David Naimon

pulchritudinous werdsmithery

[davidnaimon]

Writing Across Difference with Ursula K. Le Guin

While Ursula has many collections of essays and literary criticism she has rarely been interviewed about this aspect of her career--her process/approach to writing essays, to writing nonfiction, to writing “the real.”  We talk about the risks and rewards of writing across difference (writing as a different race, gender, species), about the new memoir written by her cat Pard, about the four strategies used to keep women out of the canon or diminish them in the literary conversation, about America's fear of the imagination, and of science, as well as about the work of Margaret Atwood, Cormac McCarthy, Chang-rae Lee and Jose Saramago.  Our conversation can be listened to here

[davidnaimon]

Notes on My Dunce Cap, the philosophy of writing and teaching writing with Jesse Ball

My hour-long interview with Jesse Ball was probably the most unique conversation I’ve had as a radio host.  We talk about his latest critically-acclaimed novel, How to Set a Fire and Why, and how, remarkably, he writes most of his books in under a week, spending most of the year not writing at all.  We also talk about his new book of writing pedagogy, Notes on My Dunce Cap, which explores his teaching philosophy (he teaches courses on walking and lucid dreaming and lying to writers at the Art Institute of Chicago) and which shares his unique syllabi for fellow teachers.  I hope you’ll listen in!

[davidnaimon]

Language, Enchantment & Betrayal with Rikki Ducornet

I’m very excited to share the audio of my hour-long conversation with the inimitable Rikki Ducornet. “If fiction can be said to have a function, it is to release that primary fury of which language, even now, is miraculously capable—from the dry mud of daily use.  So that furred, spotted and striped it may—as it did in Eden—scrawl under every tree as revelation”--Rikki Ducornet  

Hope you’ll listen in!

[davidnaimon]

Essays Near Knowing: a conversation with Brian Blanchfield

My conversation with Whiting Award-winning poet, Brian Blanchfield, about his essay collection “Proxies” is now online for listening.   Maggie Nelson might describe this singular collection best when she says: “Into what some are calling a new golden age of creative nonfiction lands Brian Blanchfield’s Proxies, which singlehandedly raises the bar for what’s possible in the field. This is a momentous work informed by a lifetime of thinking, reading, loving, and reckoning, utterly matchless in its erudition, its precision, its range, its daring, and its grace. I know of no book like it, nor any recent book as thoroughly good, in art or in heart."

[davidnaimon]

Late in the Day with Ursula K. Le Guin

Could poetry be the answer to climate change?  I wondered this after my discussion with Ursula K. Le Guin.  Science explicates, poetry implicates, says Le Guin. We need both, she says, but it is poetry that reorients us to and creates fellowship with the non-human other--plants, animals and insentient things. It is only through fellowship, and what she calls 'the subjectification of the universe" that we can begin to address the devastation the planet is enduring. In this hour-long conversation we discuss poetry and poetry translation, the meaning beyond the meaning of the words, Rilke, Housman, Mistral vs. Neruda, and the mysterious ways writing in difficult forms can liberate creativity.  Hope you'll take a listen! 

[davidnaimon]

The Story of My Teeth with Valeria Luiselli

Mexican writer Valeria Luiselli’s latest book, the “collective novel-essay” The Story of My Teeth was co-written with her translator and the workers at a Jumex juice factory,  It is a picaresque tale set in the industrial suburbs of Mexico City and also an insightful examination of the value of storytelling itself.  Our conversation can be listened to here.

[davidnaimon]

Mucus and Madness with Amelia Gray

Amelia Gray’s writing has been compared to that of George Saunders, Jorge Luis Borges and Shirley Jackson, and to the films of David Lynch and David Cronenberg.  But Gray’s weird, unsettling, grotesque and hilarious stories are particular to her.  Amelia joined me for a great conversation about the 38  stories in her new collection Gutshot, about writing with constraints, about what disturbing the reader achieves for the story, about good and bad endings, and much more.  You can listen to our conversation here.

[davidnaimon]

Changing the Word, Changing the World with Ursula K. Le Guin

You can’t restructure society without restructuring the English language, says today’s guest Ursula K. Le Guin.  Not surprisingly her craft book engages class, race, gender, capitalism, and morality, but through the mechanics of language, an interrogation of grammar, punctuation, tense, and point of view.  Newly revised and rewritten for the 21st century writer of fiction and memoir, we talk about Le Guin’s latest book, Steering The Craft.  You can listen to the conversation here.

[davidnaimon]

Liz Prato and Baby’s On Fire

It is really easy to write sex poorly, to be political in one's stories in a way that feels like propaganda, to write about death and have one's prose flattened by a sense of propriety, a need for the utmost seriousness.  A lot of writers will just avoid these potential pitfalls but Liz Prato does not turn away from these topics because they are risky.  Sex, death, families falling apart, new ones being forged, her stories have stakes, her characters are on the brink of something that will change them.  Listen to my conversation with Liz about her collection, Baby’s On Fire here

[davidnaimon]

Mapping the Particulars, Essays on Poetry with David Biespiel

Poet, teacher, essayist, and critic David Biespiel is also the author of the longest standing newspaper column on poetry in the United States.   The best of these columns have been assembled in his latest book A Long High Whistle whose topics range wide and far: from how to read a poem, to how poets grapple with the poets that come before them, from issues of poetry in translation to the challenges of political poetry and the role of engaged citizenry for poets in the world.  Likewise our conversation together goes deep and ranges wide.  You can listen to the full conversation here.

[davidnaimon]

Music for Wartime, an interview with Rebecca Makkai

It isn’t hyperbole to say Rebecca Makkai is a master storyteller.  Included in four consecutive Best American Short Stories anthologies, her stories are now gathered into the collection Music for Wartime.  But gathering and collecting are actually the wrong words for how Music for Wartime came to be.  One of my favorite parts of our conversation is discussing her considerations on how to create a book that is not merely a collection, but becomes a cohesive whole greater than its parts.  Rebecca also discusses the inclusion of family legends, purported nonfiction, alongside her imagined stories, and how these two types of tales inform each other as you progress through the book.  You can listen to our conversation here.

[davidnaimon]

A Becoming in Which One Never Becomes, A Conversation with Maggie Nelson

Maggie Nelson describes her latest book, The Argonauts, as a book of “autotheory,”  a blending of personal biography with literary theory, queer theory and philosophy; this formal choice becomes an act of intellectual family-making (of being in active conversation with the thinkers one is influenced by) which in turn takes family-making as its subject, dramatizing and interrogating it.  Exploring her relationship with the fluidly-gendered artist Harry Dodge and their disagreement over their respective relationships to language, Nelson has made a truly remarkable book.  Our conversation was rich and dense and insightful and provides an hour of listening that is sure to reverberate long after it’s over.  Tune in here.

[davidnaimon]

Musing on Muses, Bodies & Biography with Lidia Yuknavitch

Art as life, life as story, art and death. Redacted history, fractured memory, literary fragments, silenced voices. Breaking biography to connect biographies, keeping voices of the dead alive, juxtaposition, collage, the body of text, writing the body...listen to Lidia Yuknavitch on Between The Covers (KBOO 90.7FM Portland).

[davidnaimon]

Wasting Time (and Paying Attention) with Mary Ruefle

When Tin House and Portland State University’s MFA program brought Mary Ruefle to Portland for a special event I had the opportunity to talk with her about her life as an artist, the origins of her love of poetry, her thoughts on aging, on technology, and her ever-growing love of erasing 19th century texts.  Hope you’ll listen in!

[davidnaimon]

Engineering a Better Future with Neal Stephenson

Listen in to my nearly hour-long chat with Neal Stephenson whose latest book is Seveneves. Our conversation touched on so many great topics: why women are better equipped to survive long-term in space, why so many SFF novels and films create humanoids with race-based character traits and the limitations of this, advances in epigenetics and the question of genome manipulation, whether or not humans are a part of nature and the merits of geoengineering to address climate change, human responses to sudden vs. gradual catastrophes, the importance of celebrity scientists and the difference between what Carl Sagan was up against and what Neil deGrasse Tyson is, the role of science fiction in inspiring scientific advances, and much more.  Hope you’ll tune in!

[davidnaimon]

Talking Ethical Memory with Viet Thanh Nguyen

All wars are fought twice, once on the battlefield, the second in memory.  What are the pitfalls in attempts to memorialize life’s tragedies, to represent them in art? Can memory be ethical?  Can it be passed down second-hand?  Can one lose the first type of war and yet triumph in the second?  I had the great pleasure to talk with Viet Thanh Nguyen about his novel The Sympathizer, one Washington Post critic, Ron Charles, says is surely a new classic of war fiction,  “a book that opens with a terror that feels so real that you’ll mistake your beating heart for helicopter blades thumping the air.”  I hope you’ll listen in.  We talk about how the Vietnam war has been represented in film and literature, how Asian-Americans are represented, how ethical memory can create a different type of representation, and how The Sympathizer is in conversation with the great tradition of African-American literature, particularly Ellison’s Invisible Man. 

[davidnaimon]

Remembering to Forget with Sarah Manguso

Listen in to a great conversation I had with Sarah Manguso about her latest book, Ongoingness: The End of a Diary.  We talk about memory and language, the failures of both, we touch on Lydia Davis and Proust, Elizabeth Bishop and Leslie Jamison, on motherhood, amnesia, and graphomania, on being a writer versus a ‘woman writer,’ and much more.  Hope you’ll tune in!