Skylight Books Podcast Series

Amina Cain, "INDELICACY" w/ Adam Novy

In "a strangely ageless world somewhere between Emily Dickinson and David Lynch" (Blake Butler), a cleaning woman at a museum of art nurtures aspirations to do more than simply dust the paintings around her. She dreams of having the liberty to explore them in writing, and so must find a way to win herself the time and security to use her mind. She escapes her lot by marrying a rich man, but having gained a husband, a house, high society, and a maid, she finds that her new life of privilege is no less constrained. Not only has she taken up different forms of time-consuming labor―social and erotic―but she is now, however passively, forcing other women to clean up after her. Perhaps another and more drastic solution is necessary?

Reminiscent of a lost Victorian classic in miniature, yet taking equal inspiration from such modern authors as Jean Rhys, Octavia Butler, Clarice Lispector, and Jean Genet, Amina Cain's Indelicacy is at once a ghost story without a ghost, a fable without a moral, and a down-to-earth investigation of the barriers faced by women in both life and literature. It is a novel about seeing, class, desire, anxiety, pleasure, friendship, and the battle to find one’s true calling.

Cain is in conversation with Adam Novy, author of The Avian Gospels came out in 2010.

Emma Copley Eisenberg, "THE THIRD RAINBOW GIRL" w/ Steph Cha

In the early evening of June 25, 1980 in Pocahontas County, West Virginia, two middle-class outsiders named Vicki Durian, 26, and Nancy Santomero, 19, were murdered in an isolated clearing. They were hitchhiking to a festival known as the Rainbow Gathering but never arrived; they traveled with a third woman however, who lived. For thirteen years, no one was prosecuted for the "Rainbow Murders," though deep suspicion was cast on a succession of local residents in the community, depicted as poor, dangerous, and backward. In 1993, a local farmer was convicted, only to be released when a known serial killer and diagnosed schizophrenic named Joseph Paul Franklin claimed responsibility. With the passage of time, as the truth seemed to slip away, the investigation itself caused its own traumas--turning neighbor against neighbor and confirming a fear of the violence outsiders have done to this region for centuries.

Emma Copley Eisenberg spent years living in Pocahontas and re-investigating these brutal acts. Using the past and the present, she shows how this mysterious act of violence has loomed over all those affected for generations, shaping their fears, fates, and the stories they tell about themselves. In The Third Rainbow Girl, Eisenberg follows the threads of this crime through the complex history of Appalachia, forming a searing and wide-ranging portrait of America--its divisions of gender and class, and of its violence.

Eisenberg is in conversation with Steph Cha, the author of Follow Her Home, Beware Beware, Dead Soon Enough, and Your House Will Pay, out from Ecco in 2019.

Crissy Van Meter, "CREATURES" w/ Edan Lepucki

Unique in its structure and written to mimic the tidal charts that Evie studies as well as the natural ebbs and flows of life, Creatures takes readers on a provocative and mesmerizing journey as Evie is forced to reckon with her complicated upbringing in this lush, feral land off the coast of Southern California. On the eve of Evie’s wedding, a dead whale is trapped in the harbor of Winter Island, the groom may be lost at sea, and Evie’s mostly absent mother has shown up out of the blue.  Evie grew up with her well-meaning but negligent father, surviving on the money he made dealing the island’s world-famous strain of marijuana, Winter Wonderland. Although he raised her with a deep respect for the elements, the sea, and the creatures living within it, he also left her to parent herself.

Crissy Van Meter based Creatures on her own coming of age in Newport Beach. “I was asking questions about what it means to grieve, to love, to experience love informed by grief, and to love someone who isn’t always good.” She explains, “I was interested in digging into my own experiences with my father’s drug and alcohol addiction, his failures as a father, and the dichotomy of still loving him so much… And, I was interested in exploring what it means to have a treacherous past with a father like this, and what it means as an adult to decipher what it means to love, what it means to forgive.”

Van Meter is in conversation with Edan Lepucki, bestselling author of the novels California and Woman No. 17.

Lidia Yuknavitch, "VERGE"

Lidia Yuknavitch's bestselling novels The Book of Joan and The Small Backs of Children, and her groundbreaking memoir The Chronology of Water, have established her as one of our most urgent contemporary voices: a writer with a rare gift for tracing the jagged boundaries between art and trauma, sex and violence, destruction and survival. In Verge, her first collection of short fiction, she turns her eye to life on the margins, in all its beauty and brutality. A book of heroic grace and empathy, Verge is a viscerally powerful and moving survey of our modern heartache life.

WRITEGIRL 4 Group Reading

WriteGirl is an innovative nonprofit organization that empowers teen girls through creative writing. Join us for this special chance to hear WriteGirl teens speak their minds and read their original poetry and prose. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, and you’ll be surprised—you won’t want to miss it! 

In WriteGirl’s new award-winning anthology, This Moment: Bold Voices from WriteGirl, 180 teens share stories, poems, memoirs, scripts and songs about their hopes and fears, loves and losses, amigas and pan dulce, as they navigate a challenging present and uncertain future with determination and grace. Their words inspire reflection and ignite action. The book includes a Creativity Starter Kit with 15 fresh writing activities to inspire young writers. This Moment is available for purchase at Skylight Books.

Chani Nicholas, "YOU WERE BORN FOR THIS" w/ Jen Richards

Your weekly horoscope is merely one crumb of astrology's cake. In her first book You Were Born For This, Chani Nicholas shows how your birth chart--a snapshot of the sky at the moment you took your first breath--reveals your unique talents, challenges, and opportunities. Fortified with this knowledge, you can live out the life you were born to. Marrying the historic traditions of astrology with a modern approach, You Were Born for This explains the key components of your birth chart in an easy to use, choose your own adventure style. With journal prompts, reflection questions, and affirmations personal to your astrological makeup, this book guides you along the path your chart has laid out for you.

Nicholas is in conversation with transgender activist, writer, actress, and producer Jen Richards.

Elaine Kahn, "ROMANCE OR THE END"

Romance or The End takes up the tools of romantic narrative in order to perform the rupture between self and story that occurs at the onset of trauma. Using known and pathologized literary arcs, Elaine Kahn unspools the fundamental instability of truth, love, and language to create an experiential portrait of narrative’s power to both disfigure and restore.

Kahn is in conversation with Justin Torres, who has published short fiction in The New Yorker, Harper's, Granta, Tin House, The Washington Post, Glimmer Train, Flaunt.

A Tribute to Holly Prado

"The last time I saw Holly Prado, whom I’d known forty years, we were part of a group performance of Song of Myself at Beyond Baroque. Now we have her experiment in the long poem, Weather, a single, book-length poem in the larger tradition of Whitman’s personal epic, presenting the account of a voyage, lasting from fall 2015 to fall of 2018, through the inner seasons of a mythically conscious woman’s Los Angeles. 

"In a more specific tradition, Prado’s work is in the line of Diane Wakoski, Anais Nin, Diane DiPrima, Lyn Hejenian, and other women who have written with wisdom and courage about their resonantly three-dimensional inner lives. Sadly, it is her last book; but a near-compensation is, it is her best. Farthest and deepest in reach, a modernist collage orchestrated by a expressive hand, the poem is open enough to be entered virtually anywhere, yet organically shaped by a mature mythic awareness to have narrative momentum and coherence. Beautifully turned phrases, sentences, and lines abound. An example: "Out in the huge autumn sky, / leonid meteors give us their message: Don’t think too much / of your human pursuits. Don’t think you won’t be / dissolved in everything wilder than you. Enter / your myths with your open-palmed hands on your knees."

“Dissolved in everything wilder than you” — that is the state of feeling and vision Prado’s imagination makes available to us. It is also the promise all real poetry makes: that our veil of pursuits be lifted, that we see the wild truth."

—James Cushing, joined in conversation and readings by Harry E. Northup and Phoebe MacAdams.

Ejeris Dixon & Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, "BEYOND SURVIVAL" w/ Guests

Afraid to call 911, but not sure what to do instead? Read this book! Beyond Survival collects tools, strategies and personal stories of the struggle to create safety, justice and accountability beyond the criminal justice system. 

This long-awaited and deeply necessary book documents some of the work of the transformative justice movement- collecting everything from personal stories of successful interventions in abuse and violence to guides to being accountable if you’ve been abusive, from strategies to support folks having emotional crises without calling 911 to toolkits for creating safer party spaces and community safety zones from ICE.  Along the way, there’s plenty of personal essays and reflections from long time organizers on the state of the movement, and visions for the future we’re building that will bring us all home.  

Editors Ejeris Dixon and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha are in conversation with activist-contributors Amita Swadhin and Raquel Lavina.

 

Chana Porter, "THE SEEP" w/ Agnes Borinsky

Trina Goldberg-Oneka is a fifty-year-old trans woman whose life is irreversibly altered in the wake of a gentle—but nonetheless world-changing—invasion by an alien entity called The Seep. Through The Seep, everything is connected. Capitalism falls, hierarchies and barriers are broken down; if something can be imagined, it is possible.

Trina and her wife, Deeba, live blissfully under The Seep’s utopian influence—until Deeba begins to imagine what it might be like to be reborn as a baby, which will give her the chance at an even better life. Using Seeptech to make this dream a reality, Deeba moves on to a new existence, leaving Trina devastated.

Heartbroken and deep into an alcoholic binge, Trina follows a lost boy she encounters, embarking on an unexpected quest. In her attempt to save him from The Seep, she will confront not only one of its most avid devotees, but the terrifying void that Deeba has left behind. A strange new elegy of love and loss, The Seep explores grief, alienation, and the ache of moving on.

Author Chana Porter is in conversation with Agnes Borinsky, a playwright and performer based in Los Angeles.

Michael Lee, "THE ONLY WORLDS WE KNOW" and Morgan Parker "MAGICAL NEGRO"

Join poets Morgan Parker (Magical Negro) and Michael Lee (The Only Worlds We Know) as they read from their respective collections.

Ian Brennan, "SILENCED BY SOUND" w/ Tunde Adebimpe

Popular culture has woven itself into the social fabric of our lives, penetrating people's homes and haunting their psyches through images and earworms. Justice, at most levels, is something the average citizen may have little influence upon, leaving us feeling helpless and complacent. But pop music is a neglected arena where concrete change can occur — by exercising active and thoughtful choices to reject the low-hanging, omnipresent corporate fruit, we begin to rebalance the world, one engaged listener at a time.

Silenced by Sound is a powerful exploration of the challenges facing art, music, and media. Ian Brennan delves into his personal story to address the inequity of distribution in the arts and demonstrates that there are millions of talented people around the world more gifted than the superstars for whom billions of dollars are spent to promote the delusion that they have been blessed with unique genius.

Brennan is in conversation with Tunde Adebimpe, a Grammy-nominated musician, actor, director, and visual-artist best known as the lead singer of the band TV on the Radio.

Melissa Matthewson, "TRACING THE DESIRE LINE" w/ Mathieu Cailler

Tracing the Desire Line follows a writer's journey of opening her marriage with her husband. The story—told through short memoirs, essays, lists, letters, and hybrid prose poems—is an intimate inquiry into one woman’s search for autonomy with detours into meditations on music, motherhood, religion, love, and wildness.

Matthewson is in conversation with Mathieu Cailler, an award-winning author, whose poetry and prose have been widely featured in numerous national and international publications, including the Los Angeles Times and The Saturday Evening Post.

Caroline Zancan, "WE WISH YOU LUCK" w/ Aja Gabel

An exhilarating novel about a group of students who take revenge on a wunderkind professor after she destroys one of their own-- a story of collective drive to create, sabotage, and ultimately, to love.

It doesn't take long for the students on Fielding campus to become obsessed with Hannah, Leslie and Jimmy. The three graduate students are mysterious, inaccessible, and brilliant. Leslie, glamorous and brash, has declared that she wants to write erotica and make millions. Hannah is quietly confident, loyal, elegantly beautiful, and the person they all want to be; and Jimmy is a haunted genius with no past. After Simone - young, bestselling author and erstwhile model - shows up as a visiting professor, and after everything that happened with her, the trio only become more notorious.

Love. Death. Revenge. These age-old tropes come to life as the semesters unfold. The threesome came to study writing, to be writers, and this is the story they've woven together: of friendship and passion, of competition and envy, of creativity as life and death. Now, they submit this story, We Wish You Luck, for your reading pleasure.

Author Caroline Zancan is in conversation with Aja Gabel, whose debut novel, The Ensemble, was released by Riverhead in 2018.

André Naffis-Sahely and Fred D'Aguiar, "A STRANGER"

Exile lies at the root of our earliest stories. Charting varied experiences of people forced to leave their homes from the ancient world to the present day, The Heart of a Stranger is an anthology of poetry, fiction and non-fiction that journeys through six continents, with over a hundred contributors drawn from twenty-four languages.

Highlights include the wisdom of the 5th century Desert Fathers and Mothers, The Flight of the Irish Earls, Madame de Staël’s thoughts on Napoleon’s tyranny, Emma Goldman’s travails in the wake of the First Red Scare, Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s tales of European colonial settlers in Kenya and the work of the contemporary Eritrean poet Ribka Sibhatu.

Edited by poet and translator André Naffis-Sahely, The Heart of a Stranger offers a uniquely varied look at a theme both ancient and urgently contemporary.

Naffis-Sahely is in conversation with Fred D'Aguiar, poet, novelist, playwright, born in London of Guyanese parents and raised in Guyana.