Muriel Leung is a recipient of fellowships to Kundiman, VONA/Voices Workshop and the Community of Writers, and she has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Her writing can be found in The Baffler, Cream City Review, Gulf Coast, The Collagist, and the Fairy Tale Review, among others. Her first book of poetry, Bone Confetti, won the 2015 Noemi Press Book Award. Of it, one reviewer said, “It made the words into a bell, and the bell made me stop what I was doing.” In this episode, I talk to Muriel about her newest collection, Imagine Us, The Swarm, which comes out on May 25th. Our conversation spans the death of her father, racialized labor, and what these things mean in the context of capitalism.

Story Behind the Story

Episode 27: Muriel Leung - IMAGINE US, THE SWARM

Over his 35 year career, Jeff VanderMeer has published more than a dozen novels, and his non-fiction writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Atlantic, Slate, Salon, and the Washington Post. His genre-defying novels and short stories frequently engage with ecological themes, including climate change, causing the New Yorker to dub him “weird Thoreau.” In 2014, Annihilation, the first book in his New York Times-bestselling Southern Reach trilogy, won the Nebula and Shirley Jackson Awards for Best Novel; it was adapted into a movie in 2018. In this episode, I talk to Jeff about his newest novel, Hummingbird Salamander, which comes out on early next week. It follows a security analyst named Jane as she tries to unravel the mystery of a taxidermied extinct hummingbird gifted to her by an ecoterrorist.

Episode 26: Jeff VanderMeer - HUMMINGBIRD SALAMANDER

Finola Austin was born in England and moved to Northern Ireland when she was five; she is now based in Brooklyn, New York. Her debut novel Brontë’s Mistress, is a retelling of the infamous affair between Anne, Charlotte, and Emily’s brother Branwell and a long-maligned married woman, Lydia Robinson, from Lydia’s perspective. Using themes from the Brontë sisters’ novels and weaving in original and secondary sources on the affair, Austin gives voice to a woman torn between her desires and what was expected of her. I talk to Austin about the enduring appeal of the Brontës, creating characters out of real people, and the 19th century women who never got to tell their stories.

Episode 25: Finola Austin - BRONTË'S MISTRESS

In this episode, I talk to author Kamala Puligandla about her new novella, You Can Vibe Me on My FemmePhone, queer coming of age stories, and the function of humor in her writing. Puligandla lives in Los Angeles, where she also eats, snobs, wears elastic-waisted pants, skulks around the farmer's market, attempts to go to the Y, swipes on Tinder, and thrifts for flair that makes style pop. She is from Oakland, CA and has previously lived there, Portland, OR, and Chicago, IL. She is currently the Communications & Marketing Director at the Women’s Center for Creative Work.

Episode 24: Kamala Puligandla - YOU CAN VIBE ME ON MY FEMMEPHONE

Elisa Gabbert is obsessed with disasters and how we perceive them. In The Unreality of Memory, which was released last year in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, Gabbert tackles pandemics, environmental disasters, the nature of pain and its perception, nostalgia and more. We talk about Gabbert's interest in these topics, the relationship between her poetry and her essays, and getting burned out on empathy. -- Elisa Gabbert is the author of five collections of poetry, essays, and criticism: The Unreality of Memory & Other Essays, out now from FSG Originals and Atlantic UK; The Word Pretty (Black Ocean, 2018); L’Heure Bleue, or the Judy Poems (Black Ocean, 2016); The Self Unstable (Black Ocean, 2013); and The French Exit (Birds LLC, 2010). The Unreality of Memory and The Word Pretty were both named a New York Times Editors’ Choice, and The Self Unstable was chosen by New Yorker magazine as one of the best books of 2013. Gabbert writes a regular poetry column for the New York Times, and her work has appeared in Harper’s, The New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine and Book Review, the New York Review of Books, the Guardian Long Read, the London Review of Books, A Public Space, the Paris Review Daily, American Poetry Review, and many other venues.

Episode 21: Elisa Gabbert - THE UNREALITY OF MEMORY

In this month's episode, I talk to New York Times-bestselling author Lev Grossman about his new middle-grade fantasy novel, The Silver Arrow, which follows 11-year-old Kate and her younger brother Tom on a magical ecological adventure. It's a classic children's adventure novel in the style of The Phantom Tollbooth or The Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankwiler with an important modern message. In this live online event, produced for Kepler's Literary Foundation, we discuss the difference between writing for adults and writing for children, the joy of creating voices and personalities for each of the talking animals, Lev's favorite kids' books, and the feedback his kids gave him on the book. -- Lev Grossman is a writer and journalist best known for the New York Times-bestselling Magicians trilogy, a series of urban fantasy novels that were adapted into a television show by the same name. In addition to those novels and The Silver Arrow, he has written two other books, Warp and Codex. His essays and criticism have also been published in Vanity Fair, the Believer, the Village Voice, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Salon, Slate, Wired, Entertainment Weekly, the Week, Buzzfeed, NPR, and Lingua Franca. He served as the lead technology writer and book critic for Time magazine for nearly 15 years, from 2002 to 2016. Special Guest: Lev Grossman.

Episode 20: Lev Grossman - THE SILVER ARROW

In this month's episode, I talk to author Adam Sass about his debut novel, Surrender Your Sons, a queer YA thriller set in a conversion therapy center in Costa Rica. Sass is a gay man himself, and he says he wrote Surrender Your Sons not as a story about queer pain, but as one of queer triumph. Over the course of this hour, we talk about depictions of coming out and conversion therapy in media, the importance of solidarity, and the difficulty of talking honestly about conversion therapy when so many people believe it to be a thing of the past. Adam Sass is a self-professed gay geek. Though this is his first novel, his short story “98% Graves” was nominated by Writer’s Digest for Best Science Fiction Story in 2015. In addition to his writing, he is a recurring co-host on the popular Buffy the Vampire Slayer podcast Slayerfest98, alongside such special guests as Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. producer Drew Z. Greenberg and_ RuPaul’s Drag Race_ winner Trixie Mattel. He lives in North Carolina with his husband and their dachshunds. Special Guest: Adam Sass.

Episode 19: Adam Sass - SURRENDER YOUR SONS

Zaina Arafat grew up in two very different worlds with different sets of expectations. It left her with a profound sense of alienation and the feeling of being caught between two identities. As a queer woman who identifies as bisexual, she felt similarly torn. In her debut novel, You Exist Too Much, Arafat explores that feeling of unbelonging through an unnamed narrator who disappears into romantic relationships and leaves when her partners begin to see her. We talk in this interview about the ways she explored those themes in her novel, her own experiences of growing up in a diaspora, and her narrator's difficult relationship with her mother. -- ZAINA ARAFAT is a Palestinian-American journalist and fiction writer whose work centers the Arab diaspora. Her stories and essays have appeared in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The Christian Science Monitor, NPR, and many other publications.

Episode 18: Zaina Arafat - YOU EXIST TOO MUCH

Kawai Strong Washburn grew up on the Big Island of Hawaiʻi. Life on the Hāmākua coast gave him an appreciation for the natural landscape, as well as the stories and myths he learned in school and from his peers. In his debut novel, Sharks in the Time of Saviors, Washburn follows the Hawai'ian-Filipino Flores family as they navigate the changing physical and socioeconomic landscape in Hawai'i. The story of the Flores family is set against the backdrop of Hawai'ian myth: when the youngest child is saved from drowning by sharks, his parents come to believe he has been chosen for a special purpose. That belief shapes the way the family functions and the pressues each of the Flores children feel. Sharks in the Time of Saviors received rave reviews from the New York Times, the L.A. Review of Books, Vanity Fair, and a slew of other top publications when it was released this past March. In our conversation, we talk about the difference between the Hawai'i that lives in the collective imagination of mainlanders and the Hawai'i of Washburn's youth, the Flores family's dynamic in the context of the traumas they've suffered, and genre. -- KAWAI STRONG WASHBURN was born and raised on the Hāmākua coast of the Big Island of Hawaiʻi, where he read loads of books, lived breathed slept soccer, played saxophone, and did all sorts of dangerous things on concrete and in the water. He currently lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where he is a husband and father (two firecracker daughters), and writes fiction. He occasionally does somewhat dangerous things on rock faces. Special Guest: Kawai Strong Washburn.

Episode 17: Kawai Strong Washburn - SHARKS IN THE TIME OF SAVIORS

Born and raised in Markham, Ontario, Jillian Christmas is a poet, enthusiastic organizer, and activist in the Canadian arts community with a focus on increasing anti-oppression initiatives in spoken word. Her work has been featured in The Huffington Post and many other publications, including collections such as Matrix New Queer Writing (Issue 98), The Post Feminist Post, and the celebrated anthology, The Great Black North. In March, Christmas published a collection of her poetry. The Gospel of Breaking explores love, family, queerness, and identity in poetry that is sometimes narrative, sometimes lyrical, and always compelling. In this episode, we talk about Christmas' poetic approach, her relationship to her mother and grandmother, and how she connects her organizing work with her art. Jillian Christmas is the former Artistic Director of Vancouver's Verses Festival of Words. An educator, organizer, and advocate in the arts community, utilizing an anti-oppressive lens, Jillian has performed and facilitated workshops across North America. She lives in Vancouver. Special Guest: Jillian Christmas.

Episode 16: Jillian Christmas - THE GOSPEL OF BREAKING

Environmental lawyer Rishi Reddi came to prominence as a writer in the early 2000s. Her short fiction has earned her a PEN Award as well as a nomination for the Pushcart Prize, and her story "Justice Shiva Ram Murthy" appeared in the 2005 edition of The Best American Short Stories. It was also featured on NPR’s “Selected Shorts.” In April 2020, she published her first novel. Passage West explores the lives of Indian-American immigrants in California's Imperial Valley near the turn of the twentieth century. Taking World War I and a series of laws and legal precedents targeting Asian immigrants as its backdrop, the novel explores an enduring question that is still relevant today: Who is welcome in America? -- Born in Hyderabad, India before living in the United Kingdom and the United States, Rishi Reddi is an author and environmental lawyer. Her short story collection Karma and Other Stories received the 2008 PEN Award. Reddi lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Special Guest: Rishi Reddi.

Episode 15: Rishi Reddi - PASSAGE WEST

Host Clara Sherley-Appel interviews authors about their creative process, from the inspiration behind the books they write to specific choices they make.

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Story Behind the Story

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