Episode 4.12 Cool Poet Mom with Dina Del Bucchia

Photo Credit: Victoria Black

To make up for the very mini minisode, here’s an extra-long interview with extra-awesome human being Dina Del Bucchia! We talk about poetry, publishing, cats, farts, and basically everything in between. Here are a million links!

• First! Check out the rest of Dina’s stuff here on her website, and then subscribe to her awesome podcast Can’t Lit, and then buy all her books! Also go see her (and me, and everyone) at the Growing Room festival this March. ALSO also, check out the archives of Poetry is Dead. ALSO ALSO also, go to the Real Vancouver Writers’ Series.
• Want to read more about Cheer on Netflix? I really like this Atlantic piece on how harmful cheerleading is to the athletes and this New Yorker piece on the deceptions of cheerleading.
• If you want to know what’s up with the UBC MFA, here’s an article.
• Dina mentioned the Millennial Line comedy and poetry series.
• The Roland Barthes book I was referencing is Image~Music~Text.
• Laura McGrath’s article is “Comping White”.
• Adèle Barclay’s new poetry book is Renaissance Normcore. You can listen to her episode of Secret Feminist Agenda here. (I said it was the third episode but it was the eighth, whoops!)
• Read up on McClelland & Stewart’s Spring 2020 poetry collections.
• Here’s a pertinent article about Margaret Atwood being co-awarded the Booker and how that win may have betrayed the biases in how awards evaluate literary merit.
• You can read the More Canada report online, if you want.
• Oh, and here’s the Cherie Dimaline profile from Quill&Quire.
• Read more about Caroline Calloway!
• We chatted about small presses, including Arsenal Pulp Press and Europa Editions, which is responsible for publishing Elena Ferrante in English as well as Muriel Barbery’s The Elegance of the Hedgehog.
• Remember the viral short story “Cat Person”? Well the author, Kristen Roupenian, got a $1.2 million advance for her short story collection, You Know You Want This, which has also been optioned by HBO.
• Speaking of publishing being completely wild, here’s an explainer on what’s going on with American Dirt. Instead of reading this apparently very bad book, you should read Valeria Luiselli’s stunning Lost Children Archive.
• We talked about Rupi Kaur’s impact on poetry sales in Canada, and The New Republic declaring her “the writer of the decade” .
• A few more pertinent links: