Host Tanya Shaffer talks with artists from a wide range of disciplines about their creative process: what excites them, ignites them, and helps them get to that free-flowing creative state where they feel they’ve slipped the leash.
Author Jennifer Steil: Go Somewhere That Challenges Your Beliefs
Jennifer Steil is a British-American writer currently living in France. She’s the author of the novel Exile Music, which won Grand Prize in the Eyelands 2020 Book Awards and the Multicultural and Historical International Book Awards. It was also a finalist for the Lambda Literary Lesbian Fiction Award. Previous books include the novel The Ambassador’s Wife and the memoir The Woman Who Fell From the Sky. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, New Orleans Review, Kenyon Review, World Policy Journal, Mslexia’s Best Women’s Short Fiction 2023, Gay & Lesbian Review, Time, Life, The Washington Times, and Vogue UK. She writes a weekly Substack newsletter called Liminal, about living between cultures, languages, and illness and health. In this interview, she talks with Tanya about her journey from reporting in New York to becoming the editor of a newspaper in Yemen, how being held hostage when she was six months pregnant inspired her first novel, and the seeds of inspiration for her second novel, about Jewish Holocaust refugees in Bolivia.
1 Oct 2023
Writer and Teacher Laurie Wagner: Pray That You Get Lost
Laurie Wagner has been publishing books and essays and teaching writing for the last 25 years. In her Wild Writing classes, she helps people unzip what’s inside them and get ink on the page. Laurie teaches online and takes people around the world to places like Kathmandu; San Miguel de Allende and Oaxaca, Mexico; and Taos, New Mexico. Her books include "Living Happily Ever After: Couples Talk about Lasting Love," and "Expectations: 30 Women Talk about Becoming a Mother." She was also a writer on the Oscar-nominated documentary "For Better or For Worse." Laurie was a teacher and mentor of Off-Leash Arts host, Tanya Shaffer. In this conversation, the two women talk about the trajectory that led Laurie from journalism to work in the publishing industry to leading Wild Writing workshops, her strategy of “lowering our gaze,” and the transformational power of naming things exactly as they are.
21 Jun 2023
Writer-Translator Mara Faye Lethem: Found in Translation
Mara Faye Lethem has received numerous international awards for her translations of contemporary Catalan authors, including the inaugural 2022 Spain-USA Foundation Translation Award for Max Besora’s The Adventures and Misadventures of Joan Orpí and the 2022 Joan Baptiste Cendrós International Prize for her contributions to Catalan literature. Her translation of Irene Solà’s When I Sing, Mountains Dance was shortlisted for the 2022 National Book Critics Circle Barrios Book in Translation Prize, and is currently longlisted for the 2023 Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize. In addition to many novels, she has translated shorter works that have appeared in The Guardian, Best American Non-Required Reading 2010, Granta, The Paris Review, Tin House, A Public Space, McSweeney’s and more. She’s also the author of the novel, A Person’s A Person, No Matter How Small. In this conversation, she discusses with host Tanya Shaffer how became a literary translator, the different ways people approach the task, the particular challenges of the translator’s job and the lessons they hold for all creative endeavors.
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