Perry Janes’s debut poetry collection, Find Me When You’re Ready, follows its speaker from childhood in Detroit to young adulthood in Los Angeles, a coming-of-age story in five acts, told through a series of lyric moments. The poems in this collection confront childhood sexual abuse and the story of what it means to be a man, ultimately reaching toward healing and love. In our conversation we talked about what poetry and prose do differently, how masculinity is presented in these poems, and why it was important to both include trauma but not dwell in it. For the second segment, we talked about attention and how hard it can be to focus.

(Recorded November 12, 2024)

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• Perry Janes
• Purchase Find Me When You’re Ready: Book Soup (Los Angeles, CA) | The Book Catapult (San Diego, CA) | Bookshop.org
• Natalie Eilbert - Indictus
• Alexander Chee - How to Write an Autobiographical Novel
• Peter Ho Davies
• Linda Gregg - “We Manage Most When We Manage Small”
• Monster (2023 film)

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

Writer Sarah Gailey returns to the show for a discussion about their new novella, Have You Eaten? This serialized story follows four young queer characters as they traverse an America in the process of collapse, taking care of each other along the way. In our conversation, Sarah and I talked about experimentation in fiction, vine-ripened tomatoes, cooking as an act of care, and what apocalypse means. Then for the second segment, we talked about why we re-recorded the second segment, sin-flattening and high-control groups, the necessity of interpersonal repair.

(Episode recorded September 27, 2024 and September 30, 2024)

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• Sarah Gailey
• Purchase Have You Eaten? (e-book): Kobo | Apple Books | Amazon
• Sarah Gailey - “STET”
• Keep the Channel Open - Episode 109: Sarah Gailey (When We Were Magic)
• Sarah Gailey - “Stone Soup #24: Mending Sauce”
• Sarah Gailey - “Pantry Cookies”
• Sabrina Imbler - How Far the Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures

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

In the opening poem of Rachel Edelman’s debut collection, Dear Memphis, the speaker returns to their home city after a long time away, traversing a landscape that is both familiar and foreign, a place to which she belongs but also doesn’t. Over the course of the collection, Edelman asks questions about heritage and inheritance; about exile, diaspora, and migration; about home; about marginalization and privilege, oppression and complicity. In our conversation, we talked about acts of care, the importance of self-criticality, what poems do, and the necessary and the possible. Then for the second segment, we talked about corresponding via hand-written letters.

(Recorded June 28, 2024)

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• Rachel Edelman
• Purchase Dear Memphis: Open Books (Seattle, WA) | The Book Catapult (San Diego, CA) | Bookshop.org
• Jacob Lawrence - The Migration Series
• Morgan Parker - Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up At Night
• Alan Kurdi (The boy on the beach)
• emet ezell
• Rachel Edelman & emet ezell - “The Correspondent’s Cheeks Are as a Bed of Spices”
• James Merrill - “Lost in Translation”
• AGNI 99

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

Writer, editor, and podcaster Jennifer Baker’s debut YA novel, Forgive Me Not, imagines a near-future America in which the juvenile criminal justice system has been “reformed” to allow young people to undergo grueling Trials instead of incarceration. It’s an incisive and powerful story about carceral justice, as well as a moving coming-of-age and family story. In our conversation we talked about writing about serious topics for younger readers, how she approached writing her characters, and why it was important for her to focus on systems rather than individual innocence or guilt. Then for the second segment we talked about finding inspiration in other art forms.

(Recorded April 3, 2024.)

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• Jennifer Baker
• Purchase Forgive Me Not: Kew & Willow Books (Kew Gardens, NY) | The Book Catapult (San Diego, CA) | Bookshop.org
• Minorities in Publishing podcast
• Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah - Chain-Gang All-Stars
• Kalief Browder
• Lionel Tate
• Squid Game
• Annie Proulx - “Brokeback Mountain” (short story)
• Brokeback Mountain (film)
• Rachel Eliza Griffiths
• Nicholas Nichols
• Titus Kaphar
• Kelsey Norris - House Gone Quiet

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

Writer Rachel Lyon returns to the show to discuss her latest novel, Fruit of the Dead, a contemporary retelling of the Persephone myth in which a young woman is seduced by wealth and privilege in a story about addiction, class, sexual assault, and power. In our conversation, we talked about how malleable identity can be during adolescence and how that informed how she wrote the character of Cory, how family members do and don’t see each other, and why it was important for the characters in this story to have agency. Then for the second segment we talked about stages of life.

(Recorded June 28, 2024.)

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• Rachel Lyon
• Purchase Fruit of the Dead: Broadside Bookshop (Northampton, MA) | The Book Catapult (San Diego, CA) | Bookshop.org
• Rachel Lyon - Self-Portrait with Boy
• Keep the Channel Open - Episode 79: Rachel Lyon (January 2019)
• The Holdovers
• Charles Baxter - First Light
• Elizabeth Jane Howard - The Long View

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

Introducing Hey, It's Me!

I'm happy to announce a new podcast from me and my friend Rachel Zucker, Hey, It's Me! Here's the first episode as a bonus for KTCO listeners. Enjoy!

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For this KTCO Book Club conversation, poet Amorak Huey joins me to discuss Layli Long Soldier’s 2017 poetry collection, Whereas. In our conversation, we talked about the way the poems confront language, what language means in the context of forced assimilation, and how the poems engage with both history and contemporary reality.

(Recorded March 26, 2024)

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• Amorak Huey
• Purchase Whereas: Gathering Volumes (Parisburg, OH) | The Book Catapult (San Diego, CA) | Bookshop.org
• Purchase Dad Jokes from Late in the Patriarchy
• Congressional Resolution of Apology to Native Americans
• Between the Covers - Layli Long Soldier : Whereas
• R. F. Kuang - Babel

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

For this KTCO Book Club conversation, I’m joined by writer and group facilitator Martha Crawford for a discussion about Ingrid Rojas Contreras’s 2023 memoir, The Man Who Could Move Clouds. In our conversation, Martha and I talked about different ways of knowing, how to read across cultures without being extractive, storytelling as healing, and what identity means in the context of forgetting.

(Recorded March 9, 2024)

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• Martha Crawford
• Purchase The Man Who Could Move Clouds, by Ingrid Rojas Contreras: The Collected Works Bookstore (Santa Fe, NM) | The Book Catapult (San Diego, CA) | Bookshop.org
• Vine Deloria, Jr.
• Hildegard of Bingen
• Thomas Merton - “The Door That Ends All Doors”

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

Writer and friend José Pablo Iriarte returns to the show to discuss their debut middle-grade novel, Benny Ramirez and the Nearly Departed. In our conversation, we talked about building stories without antagonists, writing for young readers, and what makes coming-of-age stories such an enduring phenomenon. Then for the second segment, we talked about the importance of storytelling in creating empathy and connection in our incredibly divided society.

(Recorded April 6, 2024.)

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• José Pablo Iriarte
• Purchase Benny Ramírez and the Nearly Departed: White Rose Books (Kissimmee, FL) | Mysterious Galaxy (San Diego, CA) | Bookshop.org
• Keep the Channel Open - Episode 23: José Iriarte
• José Pablo Iriarte - “Proof by Induction”
• José Pablo Iriarte - “The Substance of My Lives, the Accidents of Our Births”
• José Pablo Iriarte - “Secrets and Things We Don’t Say Out Loud”
• José Pablo Iriarte - “Life in Stone, Glass, and Plastic”
• José Pablo Iriarte - “Spirit of Home”
• Becky Chambers - A Psalm for the Wild-Built
• A. S. King’s Instagram post
• Celeste Ng - Everything I Never Told You
• Ryka Aoki - Light From Uncommon Stars
• A. S. King - Attack of the Black Rectangles

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

Sarah Rose Etter is a writer based in Los Angeles, CA. In Sarah’s latest novel, Ripe, a young woman is trapped in a dream-job-turned-corporate-nightmare at a cutthroat Silicon Valley tech startup. Her bosses are capricious and cruel, the city she lives in is crumbling under late capitalism, and everywhere she goes she is followed by her own personal black hole. In our conversation, Sarah and I talked about the relationship between her surrealist fiction and poetry, why visual art is important to her, and what it means for a character to have agency. Then for the second segment we discussed dead authors, reading in translation, and creative insecurity.

(Recorded March 2, 2024.)

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• Sarah Rose Etter
• Purchase Ripe: Skylight Books (Los Angeles, CA) | The Book Catapult (San Diego, CA) | Bookshop.org
• Sarah Rose Etter - The Book of X
• Keep the Channel Open - Episode 89: Julia Dixon Evans
• Tommy Pico
• Lilliam Rivera
• Kristen Arnett
• Sarah Rose Etter - “Unpublishable: Censored Emails from Noam Chomsky”
• Alina Szapocznikow
• Vija Celmins
• Nylon - “Sarah Rose Etter’s Ripe and the Rotted Underbelly of Capitalism”
• Sarah Rose Etter - “Inside the Cardboard Box of My Heart”
• Mark Rothko
• Louise Bourgeois
• Donald Judd
• Sarah Rose Etter - “Girl, What Is Wrong With You?”
• Parasite
• Uncut Gems
• Sarah Rose Etter - “Subglacial Rivers, A Love Poem, Because… & Either/Or”
• Crane Brinton - The Anatomy of Revolution
• Brandon Taylor - “living shadows: aesthetics of moral worldbuilding”
• Tove Ditlevsen - The Copenhagen Trilogy
• Louise Bourgeois: The Spider, the Mistress and the Tangerine

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

For this KTCO “Book” Club conversation, writer Maggie Tokuda-Hall returns to the show to talk about the game Baldur’s Gate 3. In our conversation, Maggie and I talked about what it’s like to experience a story with so many branching paths, how player choices reflect the player’s personality, as well as some standout storytelling moments from the game.

(Recorded February 9, 2024.)

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• Maggie Tokuda-Hall
• Purchase Baldur’s Gate 3
• Purchase The Siren, the Song, and the Spy
• Preorder The Worst Ronin
• Pools of Darkness
• Unlimited Adventures
• Icewind Dale
• Baldur’s Gate 2
• Octopath Traveler
• The Last of Us
• The Adventure Zone
• Dungeons & Daddies
• Neil Newbon
• Roger Ebert - “Video games can never be art”
• The Brothers Sun
• Sarah Lotz - The Impossible Us

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