentino was our guest on the show. We had Shipley’s donuts & it’s Britney’s Spears birthday all in honor of Jia. She’s a staff writer for the New Yorker and if you haven’t been living in a cave, you know she’s been on an international press tour for her first book, Trick Mirror, which she documented with her signature mix of wheee and disbelief,echoing the rollercoaster of gratitude and surreality we all ricochet between several trillion times a day (when we’re not reeling from helplessness and despair).

In every piece of her writing, Jia comes across just as baffled, heartbroken, and furious as the rest of us about the unjust forces we’ve unthinkingly given power to. But because she leads with a genuine desire to understand rather than a hastily applied authority,reading her feels like eavesdropping on a mind at work.

Whether she’s documenting her ‘fucking Tatcha’ skincare addiction or peeling back the Lycra’d layers of ‘ideal’ womanhood, Tolentino creates a philosophy of curiosity that implicates herself, not to be coy or pseudo-anything, but because she knows/admits that even hard work, luck, and successdon’t guarantee a reprievefrom even a reluctant examination of contemporary culture.Reading Jia is self care in the grandest and the most basic sense: she polishes the grimy windows of modern lifeso we can see into and out from it,and, with our sharpened perceptions, come away with more compassion for ourselves and even, occasionally, for others.

Work by Jia Tolentino:

• Trick Mirror

• Essays and Critique at The New Yorker (from Waxahatchee to Weinstein)

Suggested Reading from Jia:

• The Yellow House by Sarah Broom

• When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead

• In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado

• The Supernova Era by Cixin Liu

Honorable Mentions:

• “Does Who You Are at 7 Determine Who You Are at 63?” by Gideon Lewis-Krause for The New York Times Magazine

• Raymie Nightengale by Kate DiCamillo

• Check out the New Yorker radio hour conversation between Rivka Galchen and Jia for more children’s literature love
  
  

Photo credit Elena Mudd

What do you get when you cross clever, sometimes soaring, sometimes heart-breaking, always beautiful prose with immortality, fantasy, and historical themes? Signature Joy Preble. Since 2009, when she published the first book in her Dreaming Anastasia series, she has been writing YA novels that will break your heart, restore your hope in the good things life has to offer, and call attention to the ways in which humans fail one another disastrously.

Sidenote, she’s a master of the meet-cute. There’s a very memorable scene in Finding Paris, in a Vegas diner with a neutron joke and a coconut cream pie that we’ll put up against any Nick Hornby or Four Weddings & a Funeral scene.YA Author Adam Silvera has likened her depictions of plucky teen detectives to Veronica Mars, and we agree. We had similar feelings of escape and sheer doughnut popping sweetness diving into Preble’s two series and her two standalone books — seven books in all. She’s a gem of a writer, a teacher, and a helluva of a bookseller too. We’re lucky to have her on the show.

Topics discussed:

Are we tired of the words feisty and plucky to describe our Strong Female Protagonists yet? We uncover all the ways it makes sense to draw young girls into YA readership with young and perfectly imperfect (read: actually human) characters by speaking with YA author Joy Preble.

We rehash the magical power of the deadline and what do do when your YA fantasy book comes out at the same time as Twilight.

We also gleefully discuss Eli Wallach and his glorious role in the movie Holiday — if you need something to watch for this holiday season.

Special bonus shout-out to the glorious & awe-inspiring pie (not the value or the pizza) buffet on I-45 north towards Dallas at Sam’s.

Check out all of Preble’s books here:

• Dreaming Anastasia (#1 in the series), Haunted (#2 in the series), and Anastasia Forever (#3 in the series)

• Finding Paris

• It Wasn’t Always Like This

• The Sweet Dead Life (#1 in the series), The A-Word (#2 in the series)

Honorable Episode Mentions:

• A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle

• Chicago Public Library system, Bezazian branch

• The Queen of Nothing by Holly Black, winner of this year’s Goodreads prize in YA Fantasy

• The Serpent King by Jeff Zentner

Photo credit: Toppel Photography

We first met this episode’s guest at the WriteFest conference at Rice University. We found had all sorts of connections, as writers in this weird industry often do: he grew up in Houston like Kate did, and he has ties to Jessica’s Boston, where he lives and teaches. We are more than happy to showcase his work here on the show. From the gorgeous and yet tangled-up-in-dirt realities of short stories, like his “Sheep” published in the Atlantic, to his novel Ghost Horse, which dissects the irredeemably messed up process of becoming a teenage boy in a broken home beset on all sides by even more broken societal systems—brutality justified by marriage, institutionally-enforced racism, poverty. McNeely adroitly captures the rough edges of these lives we live. You don’t read McNeely so much as read the world, and its rigid systems of belief—how they rub up against, puncture, & punch the soft flesh of its humanity.

And yet, as we’ll explore on this episode, the stories he tells are not without hope. For the readers who read them; he writes not to condemn us, but to ask us to look deeply, to confront, rectify.

Diversions worth noting and honorable mentions:

• The Novel is Dead: 2014 Edition

• the gut wrenching Joy Williams’ short story, “Escapes”

• Books or a bar of soap? The book in a capitalist society\

• Would James Joyce be good at Twitter?

Other books discussed that blur YA/Adult Lit Fic lines:

• The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold

• Other Voices, Other Rooms by Truman Capote

• The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers

• Trust Exercise by Susan Choi

Welcome to our final installment of our special summer series, F***ing Shakespeare’s Shorts, where we interviewed the very tired but always brilliant souls who had books coming out in the time of the pandemic. For this final shorts episode, we spoke with poet Elizabeth Lindsey Rogers who shares with us the beautiful queering of poetic form in her book, The Tilt Torn Away from the Seasons, which came out this February from Acre Books. Elizabeth tells us about the dichotomy of her past publishing nightmares and the wonder of having a one-year-old bopping around the house, and we make fun of her for living in D.C. Ultimately, we all agree that The Tilt is truly a book for our times, as the poems explore the nature of solitude and forces of colonization. Plus, we all learn that Jessica is a top-notch social media stalker. You can book her any time for that quarantine-edition social media prowling that we’re all doing since we’re not seeing each other in person. (Obviously, we’re mostly kidding.) We hope you enjoy this final episode of our shorts series, and we’ll see you again soon for the next full season of the podcast!

Instead of social media stalking your exes, pick up a copy of The Tilt Torn Away from the Seasons and read some really good poetry. You can also find more from Elizabeth at her website or by following her on Twitter.

Born and raised in North Carolina, Elizabeth Lindsey Rogers was educated in the public schools and trained as both a dancer and musician. She received her B.A. from Oberlin College in Creative Writing and Dance and an M.F.A. in Poetry from Cornell University. She was an Oberlin Shansi Fellow from 2007-2009 at Shanxi Agricutural University (山西农业大学) in Taigu, China, where she taught English and dance. Rogers received the two-year fellowship at The Kenyon Review, and has held teaching positions in community settings and at multiple universities and colleges across the nation. Most recently, Rogers was the Murphy Visiting Fellow in English-Creative Writing at Hendrix College from 2016-2019, where she taught creative writing and mentored students in the Murphy Scholars Program.She is a Contributing Editor at The Kenyon Reviewand a volunteer for the Veterans' Writing Project. She lives in Washington, D.C. with her wife and baby.

Move aside, poets! (But just for one second!) Here near the end of our Shakespeare’s Shorts season, we finally caught hold of another fiction aficionado! Alexis Kienlen’s first novel, Mad Cow, came out this April from Now Or Never Publishing, but she’s also a two-time published poet. (We told you, poets: just hold on for one second.) In this episode we discuss about how Alexis did research for her book by simply doing her job as an agricultural reporter, and we meditate on the theme of the urban outsider in a rural setting. Along the way, Kate and Phuc finally learn where Canada is, and we hear mention of some steamy cowboy romances. Saddle up partner, because this episode is a wild, wonderful ride.

Order a copy of Mad Cow from Bookshop.org, and while you’re at it, you can pick up Alexis’s poetry publications, 13 and She Dreams in Red, through your local indie. Finally, be sure to follow Alexis on Twitter to stay up to date on all the latest bovine (and writing) news!

In this episode, we get to chat (and giggle and lose all sense of time) with an old friend, Ayokunle Falomo, whose first incendiary chapbook entitled African, American has been published. He has promised us that it will be available for purchase from New Delta Review as soon as COVID insanity ends! We talk with Ayo about the many steps of working on a decade-long project, and we tackle the age old question of writing between the personal and the political, the body of a nation and the body of an individual. Not to mention that he gives us chills with his reading. Now, please excuse us, as we take Ayo’s ultimate quarantine advice to just go and take a nap.

Keep an eye out on the New Delta Review website for the availability of African, American. In the meantime, be sure to check out his other short collections, kin.DREAD and thread, this wordweaver must!

Honorable Mentions:

• Solmaz Sharif / check out her first full collection, Look: Poems.

• Layli Long Soldier / check out her first full collection, Whereas: Poems.

• Marwa Helal / check out her most recent collection, Invasive Species.

• Selah Saterstrom / check out her novel Slab and Ideal Suggestions: Essays in Divinatory Poetics.

• Loyce Gayo / explore her work here.

• Ariana Brown / check out her collection of spoken word poetry put on the page, Sana Sana.

• Mwende “FreeQuency” Katwiwa / check out their collected, Becoming//Black.

Ayokunle Falomois: a Nigerian, a poet who uses his pen as a shovel to unearth those things that make us human, a TEDx speaker, an American, and the author of kin.DREAD & thread, this wordweaver must! He and his work have been featured a number of publications in print (Local Houston magazine, Glass Mountain) and online (The New York Times, Houston Chronicle, Hive Society, Squawk Back, Pressure Gauge Press). His work has also led to venues and stages around & outside of Texas. He enjoys walking & talking to himself (a lot) and sometimes, he is fortunate enough to have other people there to listen.

Learn more about Ayo’s author site for more of his his work.

Adding an extra photo of our bud because we really love this one :)

Esther Lee is a poet (and letter-press artist!) who, along with her husband and cat Bowie, lives on a 35-foot sailboat called “Hope.” Currently, they’re living off the coast of Jacksonville, Florida, where she writes poetry, blogs about her efforts at a zero-waste boat life, and occasionally takes phone calls from podcasters.

Spit, her debut collection, received both the Elixir Press Poetry Prize and Pushcart Prize nominations.

On today’s episode, Lee reads from her brand-new and beautiful collection of poetry out now from Conduit Books and Ephemera, Sacrificial Metal. These poems offer a meditation through the lens of dance and human movement about the quiet dignities and alienation of illness, caregiving, and living in a racialized body. Part documentary poetics, part mourning diary, part textual choreography, and part nautical-inspired elegy, the poems in Sacrificial Metal, serve as inquiries about how we may become socialized or exiled from a community, along with how movement and dance offer possibilities of interconnectedness with one’s own body and a sense of collective identity.

Find out more about Esther Lee and her amazing life’s work:

• EstherLee.io

• WayfindersNow.com

If you’re feeling extra curious, check out more about Rudolf van Laban’s fascinating distillations of dance and movement here.