Sofia Samatar's "Opacities: On Writing and the Writing Life"
08/30/24 • 49 min
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Sofia Samatar speaks with Kate Wolf about her new book Opacities: On Writing and the Writing Life. Opacities is addressed to a fellow writer, Samatar’s close friend Kate Zambreno, and considers both the process of composing a book—the wellspring of inspiration, wishes and anxieties that accompany it— as well as the distance between a work and its author. Samatar explores how to stay alive as a writer through things such as community, extensive reading, and research alongside the dissonant ways writers are often asked to codify their identities and constantly promote themselves. Drawing on the words of writers like Eduard Glissant, Maurice Blanchot, Clarice Lispector, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Opacities is at heart a book about the furnace of creativity, and the fuel that keeps it burning despite its many trials, risks, and disappointments. Also, Eugene Lim, author of Fog and Car, returns to recommend Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal.
Sofia Samatar speaks with Kate Wolf about her new book Opacities: On Writing and the Writing Life. Opacities is addressed to a fellow writer, Samatar’s close friend Kate Zambreno, and considers both the process of composing a book—the wellspring of inspiration, wishes and anxieties that accompany it— as well as the distance between a work and its author. Samatar explores how to stay alive as a writer through things such as community, extensive reading, and research alongside the dissonant ways writers are often asked to codify their identities and constantly promote themselves. Drawing on the words of writers like Eduard Glissant, Maurice Blanchot, Clarice Lispector, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Opacities is at heart a book about the furnace of creativity, and the fuel that keeps it burning despite its many trials, risks, and disappointments. Also, Eugene Lim, author of Fog and Car, returns to recommend Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal.
Previous Episode
Charlotte Shane's "An Honest Woman: A Memoir of Love and Sex Work"
Charlotte Shane joins Kate Wolf to speak about her latest book, An Honest Woman: A Memoir of Love and Sex Work. Detailing Shane’s many years as a sex worker, the book is also a candid examination of her own sexuality, as well as her deep fascination with the sex lives and interior worlds of men. Shane writes about the importance of her early “sexperimentation” with a group of close guy friends in high school; the nuances of her relationship to her father, her husband, and her clients—especially the almost decade long bond she shared with one of them named Roger. She comes to sex work, and even heterosexuality, with both curiosity and empathy, as well as a feminist perspective. Her book focuses less on matters of harm and power than the intricacies of desire and the variety of intimacy possible between women and men. Also, Sarah Manguso, author of Liars, returns to recommend Soldier Sailor by Claire Kilroy.
Next Episode
Danzy Senna's ''Colored Television"
Kate Wolf talks to Danzy Senna about her latest novel, Colored Television. It follows a writer named Jane Gibson who’s finally making headway on her second book, a magnus opus her husband calls the “mulatto War and Peace” that’s been nearly a decade in the making. Jane’s helped along by her family’s stay in the tony, Eastside Los Angeles home of a friend of hers—a former fiction writer who long ago sold out to work in TV. Jane and her husband, Lenny, help themselves to this friend's wine and clothes, and Jane yearns for his financial stability. When her novel is rejected by her agent, she decides to try on his career in Hollywood as well. Colored Television is a hilarious unpacking of class, marriage, race, midlife, exploitation, Los Angeles, and what it takes to be an artist when no one cares about your work. Also, Charlotte Shane, author of An Honest Woman, returns to recommend a trilogy of historical novels by Sharon Kay Penman: Here Be Dragons, Falls the Shadow, and The Reckoning.
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