Tom Toner / Caspar Geon | Science Fiction | Ep. 5

’Pemi Aguda | Fiction | Ep. 9

Nigerian short story writer and novelist ’Pemi Aguda reads a passage from her latest work, One Leg on Earth, and discusses the challenges–and rewards–of short vs. longform writing, the writers who keep her inspired, and how liberating it can be to scrap your book and start from scratch. 'Pemi’s critically acclaimed work mixes elements of supernatural, speculative fiction, folk horror, and contemporary literature to haunting and mesmeric effect.  It was fantastic to talk to her about her process and her debut novel, “a richly patterned work of tangled mysteries” (The Guardian). ’Pemi’s passage, from One Leg On Earth:  "When a man eventually approached her, two-thirds into the green bottle, the night was already set on its path. Of course, he sat without waiting for an answer to “Fine girl, may I join you?” Of course, he said it should be a crime for a pretty girl like her to be sitting all alone at an hour like this in a city like this, and maybe it was destined, yes, destined, that Yosoye would tilt her head until her maroon braids pooled on one shoulder, and ask if he was there to remedy that.  The lines came unrehearsed to her lips. The script of a worldly woman. She who had always been a hesitant speaker, one who revised her sentences in her head over and over until her conversation partners repeated themselves, assuming she’d never heard them. Was she the same girl? Yosoye from five days ago would have been gobsmacked, would have clapped her hands like a Nollywood village girl and said, “Ehehn? Na you be this? This is you, yeah?” She was heady with unexpected success, so when he rose and took her hand, she didn’t protest. She didn’t think, too-fast-too-fast-too-fast. No. She thought, “Give me, give me.”  This was exactly what she wanted from Lagos: unpredictable turns to a day so that what was up was suddenly sideways, and that 8 p.m. would bring adventure that 6 a.m. never dared to anticipate, and enough courage to stop her from curling back into herself, retreating into the loneliness she was used to, the comfort of its grasping arms. In the cheap motel that smelled too strongly of air freshener, Yosoye removed her clothes with a determination alien to her, a forthrightness that belied inexperience. A handful of painful times was the extent of her sexual knowledge, cold clutches and dry entries, but she did not remember those discomforts in this moment. All she thought was now, was yes, was give me. She flung off her blouse, impatient for what came next, for her future. Her flesh fed on its own hunger, slicked from her eagerness alone, did not look to this man to generate the wet heat needed. She would not remember the air conditioner giving up with a short bang, or the diamond patterns of the bedsheet, and when his socks dropped to the floor, she could not be sure if it was rat or shadow that darted over them.  Yosoye would deliberately refuse to remember him complaining about the condom, pulling out, tugging swiftly and efficiently enough to suggest practice, flinging the rubber into the foliage of a fake indoor plant—to be found by a whistling cleaner, or to ferment there forever. What Yosoye did remember was the feeling of being tugged along this Lagos night, lured, pulled, towed. Not the rhythmic smacking of his sweaty paunch against the inside of her thighs, but a grander hypnotic feeling of being swept up in a current, dragged in the surge of a ravenous tide."

Jan Swafford | Biography | Ep. 8

Musician, writer, and biographer Jan Swafford reads not one but two passages! The first from the opening of his biography of the American composer Charles Ives and the second from his massive book on the life of Beethoven, Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph–9n his words the hardest thing he’s ever written. He also talks to Jon and Cory about: * Why a musical biography has to reflect the subject–an Ives book should be Ivesian, a Beethoven book should be Beethovenian. * His start as a “hack writer” writing Civil War history books for hire and learning how to do research. * His research process and the value of a solid chronology. * What you can learn about how people think and talk–from reading–and retyping–letters. * The temptation to interpret a subject and the risks in doing so. * Why writing about Beethoven’s process of composing his monumental Eroica symphony was the hardest passage he’s ever worked on. * The importance of instinct–and of having a good early reader to give you honest feedback. Jan’s first passage, from Charles Ives: A Life in Music: In the old Ives house in the middle of Danbury, Connecticut in 1874, among the warren of rooms smelling of beeswax and fruit, these sounds were familiar. The intimate patter of rain, the measureless peeling of thunder, the jingle of sleighs in winter, the sure of spring peepers from springs and ponds, the clatter and clop of buggies down dusty Main Street, and the deeper rolling rumble of wagons on their way to shops and factories. From the congregational church next door are the muffled sounds of choir and organ and the great bronze booming of the bell, and all day Sunday the sound of distant bells like intimations of a presence beyond the horizon of this moment of this life. At holidays, the brass bands marching past, the rattle and crump of fireworks, the clang of the fire bell, in summer the cries of icemen and boys selling newspapers, inside the house the groaning of old floors, the antiphonal voices of a big family's comings and goings, and every night the bright rising and falling of music, cornet or piano or violin or bands, little orchestras playing in the park, outside in the shed or in the barn playing quick steps and hymns and Beethoven and Stephen Foster. On October 20th, 1874, from the large bedroom over the South Parlor, rose the Keening whale of newborn Charles Edward Ives, who would register the myriad sounds of home as few people have, and who would never forget them in the intimacies of their timbers and in their deeper human resonances. Jan’s second passage, from Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph: The dots and quilled and penciled on the page define an accumulating and clarifying vision of the work. Beethoven has never seen a battle, but years before, on the road from Bonn to Vienna, he encountered armies heard the bustle and rattle of troops on the march, the bugle calls and martial music. The overarching conception and the minutiae of melody and rhythm and harmony feed on one another. As usual, conceives his ideas in terms of familiar formal outlines. So now I'm talking about the process and the finished at the same time. For the first movement, he needs a Thema for the opening, then what he calls the Mittelgedanke, subsidiary ideas. Then he needs ideas for the Durchführung, his term for the development section. His forms are not molds to be filled with notes, but general guidelines to help organize the conception. This time, the conception is a name, Bonaparte. Whatever the form becomes, it has to be measured and cut to that subject. He wears out one quill pen after another, notes spreading over empty staves, pages accumulating in the sketchbook...

Nathan Ballingrud | Horror | Ep. 7

Horror and dark fantasy writer Nathan Ballingrud reads a passage from his novella, The Butcher’s Table, originally published in the short fiction collection Wounds (The Atlas of Hell). He talks to Jon and Cory about: * The story’s origins as a blog serial * His initial struggles to commit to the significant tonal departure from the stories in his first collection, North American Lake Monsters * The fear of being taken less seriously by writing pulpy, fantastical fiction * How Mike Mignola's Hellboy inspired him to commit to something as over-the-top as an angel-possessed squid * Switching between laptop and pen and paper to unlock looser, more reckless drafting * Learning to write by mimicking Stephen King and Clive Barker * Attending Clarion Workshop * Why he tries to avoid reading reviews (including those on Reddit, Goodreads, and social media) * His love of Mervyn Peake and the Gormenghast books Nathan’s passage, from The Butcher’s Table: It spoke a word that fractured the jaw of its host, registering the pain as a curiosity. Upon hearing the word, one of the roosting angels took flight, rearing against the sun in a flare of black feathers, and plummeted into the sea, where it sank from sight like a corpse weighted with stones. The angel descended quickly, a dark-feathered ball, until it passed beyond the reach of sunlight and the water grew cold and black. It fell more deeply yet, oblivious to the atmospheres pressing against its body, its eyes pulling from the lightless fathom darting shapes, shifting mountains of flesh. It found a host, made a bloody gash and wriggled into it, and filled the beast with its holy spirit. Skin split in fissures along the length of its form, and it jetted forward with fresh purpose, its tentacles trailing in a tight formation behind it, its red saucer-shaped eyes incandescent with hunger. [...skips about 10 pages…] It was a squid, a deep-sea monstrosity with tentacles nearly as long as the ship itself, and it was inverted in the sky. Its arms pulled the sails from their masts, yanked yardarms free of their moorings. People slid from the deck and into the churning water. The squid hovered in the air, its skin split lengthwise, revealing the white flesh of its interior, as though something within itself did not fit. Ragged black feathers jutted from the wounds. Its tentacles splayed in the air around it, a corona of horrors. Its glaring eyes smoked in the beating rain.

Michael Katz | Russian Translation | Ep. 6

The great Russian translator Michael Katz reads a passage from Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov and discusses the painstaking process, many challenges, and hard limitations of translation, which he considers a “recreative” act vs. a purely creative one. He also talks to us about what keeps readers coming back to Dostoevsky’s strange, often difficult books, and why a good translation is only good for about 20 or 30 years. Michael’s passage, from his translation of The Brother’s Karamazov: He had a strange dream, utterly out of keeping with the time and place. He was somewhere out on the steppe, where he’d been stationed a long time ago, and a peasant was driving him through the slush in a cart with a pair of horses. Mitya felt cold; it was early November and snow was falling in large, wet flakes; it melted immediately, as soon as it hit the ground. The peasant drove along swiftly, boldly snapping his whip; he had a long fair beard. The driver wasn’t an old man, perhaps fifty, wearing a gray peasant’s homespun coat. There was a village not far off. He could pick out the very black huts; half of them had burned down, and there were only a few charred beams sticking up. Standing along the road leading out of the village were lots of peasant women, a whole row of them, all thin and wan, with brownish faces. There was one in particular at the edge, such a bony woman, tall, looking about forty, but perhaps only twenty, with a long, thin face; in her arms she held a little child who was crying; her breasts must have dried up, with no milk left in them. The baby was crying, crying, holding out his bare little arms, his little fists blue from the cold. “Why are they crying? What are they crying for?” he asks, briskly flying by. “It’s the babe,” the driver replies. “It’s the babe crying.” And Mitya’s struck by the fact that he says it in his own way, the peasant way, “babe,” and not “baby.” He likes the peasant’s calling it a “babe”; it seems as if there’s more pity in it. “But why is he crying?” Mitya persists like a fool. “Why are his little arms bare? Why don’t they wrap him up?” “The babe’s chilled to the bone; his little clothes are frozen and don’t warm him.” “But why is it so? Why?” foolish Mitya persists. “They’re poor people, burned out; they haven’t a crust of bread; they’re begging because they’re burned out.” “No, no.” Mitya still seems not to understand. “Tell me: why are these poor mothers standing there? Why are the people poor? Why is the babe poor? Why is the steppe barren? Why don’t they all embrace and kiss? Why don’t they sing songs of joy? Why are they so dark from black misery? Why don’t they feed the babe?” He feels that although his questions are unreasonable and senseless, he still wants to ask them and he has to pose them in just that way. He also feels that an emotion of sweet tenderness is rising up in his heart, one he’s never experienced before, and that he wants to weep, he wants to do something for everyone so that the babe won’t cry anymore, and so that the dark, dried-up mother of the baby will no longer cry, so that no one will shed any more tears from this moment forth, and he wants to do all this at once, at once, without delay, in spite of all obstacles, with all of the Karamazov recklessness.

Tom Toner / Caspar Geon | Science Fiction | Ep. 5

Science fiction writer Tom Toner reads a passage from his latest novel, The Immeasurable Heaven, published under the pen name Caspar Geon. He talks to Jon and Cory about his many notebooks full of longhand worldbuilding ideas, finding inspiration for alien species in David Attenborough nature documentaries, writing under contract vs. writing on spec, and a unique drafting process built more around addition than subtraction. Tom’s Passage, from The Immeasurable Heaven (slightly abbreviated for space): In the silt-suspended gloom something huge uncoiled. It scratched itself with a few lazy sweeps of its fins, scraping a peel of dead skin into the depths, before extending a tongue shaped like a fabulously intricate key and latching into the receiver. The apparatus glowed into life, startling a flitting ecosystem into the shadows and revealing the full, serpentine bulk of its user in a ghostly wash of light. The interior of the water-filled space lit up with every flicker and flash to reveal a cavern of gnarled, artificial stalactites and equipment that poked like instruments of torture into the creature’s lair. The Translator, hundreds of meters from snout to tail, had never seen the galaxy with its own eyes, for it possessed none. It was likewise completely deaf, as most other species understood the term, relying instead on the single most sensitive organ for light-years around: a tongue equipped with twenty million pressure receptors per cubic centimetre, a tongue it had never seen.   The receiver pulsed with flowing light as the Translator cycled through a wealth of options, sorting the signal vaults. Trillions of rising transmissions had been collected from the fissure in the realities as if with a giant net and left to stew, their caches of interference filtered and stored in separate branches of Obaneo station for further analysis. Today it was moving downwards through the datastores, so to speak, into a vault that had been left unopened for millennia.  The Translator clenched and relaxed one of the hundreds of muscles in its tongue in rapid succession, exploring a chronological sensochart and discovering that the signals in today’s vault were pre-Throlken, over five hundred million years old, the deepest it had ever gone. It made itself comfortable, suckling a jet of Jatsotl milk from the reservoir below the receiver while a population of Tickler species went to work massaging its ancient, scaly body, and dialled the pressure volume to medium, looking forward to the stimulating glut of undiscovered languages it was about to sense for the very first time. The Translator opened the vault, recoiling a moment later as the waters of its nest clouded with dark, sulphuric blood. It shut the receiver off, yanking its tongue free and nursing it inside its mouth, every nerve howling in pain. It could only think of one sufficient word for what it was: a scream of a strength never recorded before. The older transmissions were always diluted and weak; nothing even a tenth that antiquated had ever come through so potent, so painful. Converted into sound it would surely deafen—perhaps even kill—anything unlucky enough to be born with ears.  The Translator gingerly reinserted, probing carefully through the data to check the signal strengths—something it really ought to have done beforehand. There. Nine thousand one hundred on the scale. No wonder its poor tongue had almost split in half.  It labelled the vault as unsafe and coiled into a knot on the floor of its cavern, thinking, the nest’s filtration systems already dispersing the blood. Such a signal would take colossal amounts of power to produce, whole star systems’ worth, the output of a widespread and successful interstellar civilisation. All that power, channelled straight into its mouth.