Skylight Books Podcast Series

SKYLIT: adrienne maree brown, ”FABLES AND SPELLS”

Fables and Spells is a vibrant selection of visionary works, both previously published and brand new. Included here is adrienne maree brown's most beloved story, "The River," as well as the two sequel tales of her Water Trio. The remaining sixty-seven pieces explore moments of beauty, conflict, and transformation that also weave deep, radical lessons. With narrative "fables" of speculative fiction and "spells" that play with the lines between poetry, instruction, song, and chant, Fables and Spells demonstrates how good writing can engage the present while providing expansive visions of the possible worlds humans can build.

 

Join us for a wonderful conversation between Brown and Skylight's Nat Freeman.

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Produced by Nat Freeman & Michael Kowaleski.

Theme: "I Love All My Friends," an unreleased demo by Fragile Gang.

SKYLIT: Emil DeAndreis, ”TELL US WHEN TO GO” w/ Joseph Bien Kahn

The post-recession Bay Area is a land fertile for world-changers and dreamers. This is the setting for Emil DeAndreis's Tell Us When To Go, a millennial coming-of-age story, part Silicon Valley satire and part urgent glimpse into the darker sides of privilege, troll culture, and class disparity. It asks the question, what comes of a friendship, or a city, with so much splitting it apart? Can it be saved?

Cole Gallegos is the ace of his college pitching staff, projected to make millions in the big leagues. But a ruthless case of "yips" leads him to break down and drop out of college.

Cole's teammate Isaac Moss is a wallflower who lacks direction and independence, so he follows Cole to San Francisco, where they rent a dingy apartment and attempt adult lives.

Desperate for a job, Cole is hired by Seaside High to work one-on-one with foster youth Dizzy Benson, who is one strike from getting expelled. The two do not vibe, to say the least. Days are turbulent with standoffs and threats. But their disconnect is not without humor, and with time their grudges against the world clumsily unite them.

Meanwhile Isaac is hired as a temp at a growing startup in Silicon Valley, where he enjoys breakrooms with hammocks, and teambuilding beer-tastings. Through this, he begins to gel with this fast paced and vibrant workforce that's begun to sweep through San Francisco. For once, he feels confident, even cool.

With such different days and perspectives, Cole and Isaac begin to diverge, much like the city itself. Told across one semester, Tell Us When To Go explores a city amid change, and the people and friendships that are liable to change with it.

 

Join us for a conversation between DeAndreis and Joseph Bien Kahn, moderated by Skylight's Tyler Austin.

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Produced by Nat Freeman & Michael Kowaleski.

Theme: "I Love All My Friends," an unreleased demo by Fragile Gang.

SKYLIT: Anna Moschovakis, ”PARTICIPATION” w/ Amina Cain

In the latest novel from Anna Moschovakis, two reading groups, unofficially called Love and Anti-Love, falter amidst political friction and signs of environmental collapse. Participation offers a prescient look at communication in a time of rupture: anonymous participants exchange fantasies and ruminations, and relationships develop and unravel. As the groups consider--or neglect--their syllabi, and connections between members deepen, a mentor disappears, a translator questions his role, a colleague known as "the capitalist" becomes a point of fixation, and "the news reports" filter through in fragments. With incisive prose and surprising structural shifts, Participation forms an alluring vision of community, and a love story like no other.

 

Join us for a conversation between Moschovakis and Amina Cain, moderated by Skylight's Halley Parry.

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Produced by Nat Freeman & Michael Kowaleski.

Theme: "I Love All My Friends," an unreleased demo by Fragile Gang.

SKYLIT: Colette Sartor, Gerda Govine Ituarte, Cassandra Lane, & Carla Rachel Sameth

Join us for a tremendous conversation and group reading with LA-based writers and poets. 

 

Colette Sartor, Gerda Govine Ituarte, Cassandra Lane and Carla Rachel Sameth convene to read their works and discuss their admirations, fears, and perspectives on writing as women.

 

Moderated by Skylight's Tyler Austin.

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Produced by Nat Freeman & Michael Kowaleski.

Theme: "I Love All My Friends," an unreleased demo by Fragile Gang.

SKYLIT: Danny Ramadan, ”THE FOGHORN ECHOES” w/ Lance Morgan

Hussam and Wassim are teenage boys living in Syria during America's 2003 invasion of Iraq. When a surprise discovery results in tragedy, their lives, and those of their families, are shattered. Wassim promises Hussam his protection, but ten years into the future, he has failed to keep his promise. Wassim is on the streets, seeking shelter from both the city and the civil war storming his country. Meanwhile Hussam, now on the other side of the world, remains haunted by his own ghosts, doing his utmost to drown them out with every vice imaginable.

Split between war-torn Damascus and Vancouver, The Foghorn Echoes is a tragic love story about coping with shared traumatic experience and devastating separation. As Hussam and Wassim come to terms with the past, they begin to realise the secret that haunts them is not the only secret that formed them.

 

Join us for a conversation between author Danny Ramadan and Skylight's Lance Morgan.

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Produced by Nat Freeman & Michael Kowaleski.

Theme: "I Love All My Friends," an unreleased demo by Fragile Gang.

SKYLIT: Kyra Simone & Emmalea Russo

Kyra Simone, Palace of Rubble

 

A collection of stories composed primarily of single words culled each day from the New York Times, among other news sources. Written under constraint in the tradition of Oulipo, these hybrid works of prose are reconstructions that no longer resemble the original texts, yet draw from the same reservoir of vocabulary, conveying new images and ideas, while preserving some distant ember of the universe from which they were first generated.

 

Emmalea Russo, Confetti

 

By turns cinematic, cosmic, alchemical, and geometric, Confetti uses language to alter the boundaries between film and daily life. Against a backdrop of screens, personal relationships extend into a play of light to create a meditation on disposability and permanence. Confetti soaks up dirt, shimmers, and gets thrown up into the air, landing on the ground in strange piles.

 

Join Simone and Russo as they discuss their work with episode host Halley Perry.

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Produced by Nat Freeman & Michael Kowaleski.

Theme: "I Love All My Friends," an unreleased demo by Fragile Gang.

SKYLIT: Emerson Whitney, ”HEAVEN” w/ Claire Boyle

At Heaven's center, Emerson Whitney seeks to understand their relationship to their mother and grandmother, those first windows into womanhood and all its consequences. Whitney retraces a roving youth in deeply observant, psychedelic prose-all the while folding in the work of thinkers like Judith Butler, Donna Haraway, and C. Riley Snorton-to engage transness and the breathing, morphing nature of selfhood.

 

Join Whitney for a conversation with Claire Boyle

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Produced by Nat Freeman & Michael Kowaleski.

Theme: "I Love All My Friends," an unreleased demo by Fragile Gang.

SKYLIT: ”IT CAME FROM THE CLOSET”

Horror movies hold a complicated space in the hearts of the queer community: historically misogynist, and often homo- and transphobic, the genre has also been inadvertently feminist and open to subversive readings. Common tropes--such as the circumspect and resilient "final girl," body possession, costumed villains, secret identities, and things that lurk in the closet--spark moments of eerie familiarity and affective connection. Still, viewers often remain tasked with reading themselves into beloved films, seeking out characters and set pieces that speak to, mirror, and parallel the unique ways queerness encounters the world. It Came from the Closet features twenty-five essays by writers speaking to this relationship, through connections both empowering and oppressive.

 

Join us for a round-table conversation between editor Joe Vallese and contributors Carrow Narby, Grant Sutton, Laura Maw, Prince Shakur, Sachiko Ragosta, and Tucker Lieberman. It's the perfect queer spooky-conversation that ranges from each writer's initial foray into horror, who the most queer horror character is, and the minute differences between Basket Case and Brain Damage.

 

This conversation is moderated by Nat Freeman. 

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Produced by Nat Freeman & Michael Kowaleski.

Theme: "I Love All My Friends," an unreleased demo by Fragile Gang.

SKYLIT: Ama Codjoe, ”BLUEST NUDE” w/ Aleshea Harris & Ashaki Jackson

Ama Codjoe's poems explore how the archetype of the artist complicates the typical expectations of women: be gazed upon, be silent, be selfless, reproduce. Dialoguing with and through art, Bluest Nude considers alternative ways of holding and constructing the self. From Lorna Simpson to Gwendolyn Brooks to Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, contemporary and ancestral artists populate Bluest Nude in a choreography of Codjoe's making. Precise and halting, this finely wrought, riveting collection is marked by an acute rendering of highly charged emotional spaces. Purposefully shifting between the role of artist and subject, seer and seen, Codjoe's poems ask what the act of looking does to a person--public looking, private looking, and that most intimate, singular spectacle of looking at one's self. What does it mean to see while being seen? 

 

Join us for a conversation with Codjoe and Aleshea Harris & Ashaki Jackson.

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Produced by Nat Freeman & Michael Kowaleski.

Theme: "I Love All My Friends," an unreleased demo by Fragile Gang.

LIVE ON CROWDCAST: Billy-Ray Belcourt, ”A MINOR CHORUS”

In the stark expanse of Northern Alberta, a queer Indigenous doctoral student steps away from his dissertation to write a novel, informed by a series of poignant encounters: a heart-to-heart with fellow doctoral student River over the mounting pressure placed on marginalized scholars; a meeting with Michael, a closeted man from his hometown whose vulnerability and loneliness punctuate the realities of queer life on the fringe. Woven throughout these conversations are memories of Jack, a cousin caught in the cycle of police violence, drugs, and survival. Jack’s life parallels the narrator’s own; the possibilities of escape and imprisonment are left to chance with colonialism stacking the odds. A Minor Chorus, Billy-Ray Belcourt's debut novel, introduces a dazzling new literary voice whose vision and fearlessness shine much-needed light on the realities of Indigenous survival.

 

The event is moderated by Nat Freeman, recorded live on our Crowdcast channel on October 13, 2022.

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Produced by Nat Freeman, Lance Morgan, & Michael Kowaleski.

Theme: "I Love All My Friends," an unreleased demo by Fragile Gang.

Visit https://www.skylightbooks.com/event for future offerings from the Skylight Books Events team.

SKYLIT: Andrea Chapela, ”THE VISIBLE UNSEEN” w/ Kelsi Vanada

In powerful, formally inventive essays, The Visible Unseen disrupts the purported cultural divide between arts and science. As both a chemist and an award-winning author, Andrea Chapela zeros in on the literary metaphors buried in the facts and figures of her scientific observations. Through questioning scientific conundrums that lie beyond the limits of human perception, she winds up putting herself under the microscope as well.

While considering the technical definition of glass as a liquid or a solid, Chapela stumbles upon a framework for understanding the in-between-ness of her own life. Turning her focus toward mirrors, she finds metaphors for our cultural obsessions with self-image in the physics and chemistry of reflection. And as she compiles a history of the scientific study of light, she comes to her final conclusion: that the purpose of description--be it scientific or literary--can never be to define reality, only to confirm our perception of it. Lyrical, introspective, and methodical, The Visible Unseen constructs a startling new perspective from which to examine ourselves and the ways we create meaning.

 

Join us for a special bilingual reading and a conversation between Chapela and translator Kelsi Vanada.

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Produced by Nat Freeman & Michael Kowaleski.

Theme: "I Love All My Friends," an unreleased demo by Fragile Gang.

SKYLIT: Ruha Benjamin, ”VIRAL JUSTICE” w/ Lance Morgan

Long before the pandemic, Ruha Benjamin was doing groundbreaking research on race, technology, and justice, focusing on big, structural changes. But the twin plagues of COVID-19 and anti-Black police violence inspired her to rethink the importance of small, individual actions. Part memoir, part manifesto, Viral Justice is a sweeping and deeply personal exploration of how we can transform society through the choices we make every day.

 

Join us for a conversation between Benjamin and Lance Morgan.

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Produced by Nat Freeman, Lance Morgan, & Michael Kowaleski.

Theme: "I Love All My Friends," an unreleased demo by Fragile Gang.

LIVE ON CROWDCAST: ”Death in the Mouth” Roundtable

Death in the Mouth is a collection of horror stories and art showcasing BIPOC and ethnically marginalized storytellers from around the world. You’ll read stories featuring grotesque manifestations of dread, the enveloping sludge of grief, and the insectoid itch of deep-seated fear. Embodiments of mania and displacements of faith. Harrowing ecstasy and debilitating hope. Transgressions of the body, the spirit, and the community. Unique and terrifying alien mythology from the future. Quiet, creeping absurdities. Weird urban legends from secondary worlds. In this anthology, Sloane Leong and Cassie Hart bring you an incredible range of stories and illustrations that celebrate the voices of those overlooked to show you the terrifying and exquisite scope of what horror can be.

Join us for this round-table conversation with contributors Leong, Hart, Beatrice Iker, K-Ming Chang, and Karin Lowachee.

The event is moderated by Halley, recorded live on our Crowdcast channel on Saturday, October 1.

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Produced by Nat Freeman, Lance Morgan, & Michael Kowaleski.

Theme: "I Love All My Friends," an unreleased demo by Fragile Gang.

Visit https://www.skylightbooks.com/event for future offerings from the Skylight Books Events team.

SKYLIT: Alexandra Lange, ”MEET ME BY THE FOUNTAIN”

Few places have been as nostalgized, or as maligned, as malls. Since their birth in the 1950s, they have loomed large as temples of commerce, the agora of the suburbs. In their prime, they proved a powerful draw for creative thinkers such as Joan Didion, Ray Bradbury, and George Romero, who understood the mall’s appeal as both critics and consumers. Yet today, amid the aftershocks of financial crises and a global pandemic, as well as the rise of online retail, the dystopian husk of an abandoned shopping center has become one of our era’s defining images. Conventional wisdom holds that the mall is dead. But what was the mall, really? And have rumors of its demise been greatly exaggerated?

In her acclaimed The Design of Childhood, Alexandra Lange uncovered the histories of toys, classrooms, and playgrounds. She now turns her sharp eye to another subject we only think we know. She chronicles postwar architects’ and merchants’ invention of the mall, revealing how the design of these marketplaces played an integral role in their cultural ascent. In Lange’s perceptive account, the mall becomes newly strange and rich with contradiction: Malls are environments of both freedom and exclusion--of consumerism, but also of community. Meet Me by the Fountain is a highly entertaining and evocative promenade through the mall’s story of rise, fall, and ongoing reinvention, for readers of any generation.

 

Join us for a conversation between Lange and Skylight's Tyler Austin.

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Produced by Nat Freeman, Lance Morgan, & Michael Kowaleski.

Theme: "I Love All My Friends," an unreleased demo by Fragile Gang.

SKYLIT: Vanessa A. Bee, ”HOME BOUND” w/ Lydia Kiesling

In Home Bound, a singular and intimate memoir of identity and discovery, Vanessa A. Bee explores the way we define “home” and “belonging” — from her birth in Yaoundé, Cameroon, to her adoption by her aunt and her aunt’s white French husband, to experiencing housing insecurity in Europe and her eventual immigration to the US. After her parents’ divorce, Vanessa traveled with her mother to Lyon and later to London, eventually settling in Reno, Nevada, as a teenager, right around the financial crisis and the collapse of the housing market. At twenty, still a practicing evangelical Christian and newly married, Vanessa applied to and was accepted by Harvard Law School, where she was one of the youngest members of her class. There, she forged a new belief system, divorced her husband, left the church, and, inspired by her tumultuous childhood, pursued a career in economic justice upon graduation.

Vanessa’s adoptive, multiracial, multilingual, multinational, and transcontinental upbringing has caused her to grapple for years with foundational questions such as: What is home? Is it the country we’re born in, the body we possess, or the name we were given and that identifies us? Is it the house we remember most fondly, the social status assigned to us, or the ideology we forge? What defines us and makes us uniquely who we are?

Organized unconventionally around her own dictionary-style definitions of the word “home,” Vanessa tackles these timeless questions thematically and unpacks the many layers that contribute to and condition our understanding of ourselves and of our place in the world.

 

Join us for a conversation between Bee and fellow writer, Lydia Kiesling. This episode is hosted by Tyler.

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Produced by Nat Freeman, Lance Morgan, & Michael Kowaleski.

Theme: "I Love All My Friends," an unreleased demo by Fragile Gang.