Story Behind the Story: Recent Episodes
Clara Sherley-Appel
Host Clara Sherley-Appel interviews authors about their creative process, from the inspiration behind the books they write to specific choices they make.
I talk to author and playwright Calvin Kasulke about his debut novel, Several People Are Typing.
I talk to Monterey Bay Area poet, translator, and educator Kent Leatham about his writing.
I talk to Bay Area poet and educator Jamey Williams about his poetry collections BREATHING UNDER WATER and TO BE BLACK IS TO LOVE.
I talk to Monterey Bay Area writer Kenny Garcia about his poetry, the Monterey Poetry Festival, and his involvement with Boukra Press.
I talk to Namibian author Rémy Ngamije about his debut novel, THE ETERNAL AUDIENCE OF ONE.
I talk to writer / game designer Stephen Granade about the differences between interactive and traditional fiction.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Alka Joshi had a complicated relationship to her Indian heritage as a young girl. After immigrating from Rajasthan to the American midwest when she was 9, she was frequently bullied because of her race. It wasn't until she started writing The Henna Artist as an adult that she began to reclaim her cultural heritage. In our conversation, Joshi tells me that writing The Henna Artist allowed her to imagine a different kind of life for her mother, who entered into an arranged marriage at the age of 18. It also gave her an opportunity to explore India, Indian culture, and Indian socioeconomic politics in a deeply personal way. -- ALKA JOSHI is a graduate of Stanford University and received her M.F.A. from the California College of the Arts. She has worked as an advertising copywriter, a marketing consultant, and an illustrator. The Henna Artist is her first novel. Special Guest: Alka Joshi.
CARMEN MARIA MACHADO is the author of the sparklingly surreal short story collection Her Body and Other Parties, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and a winner of the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize. Her memoir, In the Dream House, was named “Best Book of the Year” in 2019 by just about every major media outlet, including The New Yorker, TIME Magazine, The New York Times, NPR, Entertainment Weekly, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, and Vogue. It is a bold, captivating account of the violence and abuse Machado endured in her first relationship with another woman, told in her inimitable voice. This episode was recorded at Kepler's Books in Menlo Park, as part of an event hosted by Kepler's Literary Foundation and produced by Amber Clark.
As a content note, our discussion includes descriptions of psychological abuse and intimate partner violence. Resources for queer survivors of domestic violence are available here (https://files.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads/images/4/499bf883-a80e-4bc2-8e36-b66e2a455ef6/zcjmEVl6.png). Special Guest: Carmen Maria Machado.
Daniel Summerhill is a poet, a professor of Poetry and Social Action and Composition Studies at CSU Monterey Bay, and an Oakland native. He has performed his poetry on stages around the world, including at the Kwamashu Center in South Africa as part of a workshop sponsored by the US Embassy. He is the 2015 New York Empire State Grand Slam Champion, a 2015 Nitty Gritty Grand Slam Champion, and a recipient of the Sharon Olds Fellowship for Poetry. His poems have been published in the Lilly Review, Califragle, Button, and Blavity, to name just a few, and he edited the collection “Black Joy: An Anthology of Black Boy Poetry,” which came out earlier this year. In this episode, I talk to Summerhill about his poetry collection, Divine, Divine, Divine, which he is editing for publication. Special Guest: Daniel Summerhill.
In this episode, I talk to comic writer Lilah Sturges about her work on Lumberjanes: The Shape of Friendship. Lumberjanes is a youth-oriented series that follows the adventures of a group of girls at a summer camp. It's known for its positive outlook and inclusivity, as well as its creative introduction of educational content. My conversation with Lilah touches on writing for a younger audience, including educational content in ways that feel organic and entertaining, and how stories can help kids develop and solve problems they encounter in their lives. Special Guest: Lilah Sturges.
In What is real?, Adam Becker details the century-long fight over the interpretation of quantum physics -- what this enormously successful theory, which has given us so much of the technology we use today, is actually saying about the world. Becker first encountered this controversy when, as an undergraduate student of physics at Cornell, a professor pooh-poohed his concerns over the implications of the standard model of quantum theory, developed by Bohr and others in the early 20th century, writing them off as philosophical questions, irrelevant to the study of science. But as Becker soon discovered, those questions were at the heart of a scientific debate that had been raging for nearly a century. In our conversation, we talk about the social and political factors that have governed the understanding and application of quantum physics since its inception, as well as the people on both sides of the debate. Becker also talks about borrowing techniques from fiction writing to turn a true story about a complex and opaque area of scientific inquiry into an engaging narrative populated by distinctive characters. Special Guest: Adam Becker.
In her 2017 chapbook, Bitches of the Drought, poet and former Santa Cruz resident Lauren Eggert-Crowe explores what it's like when a woman's anger comes to the surface years after the object of her anger has left her life. Lauren's writing process in many ways mirrors those themes: while she wrote many of the poems in Bitches of the Drought over a single summer, it wasn't until years later that she thought to combine them into a single book. In our conversation, we touch on the emotional impact of poetry, why so many people move away from poetry as they get older, and how we can learn to love poetry again as adults. Special Guest: Lauren Eggert-Crowe.
When Andy Couturier was in his 20s, he and his wife Cynthia traveled to Japan to teach English and raise money to buy their own home. While there, he became friends with a group of people who organize their lives differently from the way most of us are used to. Instead of working full-time for a corporation, they grow their own food and work just enough to get by, spending their abundant free time on subsistance farming, environmental activism, art, music, and time spent with family and friends. In this interview, I talk to Andy about his book, The Abundance of Less: Lessons in Simple Living from Rural Japan, in which he profiles ten of the men and women he met and befriended. I hope you enjoy it. Special Guest: Andy Couturier.
Drawing inspiration for documentary theater practitioners like Anna Deveare Smith and Culture Clash, Luis 'xago' Juarez interviewed nearly 40 residents of East Salinas before writing reAlisal: Stories of East Salinas and the two other reAlisal plays that came before it. He wanted to tell the history of the Alisal using the words of the people who lived there, using their voices, and reshape the narrative of the region in the process. In this interview, I talk to xago about the reAlisal plays, his theatrical education, and what it means to residents to hear stories about the region told in their own voices. Photo © Monterey County Weekly Special Guest: Luis 'xago' Juarez.
THE CITY IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT is the latest novel from Bay Area author giant Charlie Jane Anders. This critically acclaimed novel has led some to label Anders the successor to the queen of science fiction herself, Ursula K. Leguin. But Anders is a giant in the sci-fi and fantasy community in her own right. Her 2016 novel, ALL THE BIRDS IN THE SKY, won the 2017 Nebula Award for Best Novel, the Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel, and the Crawford Award. It was also a finalist for the 2017 Hugo Award for Best Novel. Special Guest: Charlie Jane Anders.
The Disasters is M.K. England's debut young adult novel about a group of space academy washouts who are forced to step up and save the world after escaping a terrorist attack. It's a wildly entertaining romp through space that has been lauded for its nuanced representation of LGBTQIA characters and the way it handles mental health issues such as depression and anxiety. In this episode, I talk to England about these issues and more, including what it's like to write action scenes, how publishing a novel has changed the way England reads books, and how their experiences with National Novel Writing Month have affected their writing. I hope you enjoy it. Special Guest: M.K. England.
Katya Apekina's debut novel, The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish, tells the story of Edie and Mae, two sisters who go to live with their estranged father in New York after their mother’s suicide attempt. It has received a great deal of attention for its unique form: the book is structured like an oral history, with a different narrator from one chapter to the next, interspersed with archival content, including poetry, letters, and interviews. In this episode, I talk to Katya about The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish and writing as an act of faith. I hope you enjoy it. Special Guest: Katya Apekina.
When Carly Gelsinger was thirteen, she joined Pine Canyon Assemblies of God, a radical evangelical church in rural Monterey County. For years, she was “on fire for God,” speaking in tongues, slaying demons, and following her angry and abusive pastor’s every word. Only when her life literally burned to the ground did she start to make the choices that would lead her to leave the church several years later. In Once You Go In: A Memoir of Radical Faith, Gelsinger tells the story of the lengths she was willing to go to in order to belong with candor and vulnerability. In this episode, I talk to Carly about Once You Go In and the challenges of converting her painful and deeply personal experiences into a story she would share with the world. I hope you enjoy it. Special Guest: Carly Gelsinger.