The Book Maven: A Literary Revue

About The Book Maven: A Literary Revue

A weekly newsletter presented by Bethanne Patrick and team that includes editorials about literature/culture/current events, features on adaptations and additions to the canon, plus interviews with creatives. thebookmavenunbound.substack.com (https://thebookmavenunbound.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast)

Publisher

Bethanne Patrick

Category

arts · education

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

4 Oct 2024

Latest episode

22 Jul 2025

Latest episodes

23 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   22 Jul 2025

   Plotters and Pantsers with Jennifer Haigh

   Welcome to season 3 of the Book Maven! This episode, Bethanne talks to Jennifer Haigh, author of Rabbit Moon, to discuss her approach to her writing practice. Find Bethanne on X (https://x.com/TheBookMaven), Substack (https://thebookmavenpodcast.substack.com/), Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/the_bookmaven/), and Threads (https://www.threads.net/@the_bookmaven?xmt=AQGzAV_UsH3d6RX_AWWBtucKsysWEgQbAk549K0Bnp_brUg). The Book Maven: A Literary Revue is hosted by Bethanne Patrick, and produced by Jordan Aaron and Lauren Stack. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thebookmavenunbound.substack.com (https://thebookmavenunbound.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

2. 

   1 Jul 2025

   The Practice of Practicing

   Welcome to season 3 of the Book Maven! To start things out, Bethanne sits down with Martha Anne Toll, author of Duet for One, to discuss how discipline is so often a loaded word, and Martha recalls how her mentor urged his students not to wait for performance to make a beautiful sound, that a rehearsal is not a means to an end, but a moment in time that is itself worthy of our best effort. Find Bethanne on X (https://x.com/TheBookMaven), Substack (https://thebookmavenpodcast.substack.com/), Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/the_bookmaven/), and Threads (https://www.threads.net/@the_bookmaven?xmt=AQGzAV_UsH3d6RX_AWWBtucKsysWEgQbAk549K0Bnp_brUg). The Book Maven: A Literary Revue is hosted by Bethanne Patrick, and produced by Jordan Aaron and Lauren Stack. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thebookmavenunbound.substack.com (https://thebookmavenunbound.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

3. 

   18 Apr 2025

   How To Write About Sex with Carmen Maria Machado

   We’ve made it to the end of season two! To close things out, Bethanne sits down with Carmen Maria Machado, author of In the Dream House, to discuss how she got into writing erotica, the politics of writing about sex, and navigating creative work in a repressive environment. Join us in conversation as Carmen talks about her first forays into writing. Bethanne puts the spotlight on Middlemarch in this week’s Canon or Can It. Will the classic novel survive Bethanne’s critical scrutiny? Tune in to find out. Can Bethanne beat the clock? She gives us 6 Recs for our To Be Read lists. Titles include: House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski, Imagine Me Gone by Adam Haslett, Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill, A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing by Eimear McBride, Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders, and Autumn by Ali Smith. Find Bethanne on X (https://x.com/TheBookMaven), Substack (https://thebookmavenpodcast.substack.com/), Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/the_bookmaven/), and Threads (https://www.threads.net/@the_bookmaven?xmt=AQGzAV_UsH3d6RX_AWWBtucKsysWEgQbAk549K0Bnp_brUg). The Book Maven: A Literary Revue is hosted by Bethanne Patrick, produced by Christina McBride, and engineered by Jordan Aaron, with help from Lauren Stack. All titles mentioned: In the Dream House (https://bookshop.org/a/107867/9781644450383) – Carmen Maria Machado Flowers in the Attic (https://bookshop.org/a/107867/9781982108106) – V.C. Andrews To the Finland Station (https://bookshop.org/a/107867/9780374533458)– Edmund Wilson F**k: An Irreverent History of the F-Word – Rufus Lodge Orbital (https://bookshop.org/a/107867/9780802163622) – Samantha Harvey Middlemarch (https://bookshop.org/a/107867/9780143107729) – George Eliot House of Leaves (https://bookshop.org/a/107867/9780375703768) – Mark Z. Danielewski Imagine Me Gone (https://bookshop.org/a/107867/9780316261333) – Adam Haslett Dept. of Speculation (https://bookshop.org/a/107867/9780345806871) – Jenny Offill A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing (https://bookshop.org/a/107867/9781101903438) – Eimear McBride Lincoln in the Bardo (https://bookshop.org/a/107867/9780812985405) – George Saunders Autumn (https://bookshop.org/a/107867/9781101969946) – Ali Smith Episode Transcript: Bethanne: Welcome to season two of the Book Maven: A Literary Revue. And as you might be able to tell today, I the Book Maven, Bethanne, have allergies. And so my voice has dropped about an octave. Thank you, dear listeners, for putting up with it. I promise we have a really great show. As you know, this season we're talking to leading authors, digging into the classics to decide which ones should stay in the literary cannon, and I'm also recommending some of my favorite books to you. We'll have all of that and more in this episode. And first this week I talked to Carmen Maria Machado, author of In The Dream House, and we talked about how she got into writing erotica, the politics of writing about sex and navigating creative work in a repressive environment. Join us in conversation as Carmen talks about her first forays into writing. I'm wondering, the first time you wrote a sex scene, was it for a short story? Was it an essay? And knowing yourself and knowing your process and your style, did you have any trepidation about it? Carmen: If we want to be really technical, the first time I ever wrote a sex scene, it was when I was probably about 11 or 12 and I That sounds about right. Yeah. I went through this phase where I wanted to write out dirty sentences, but I didn't know how to do it. So I would be on my family computer and I would write the dirtiest sentence I could think of, which when I wasn't very dirty, I didn't know very much, but I was trying to marshal everything I knew and I would write these sort of sentences and then I got fined it that I would delete the sentence, I would write a different nonsense sentence and then I would save the document multiple times and then I would go and check and double check and make sure there was this other sentence. So I feel like kind of an origin story. I mean, I also was reading, I read a lot of different sort of things when I was young, but I was reading VC Andrew, so when I was too young to be reading VC Andrews, so I feel like I also had encountered sex scenes. That's like an early text for so many of us. Totally. Yeah. I had encountered flowers in the attic and other books in those series and read them and not quite know what to make of it, but it was intriguing and titillating in its own weird way. I think that I was just in this place where I wanted to see what it felt like to do it myself. And then I feel like fast forward to my writing career and my life. Before I even got into grad school, I was writing on my own, I was writing erotica and it was just like a private, or not private because I was actually submitting it to things, but I was like, oh, I wonder if I could try this and see. And I was pretty good at it. I really liked it. And then I remember this other kind of interesting moment. I was in my second semester at Iowa as a grad student and I was a runner up in this erotica contest for this magazine that was like a short-lived erotica magazine for women, for straight women. So essentially I was a runner up for this contest and they were like, okay, we're going to put it in a magazine. Do you want to put it under your name or under a pen name? And that semester I was taking a class with Alex Chee and I knew that Alex Chee had published erotica because it had said so in his bio. And so I met up with Alex and I asked him, and we had this long conversation about using a pen name. So I published that story and a couple other stories in various anthologies and stuff under the pen name Olivia Glass, which is my grandmother's first name. And well, initially it was going to be Miranda, but Miranda Glass was like a cellist or something. I didn't want to mess up her Google results. So I did Olivia Glass and, and then at some point during grad school I was like writing about sex and I just want to fold this all into my practice. I just want to make it all kind of one thing. And so I started submitting work that had more explicit sexual content and I never looked back. I feel like it, it felt so correct when I was doing it. I take sex very seriously and I have a lot of thoughts about it and it's a very important part of my life, and this is true for many people. And I was like, I just so rarely read sex scenes in the perspective of people who are like me. I want to move ahead with that, but I Bethanne: Also want to go back to filament for a second because you were submitting something under this pseudonym to a magazine for straight women. Was it because they had a contest? Was it because you weren't finding magazines that took the kind of writing you were doing for queer women? Or tell me a little bit more about that. Carmen: I'm bisexual. Before I went to grad school, I primarily dated men. That was just as the arc of so many queer women go. It was like doing that until I realized, oh, wait. But yeah, I think I was intrigued by the idea, I mean the idea of a magazine centering any women's erotic desires, even straight women. Bethanne: That's what I was getting to. Carmen: That itself is still kind of revolutionary. Obviously I would've been also happy to write for a queer magazine, but the fact was there was just this magazine that had some funding. I mean, it didn't pay a lot, but it paid some money. And it's like how I also really love Magic Mike XXL. I mean it's a very straight, but also it's so much about women's pleasure that I don't mind that it has more of this sort of straight energy because of interested in something that I'm really interested in, which is women's sexuality and the way that women approach sex. Bethanne: What was the moment when you wrote something and you write about sex, like you say all the time now when you thought I've gotten there, I have put a woman right where she's supposed to be. Did you have a moment like that? Carmen: I don't know if it was one singular moment. I mean, I think with my first book I had that story inventory, which was this list of sexual partners. That was a story that I wrote purely out of spite because I had been in a workshop where I had criticized a male classmates' sexual, but I thought sexist story, and he interpreted that as me being a weird prude who didn't like writing about sex. And I was so annoyed. That was his takeaway that I went and just wrotethe story. I was like, I'm going to write a story where every scene is a sex scene. But then of course I had to figure out, well, it can't just be that. What is the other thing happening behind it? And then eventually I figured it out and as I wrote the story, I was like, oh yeah, this is really good. But I remember it feeling like there was a character who was at a loose end and trying to figure out what she wants and what she needs in this very apocalyptic moment. And I think for me, it felt so similar to how I think I've approached being alive, which is, yeah, what does it mean to be in a body in certain ways here? What feels like the end or something close to the end? I think that was a story that really just, yeah, it felt like a moment of kind of a revelation. Bethanne: I think a lot of us feel closer to the end than ever, and yet here we are in these bodies and these bodies still want sex. These bodies still desire things. As you said, sex is something that's very important to you, and I don't think you just mean intellectually either. And so we have this and how do we approach the fact that we have needs and desires and all kinds of different ways that we want to look at them, assuage them, and interact with other people about them? Is there going to be an anthology, not necessarily from you about, I don't know, sex at the end of the world? How do we approach this? It's a huge question, I know. Carmen: I think it's not even so specific as that. I also think that we are actually in a very anti-sex moment. We are in a very sex negative in the United States. The US has always been a very puritanical culture, even just compared to Europe for example. I think that we are also in this historical moment where sex is suspicious, literally. Obviously, we're also in this moment of queer policies, anti-trans policies, anti-abortion stuff, and people talking about getting rid of no-fault divorce, and all these really just unhinged. And it's like you boil it down and it's essentially queer bodies or women's bodies being out of control of the state essentially. And I think that's true culturally. It's funny, like they'll do surveys where people will say there's too much sex in movies and tv and it's less sex in movies and TV than there ever has been. We are just in such a wildly prudish moment in history. So to me, I think the project of thinking about sex not just as pleasure, but also as a political act is so crucial and so important and we really can't lose sight of it. And sex will almost always be the battleground. However tangentially conservatives will fight us on. Bethanne: It's all about control and power. None of it is about pleasure or our humanity, and that's very frightening. Why can't we have hair wherever we want to have it? Or why can't we be sexy if we're sexy to our partner? Why do we have to apologize about ourselves to someone else and so on and so forth. Carmen: I think also that the more we know ourselves, the more hard we are to govern. We are the agenda of these racist rancid pieces of s**t that are sort of running everything now and have been for a while. Yeah, their politics are not served by us knowing ourselves better. Bethanne: We get to know ourselves better through our creativity and how to write a sex scene is much less important than writing a sex scene if that's what you want to write. It's really wild that we even have to think about is this going to fly? Is this going to be something that is okay to publish? And fortunately we have, you have the great Alex Chi. We have other writers from RO Kwan to Melissa FBOs, so many really terrific writers on sex and the body, and I worry that the people won't have the same freedom to write. And what do we do about that, Carmen? Carmen: I think there's a few things to do. I think part of it is where you have power in your community or your space or in your household if you are the parent of children thinking about, obviously there's age appropriate sexual education, but this project of knowing ourselves also knowledge is a part of that. That we are entering every phase of our lives with all the information that we need to make decisions and choices about what we do with our bodies and what we want to do. And that is hugely important. And this is also why book Bans and these similar, very sort of regressive policies that again, are being fought for by these awful vial people. Their agenda is served by alienating us and by keeping us from knowing ourselves. And so fighting back against that, either as a parent or as a community member or as a voter, is really important. And then, yeah, it's whose work are you supporting? Who? And if you are a writer yourself or an artist yourself, yeah, how are you encountering yourself in your own work, whether it's writing sex scenes or anything else for that matter. I think that just thinking about where we can show up for the people who like us, want to know ourselves better, and that's a tall order and it's a tall order even at the best of times. And now as we are in the worst of times, it seems even harder, but it's still really important. Bethanne: Thank you, Carmen, for joining us this week. You can find all of Carmen Maria Machado's books wherever books are sold. Now let's move on to Friday reads where we'll see what you've been reading this week. Welcome back to Friday Reads, the last one of this season. Jordan, my producer. Hello, how are you? Jordan: I'm doing well. I have my own little bout with the allergy season, so we're making it through. Bethanne: We are, we are. What have we got on the docket today? Jordan: First up, we've got from Alex Cera, who is reading to the Finland Station by Edmund Wilson. Bethanne: So this one really interested me. It's subtitled a study in the writing and acting of history, and I want to make sure that no one confuses Edmund Wilson with Edmund White. Okay. Edmund White, still alive. Edmund Wilson was one of the most influential 20th century American writers and literary critics. And so Alex has put up an image to an Abe books page for a hardcover from 1940 of this really very influential book. Again, like the Influential Critic. The thing about it is not many people liked Wilson. He was called a fat ferocious man, petty, pretentious, and petulant, a failure at many of the most ordinary tasks of life. And that was by someone who was writing an appreciation of Wilson. But this 1940 examination of revolutionary thought around the world might just be something that's relevant right now. What do you think, Jordan? Jordan: Yeah, I think definitely, revolution is in the air, I hope. Bethanne: Yeah, right there with you. So who is reading what next? Jordan: Well, speaking of a little bit of a reverence we've got from Danny Greer, who is reading a good and relevant book for the time they're reading F**k: An Irreverent History of the F-Word. Bethanne: It's by Rufuss Lodge, and the title on the jacket actually has asterisks in the middle of the F and the K, but we all know it's “f**k”. So it's a bright yellow and black book jacket, a really fun use of very old fashioned tariffs and flourishes because who among us has not dropped the occasional F-bomb, whether involuntarily or with deep sincerity? I don't listen to that many audiobooks, but I think this one might be best appreciated through earphones. If you don't know where we in the English language got this ever useful, epithet, largest little volume will prove lightning, but it might even more enlightening when it comes to the various famous people who have effed up and let's slip the frigging freaking fudging fabulous F word Jordan. So I love that one. And finally a little bit more serious, but still very, very interesting. Jordan: Yeah. We've got one last one this week from Emma Vardy, who's reading Orbital by Samantha Harvey. Bethanne: I will tell you right now, I love this book. I reviewed it for the LA Times and I think it has deserved every prize it's been nominated for or won, including the 2024 Booker Prize. It's a space pastoral, as the author says, the very opposite of a space opera in sci-fi because she follows six astronauts who are on an international space station during a single day's orbit of earth. And Harvey said she wanted to focus on what we know about space rather than write something speculative. So while she was working on it, she watched a continuous live stream of earth from the International Space Station. It took her more than a decade, but I think the resulting novel is really beautiful and unusual, so check it out. Thank you, Jordan. I think that's it for this edition of Friday Reads. What Becomes a Legend Most, I have to say, Middlemarch by George Elliot is a legendary novel for so many of us. It remains a lifelong favorite, and yet I think there are also some interesting points of weakness in some of the characters. And this week I'm going to talk about Dorothy Avan, and I hope I'm saying her name correctly, because if I'm not, then I am no credit to my school program, which I also talk about in this week's canon or Canon. Once upon a time, I was a young woman who had been admitted to graduate school and planned to earn a doctorate in English literature. Before my first semester began, I visited a college friend who was already almost finished with her own doctorate in history. “What do you plan to work on,” she asked. “Oh, sex and death,” I responded, believing I must sound impossibly sophisticated. She looked at me with kind pity in her eyes, but what do you want to say about sex and death? All I knew about life in academia was that it offered me the chance to pursue a life of the mind. I knew I wanted that but I had no idea what that entailed. I'd known quite a few classical musicians because I'd been a serious violinist for a time, but there wasn't anyone in my family's social circle who was a scholar. Although my father-in-law had been a professor at West Point, his field was computer science. The dinner table conversation at my in-law's house was more about football scores and local politics than big ideas. I yearned to learn more about big ideas, to talk about them, to appreciate great art, but I didn't have the first clue about finding out how that might happen. I was terrified of asking anyone for help. Lest they discover how naive I was, so I did what I'd always done as an overachieving young woman from a rust belt background, I forged ahead and trusted that by following various kinds of instructions, I'd figure it all out. TLDR; I didn't. I'm still doctorate-free. I did earn my master's degree and I now have a slightly better idea of what goes on in the life of the mind. Gentle readers in so many ways. I was exactly like my favorite heroine of English literature. Dorothy Caban, nay Brook Dorothy sprang to life in 1869 as George Elliot, who was born Marianne Evans and used a male nom de plume for all of her major works. Wrote a long piece called Ms. Brooke. She'd already begun notes for a project she called Middlemarch, and when in 1871 she determined that the works belong together. They originally appeared together in serialized newspaper installments. Dorothy Brook marries the Reverend John Caban because he's writing a master work with the working title of the Key to All Mythologies. Oh, the free song. Our Ms. Brooke certainly feels one, believing that she can be the ultimate. Help me to such a great man as Rebecca Mead whose take on Elliot's work. Middlemarch and Me came out in 2014, writes I loved Middlemarch and I loved being the kind of person who loved it. Well, exactly, but more to the point. Dorothy Brooke might have said exactly the same thing. Age 19, an orphan who lives as her uncle's ward along with her younger sister, Dorothea is certainly bright and energetic. She likes to renovate the cottages of farmers on her uncle's estate, but educated and focused. She is not. During her honeymoon with the 45-year-old Cavan, she discovers he does not intend her to be his Emmanuel. He returns to his moldy FU utilities as will Lattice law, the much younger and future recipient of Dorothy's affections calls them and pays his wife very little attention. Dorothea didn't have the opportunity to attend college, let alone university, but as I hope you'll see from my own experience, even an educated woman can get lost on the past to her life's purpose. Like Dorothea, I thought the life of the mind was the way forward. Like Dorothea, I discovered even the most direct path can contain detours. I'm pretty sure George Elliot, Maryanne Evans understood those things better than either Dorothea or I, which is one of the reasons Middlemarch stands the test of time. I'm canon-ing this great novel. So for this week's six Rex, I really wanted to talk about experimental fiction. And while I know Carmen Maria Machado's book is not fiction, it just made me think of some of these powerful books I've read. So I will try to get through six recommendations in under three minutes. Jordan, my producer is here with the stopwatch. Jordan, are we all set? Jordan: We're rolling. Bethanne: Alright. House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski. I feel inadequate to the task of explaining this 2000 novel, which is groundbreaking metafictional and even has a bit of engineering built into its design. It's also a family saga. I told you I'm inadequate to the task, but if you haven't read it or at least try to read it, I highly, highly recommend it, and I rarely say highly twice. Next up, Imagine Me Gone by Adam Haslet. It's an account of a family destroyed by mental illness and it was a finalist for the Pulitzer. Haslet wants to ask tough questions about depression and its ilk. What do we inherit? What can't we inherit and yet want to? How do our actions affect our effect? Somehow Haslet, and this is why he is nominated for and wins awards, infuses father John and son Mark's struggles and failures with compassionate humor.Department of Speculation by Jenny Offill is amazing. An unnamed American woman tells us about her life in chapters about the length of index cards. Does anyone remember the blog index? Love that this narrator makes quotidian scenes come alive, and that makes a lot of sense when you realize, although she's now at home with a baby and consumed by repetitive chores, she once wanted above all to be an artist consumed by her work. Offill defines human limits as much by what she leaves out as by what she puts in. A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing by Eimear McBride is the Irish author's debut, and as Anne Enright wrote about it in The Guardian, it's a book unlike any other, McBride seems to have invented her own syntactical system. She's telling a story in English, but perhaps the titular protagonist is thinking it in Gaelic or Irish. I can't remember which one is which. Perhaps her poor brain has been so fragmented by abuse and neglect or Irish girlhood, as Enright also writes, that she can only think in this twisted grammar as she tries to determine if she'll ever make it to adult womanhood. Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders, what can I say? The Tibetan idea of the bardo, a space between life and death has some equivalence to the idea of purgatory, but of course with far less judgment in the bardo spirits may not have sinned in the Judeo-Christian sense, but they do have unresolved attachments. Saunders's brilliance is to remind us that while mourning his dead son, Willie, the clearly alive, Abraham Lincoln was as much in a bardo as any lost soul. Finally, Autumn by Ali Smith. Smith has since finished her seasonal quartet, but this was the first book. And it's also according to some, the first Brexit novel, a story of England untethered and also unmoored shown fantastically through a not quite 40-year-old woman's friendship with a centenarian, her memories are still in the making, his are already history. What connects past and present, especially when an entire nation wants to control its own destiny in an uncontrollable world. There we go. Jordan, how did I do? Jordan: Well, we finished out the season with one last bookshelf falling to the ground. I came in at three minutes and 32 seconds. Bethanne: Oh, well, I really appreciate all of your service with the stopwatch, Jordan, and I will see you and all of our listeners next time. Well, that does it for this episode of the book Maven, A Literary Review. Follow us on substack for our weekly newsletter containing new book releases, commentary, and more. Talk to you next week. The Book Maven: A Literary Revue, is hosted and produced by me, Bethanne Patrick. It's produced by Christina McBride, with engineering by Jordan Aaron, and our booking producer is Lauren Stack. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thebookmavenunbound.substack.com (https://thebookmavenunbound.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1) This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thebookmavenunbound.substack.com (https://thebookmavenunbound.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

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