Abby Minor is a writer based in central Pennsylvania. In her debut book of poems, As I Said: A Dissent, Abby combines the historical narrative of Ann Lohman—a 19th-century abortion provider in New York City—with personal and family history, creating a collection of poems that challenge the typical notion of an abortion story. In our conversation, Abby and I talked about her approach to documentary poetry, why it was important to her to push back against conventional abortion discourse, and how art and activism intersect. Then in the second segment, we talked about American work culture and the necessity of rest.

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Show Notes:

• Abby Minor
• Purchase As I Said: A Dissent: Webster’s Bookstore (State College, PA) | The Book Catapult (San Diego, CA) | Bookshop.org
• NPR Arts & Letters - “The Wickedest Woman in New York”
• Erin Marie Lynch - “Using the Lens of Abortion to Look at Other Things”
• Abby Minor - “Out On This Red Edge”
• Abby Minor - “Rooms”
• Contrary Magazine - Interview with Best of the Net 2018 Winner Abby Minor
• Abby Minor - “Beyond Choice”
• Abby Minor - Reframing Abortion to Breathe Life into a “Culture of Death”
• Steven Stoll - Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia
• Robin Wall Kimmerer - Braiding Sweetgrass
• Vaughn Stills - Places for the Spirit: Traditional African American Gardens

Transcript

Episode Credits

• Editing/Mixing: Mike Sakasegawa
• Music: Podington Bear
• Transcription: Shea Aguinaldo

Molly Spencer is a poet based in Michigan. The poems in her collections In the House and Hinge engage with chronic illness, divorce, domesticity, motherhood, and the ways that our lives don’t always work out the way we expected them to. In our conversation, we talked about dissolution, the uses of poetry, ways of knowing, and speaking unlovely truths. Then for the second section, we talked about attention—both the kind of attention we’d like to cultivate in our own lives, and what kind of attention we ask of our readers.

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Show Notes:

• Molly Spencer
• Purchase If the House: Literati (Ann Arbor, MI) | The Book Catapult (San Diego, CA) | Bookshop
• Purchase Hinge: Literati (Ann Arbor, MI) | The Book Catapult (San Diego, CA) | Bookshop
• Emily Dickinson - “Make me a picture of the sun”
• Etel Adnan - Sea and Fog
• Wallace Stevens - “The Snow Man”
• Susan Glaspell - “A Jury of Her Peers”
• Molly Spencer - “On ‘Most Accidents Occur At Home’”
• Mary Oliver - “Yes! No!”
• Solmaz Sharif - Customs
• Dionne Brand - Nomenclature

Transcript

Episode Credits

• Editing/Mixing: Mike Sakasegawa
• Music: Podington Bear
• Transcription: Shea Aguinaldo

Luther Hughes is a poet based in Seattle, WA. The poems in Luther’s debut collection, A Shiver in the Leaves, are tender, erotic, vulnerable, erudite, at times dark, and at times ecstatic. In our conversation, we talked about power dynamics in sexual encounters, different forms of love, and writing as a way of understanding oneself. Then in the second section, we talked about why so many sex scenes in popular media are so strange.

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Show Notes:

• Luther Hughes
• Purchase A Shiver in the Leaves: Open Books (Seattle, WA) | The Book Catapult (San Diego, CA) | Bookshop.org
• Brooklyn Poets Reading Series - Luther Hughes, Lynn Melnick, Carl Phillips
• The Poet Salon
• Lue’s Poetry Hour
• Luther Hughes - “On Power”
• Seattle Times - “Seattle poet Luther Hughes on ‘A Shiver in the Leaves,’ his debut collection”
• Brandon Taylor - Real Life

Transcript

Episode Credits

• Editing/Mixing: Mike Sakasegawa
• Music: Podington Bear
• Transcription: Shea Aguinaldo

André Ramos-Woodard is a photographic artist originally from Texas and Tennessee. In their series BLACK SNAFU, André combines photographs celebrating Blackness with appropriated illustrations from racist cartoons as a way of confronting the history and present reality of American racism. In our conversation we discussed appropriation, questions of audience and community, and mental health. Then in the second segment, we talked about what inspires us outside of the visual arts.

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Show Notes:

• André Ramos-Woodard
• André Ramos-Woodard - BLACK SNAFU
• Hannah Jane Parkinson - “Instagram, an artist and the $100,000 selfies—appropriation in the digital age” (Article about Richard Prince Instagram images)
• William Camargo
• William Camargo’s IG post riffing on John Diva’s work
• Kansas City Artists Coalition - André Ramos-Woodard Artist Talk
• André Ramos-Woodard - African America
• Roger Ebert - “Video games can never be art”
• Beyonce - Renaissance

Transcript

Episode Credits

• Editing/Mixing: Mike Sakasegawa
• Music: Podington Bear
• Transcription: Shea Aguinaldo

Amanda Marchand is a Canadian, New York-based photographer. Amanda’s Lumen Notebook series is a body of elegant and strikingly beautiful images that nevertheless layer deep meaning within their seemingly simple compositions. In our conversation, Amanda and I talked about her process in creating these photograms and how working within strict constraints allows her to explore the technique more fully. We also discussed how she uses photography to facilitate connection and presence, and the duality of delight and mortality in her work. Then for the second segment we had a meandering conversation about autism, communication, attention, and using art to process and understand our emotional experiences.

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Show Notes:

• Amanda Marchand
• Amanda Marchand - The World is Astonishing With You in It
• Medium Photo - Second Sight lecture with Amanda Marchand
• Barbara Bosworth - The Meadow
• Stanley Fish - Is There a Text in This Class?
• Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal - Louise Bourgeois
• Linda Connor
• Kathy Acker
• Amanda Marchand - Nothing Will Ever Be the Same Again
• Amanda Marchand - Lumen Circles
• Keep the Channel Open - Episode 124: Farrah Karapetian
• Leah Sobsey
• Mary Oliver - Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver
• Mary Oliver - “The Summer Day”
• Tara Brach
• Jenny Odell - How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

Transcript

Episode Credits

• Editing/Mixing: Mike Sakasegawa
• Music: Podington Bear
• Transcription: Shea Aguinaldo

Fatemeh Baigmoradi is a photographic artist originally from Iran. In her series It’s Hard to Kill, Fatemeh works with archival family photos from Iran, using fire to obscure or destroy portions of the image—connecting to the way that her own family and many others burned their photos after the Iranian Revolution to protect themselves or others in the photos. In our conversation we talked about the relationship between photography and memory, censorship, and how violence, healing, and cleansing are all intertwined in Fatemeh’s work. Then in the second segment, Fatemeh and I talked about immigration.

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Show Notes:

• Fatemeh Baigmoradi
• Fatemeh Baigmoradi - It’s Hard to Kill
• Fatemeh Baigmoradi - Subjectivity and Objectivity
• Medium Festival of Photography - Fatemeh Baigmoradi lecture
• Keep the Channel Open - Episode 22: Esmé Weijun Wang
• Keep the Channel Open - Episode 46: Rizzhel Javier
• Brandon Shimoda
• Patrick Nagatani
• Ignant - “Fatemeh Baigmoradi On Censorship and the Fires of Revolution”
• Mitra Tabrizian
• Marcel Proust - Swann’s Way: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 1

Transcript

Episode Credits

• Editing/Mixing: Mike Sakasegawa
• Music: Podington Bear
• Transcription: Shea Aguinaldo

Sarah Hollowell is a writer based in Indiana. Sarah’s debut novel, A Dark and Starless Forest, is a YA contemporary fantasy story centered on a family of foster sisters learning about their magic, until suddenly they start disappearing. In our conversation we talked about the difference in process between short stories and novels, how her novel portrays abuse dynamics, and the importance of fan fiction. Then in the second segment, Sarah and I talked about the Alpha Workshop.

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Show Notes:

• Sarah Hollowell
• Follow @sarahhollowell on Twitter
• Purchase A Dark and Starless Forest: Viewpoint Books (Columbus, IN) | Mysterious Galaxy (San Diego, CA) | Bookshop.org
• Alpha Young Writers Workshop
• Ashley Schumacher - The Renaissance of Gwen Hathaway
• Rude Tales of Magic

Transcript

Episode Credits

• Editing/Mixing: Mike Sakasegawa
• Music: Podington Bear
• Transcription: Shea Aguinaldo

Ayesha Raees is a poet and hybrid artist based in New York, Miami, and Lahore. In her debut book of poetry, Coining a Wishing Tower, she explores death, grief, culture, religion, separation, and return in a hybrid form that is part poetry, part narrative, part fable, and entirely remarkable. In our conversation, we talked about her book, her writing process, and sustaining a relationship with her work over time. Then in the second segment, we discussed community.

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Show Notes:

• Ayesha Raees
• Purchase Coining a Wishing Tower: Platypus Press | Bookshop.org
• Rainier Maria Rilke - Letters to a Young Poet
• bell hooks - The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love

Transcript

Episode Credits

• Editing/Mixing: Mike Sakasegawa
• Music: Podington Bear
• Transcription: Shea Aguinaldo

Anahid Nersessian is a professor and critic based in Los Angeles, CA. In her latest book, Keats’s Odes: A Lover’s Discourse, Anahid takes the reader through close readings of John Keats’s six Great Odes, providing cultural context and explicating their themes of sexual violence, melancholy, and the seductiveness of beauty. More than that, though, the book is, itself, a love story. In our conversation, Anahid and I talked about how and why Keats’s Odes still resonate with readers today, how personal narrative entered these essays, and how it functions in them. Then in the second segment, we talked about experimental critical writing.

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Show Notes:

• Anahid Nersessian
• Purchase Keats’s Odes: A Lover’s Discourse: Skylight Books (Los Angeles, CA) | The Book Catapult (San Diego, CA) | Bookshop.org
• Anahid Nersessian - Utopia Limited: Romanticism and Adjustment
• Anahid Nersessian - The Calamity Form: On Poetry and Social Life
• Anahid Nersessian - “Catastrophic Desires”
• William Shakespeare - “Sonnet 73”
• Dorothy Van Ghent - Keats: The Myth of the Hero
• Danez Smith
• Alexander Pope - “The Rape of the Lock”
• Walter Jackson Bate - John Keats
• William Wordsworth - “Preface to Lyrical Ballads”
• Ingrid Sischy - “Good Intentions”
• Peterloo Massacre
• Los Angeles Review of Books - “Of Poets and Critics: A Conversation Between Anahid Nersessian and Michael Robbins”
• Alexander Chee
• Anahid Nersessian in conversation with Zoe Kazan
• Helen Vendler - The Odes of John Keats
• Wendy’s Subway
• Renee Gladman
• John Coltrane - “Olé”
• Rachel Pollack
• Penny Arcade - “Parabolic”
• Heather K. Love
• Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
• Rosie Stockton - Pumpjack
• Rosie Stockton - Permanent Volta

Transcript

Episode Credits

• Editing/Mixing: Mike Sakasegawa
• Music: Podington Bear
• Transcription: Shea Aguinaldo

For this installment of the KTCO Book Club, writer and podcaster Maggie Tokuda-Hall joins us to discuss Susanna Clark’s 2020 novel Piranesi. A relatively slim volume, Piranesi is surprisingly difficult to summarize but, like its labyrinthine setting, with patience and attention the book will reveal its profound beauty and kindness. (Conversation recorded February 24, 2022.)

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Show Notes:

• Maggie Tokuda-Hall
• Failure to Adapt
• Purchase Piranesi: Mrs. Dalloway’s (Berkeley, CA) | Mysterious Galaxy (San Diego, CA) | Bookshop.org
• Purchase Also an Octopus: Mrs. Dalloway’s (Berkeley, CA) | Mysterious Galaxy (San Diego, CA) | Bookshop.org
• Purchase The Mermaid, the Witch, and the Sea: Mrs. Dalloway’s (Berkeley, CA) | Mysterious Galaxy (San Diego, CA) | Bookshop.org
• Purchase Squad: Mrs. Dalloway’s (Berkeley, CA) | Mysterious Galaxy (San Diego, CA) | Bookshop.org
• Purchase Love in the Library: Mrs. Dalloway’s (Berkeley, CA) | Mysterious Galaxy (San Diego, CA) | Bookshop.org
• Susanna Clarke - Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell
• Jon Klassen
• Mac Barnett
• Carson Ellis
• Mac Barnett & Carson Ellis - What Is Love?
• M. T. Anderson - The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing
• Kazuo Ishiguro - Klara and the Sun
• Normal Gossip
• Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah - Friday Black

Transcript

Episode Credits

• Editing/Mixing: Mike Sakasegawa
• Music: Podington Bear
• Transcription: Shea Aguinaldo

There’s a way in which the end of a serious relationship can shake your entire concept of yourself, and through your grief you have to find yourself again. Yanyi’s latest book of poems, Dream of the Divided Field, braids poems about heartbreak and implied emotional violence with poems about transition and immigration. Each has a similar but distinct sense of a loss of self, a search for self, a yearning for connection and belonging, a sometimes violent disconnection—to a partner, to a place or culture, to oneself and one’s own body. In our conversation, Yanyi and I discussed his book, deconstruction and reconstruction, attachment to nuance, and the relationship between beauty and violence. Then for the second segment, we talked about grief.

(Conversation recorded February 28, 2022.)

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Show Notes:

• Yanyi
• Yanyi - Dream of the Divided Field
• Yanyi - The Year of Blue Water
• Yanyi - The Reading
• Samuel Ace
• TC Tolbert
• Parul Sehgal - “The Case Against the Trauma Plot”
• Carmen Maria Machado - In the Dream House
• Keep the Channel Open - Episode 33: José Olivarez
• Jane Hirshfield - Nine Gates

Transcript

Episode Credits

• Editing/Mixing: Mike Sakasegawa
• Music: Podington Bear
• Transcription: Shea Aguinaldo