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

A conversation between Brandon Taylor & Garth Greenwell about queer aesthetics, “problematic art,” representation, and much more.

“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

“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 of the critically acclaimed memoir Whip Smart, the beloved essay collection Abandon Me (for which she first appeared on Between the Covers), and her upcoming second essay collection Girlhood. She teaches in the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa.

“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 grateful.” —Allison Benis White

Joe Sacco, a talented artist known for his exquisite eye for detail and powerful storytelling, discusses his latest book 'Paying the Land' and his experience creating war reportage comics. They explore the impact of colonialism, residential schools, and resource extraction on indigenous communities in the Canadian subarctic. Sacco shares his literary influences and upcoming projects, including a book on the Rolling Stones and an Indian riot.

“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

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.

“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

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? How might we become and story ourselves differently? How might more bodies and stories and voices emerge as the old mono stories break apart? Storytelling is a site of resistance and generative possibility, in all times.”

“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