Awakeners

• Nicole Chung & Tajja Isen

  On this episode of Awakeners, Lena speaks with the nonfiction writers Tajja Isen and Nicole Chung, who became colleagues and friends after working together on an essay for Catapult, a (now sadly shuttered) digital magazine where Nicole served as editor. After collaborating to publish Tajja’s essay, Nicole brought Tajja onto the magazine’s editorial staff, and eventually Tajja succeeded Nicole as Editor in Chief. In the first half of the episode, Tajja and Nicole read aloud from their first email exchange, including Tajja’s pitch and Nicole’s feedback. We get into the nitty gritty of what this kind of editorial back-and-forth looks like—including the time Tajja took between drafts—and discuss how their mutual admiration as writer and editor grew into an enduring friendship (and how Nicole knew Tajja would make a good editor after seeing her revise her own work).  In the second half of the episode, we discuss how writing and editing feed one another, and how Tajja and Nicole have maintained their identities as writers alongside their identities as editors and champions of other writers’ work. We end with a peek into the thinking behind Tajja’s next book, Tough Love, a memoir about mentorship, control, desire, and the anxiety of influence. Nicole Chung is the author of the award-winning memoir A Living Remedy, which was named a Notable Book by The New York Times and a Best Book of the Year by over a dozen other outlets. Her 2018 debut All You Can Ever Know was a national bestseller and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Chung has written for The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, Time, Esquire, The Guardian, The Atlantic, Slate, and many other publications. Tajja Isen is the author of the essay collection Some of My Best Friends, named a Best Book of the Year by outlets including Electric Literature and The Globe and Mail. She is a contributing writer for The Walrus, for which she received an honorable mention at the 2024 National Magazine Awards. Her work has been recognized with fellowships from the Black Mountain Institute, the Ucross Foundation, and the Sewanee Writers' Conference. She also edits for Orion magazine and works as a cartoon voice actor. Her next book, Tough Love, is a memoir of mentorship. More Nicole: nicolechung.net More Tajja: tajjaisen.com Subscribe and connect with us on our website: awakenerspodcast.com. Mentioned in the episode: Catapult (RIP) Periplus Fellowship Yuka Igarashi, Editor at Graywolf Jess Zimmerman at Electric Lit Gordon Lisch Elizabeth Hardwick

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• Aditi Machado & Carl Phillips

  On this episode of Awakeners, Lena speaks with the poets Carl Phillips and Aditi Machado, who met through the MFA program at Washington University in St. Louis when Aditi began as a student almost fifteen years ago. Growing up in India, Aditi wasn’t exposed to much American poetry. Carl could tell, reading her work, that this was a singular voice—he even remembers thinking to himself that Aditi’s style made him want to reconsider his own approach.  In the first half of the episode, we discuss what surprised Carl about Aditi’s work, how Carl’s experience as a high school Latin teacher informed his pedagogy, and what Aditi remembers from her time as Carl’s student (and has borrowed, now that she’s a professor herself). We also discuss what Carl prioritized as the judge for the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize, the oldest annual literary award in the U.S. And as a bonus, Aditi shares an excerpt from a hilarious and enthusiastic journal entry she wrote after one of her early meetings with Carl to discuss her work. In the second half of the episode, we hear poems from their newest books, Aditi’s “Concerning Matters Culinary” from Material Witness and Carl’s “Fist and Palm” from Scattered Snows, to the North. We discuss their radically different approaches to form and process, what it means to get “personal” in their poetry, and their shared interest in the agency of the natural world, a subtle materialism that thrums through both collections. (In other words: Lena makes the argument that their work isn’t as different as it seems.) Aditi Machado is a poet, translator, and essayist. Her publications include three poetry collections from Nightboat, Material Witness (2024), Emporium (2020), and Some Beheadings (2017); two book-length translations from the French, Baptiste Gaillard’s In the Realm of Motes (Roof, 2025) and Farid Tali’s Prosopopoeia (Action, 2016); and several chapbooks. Her work appears or is forthcoming in journals like BOMB, Chicago Review, Fence, jubilat, Lana Turner, Volt, and Western Humanities Review, among others. A recipient of the James Laughlin and The Believer Poetry Awards, she serves as an advisory poetry editor for The Paris Review and teaches at the University of Cincinnati. Carl Phillips is the author of many books of poetry, including Scattered Snows, to the North and Then the War: And Selected Poems, 2007–2020, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. He lives on Cape Cod in Massachusetts. More Aditi: aditimachado.com More Carl: https://www.carlphillipspoet.com/ Subscribe and connect with us on our website: awakenerspodcast.com. Read Carl’s poem “Fist and Palm”: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/158812/fist-and-palm Mentioned in the episode: Martín Espada Alan Dugan Mary Jo Bang Jorie Graham John Ashbery Johannes Jorgensen, Transgressive Circulation Brigit Pegeen Kelly Rosemary Walddrop, The Reproduction of Profiles Gerard Manley Hopkins

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• Tash Aw & Jemimah Wei

  On this episode of Awakeners, Lena speaks with the novelists Tash Aw and Jemimah Wei, who connected when Jemimah signed up for Tash’s fiction master class on “time and place” in Singapore back in 2015.  Growing up in Malaysia and Singapore, Tash and Jemimah remember having almost no models for what it might look like to be a writer. The publishing industry – and the literary world – seemed to be headquartered elsewhere. This is why it was so important to Tash to return to his region to teach: to show young writers there what was possible. After Jemimah had been writing for a while, Tash suggested Jemimah look into graduate school in creative writing, and later he connected her with his literary agent, who now represents them both. Ten years after the master class, their new books were released within weeks of one another, and Jemimah even traveled back to Singapore to help Tash launch his novel in the place where they met. In the first half of the episode, we discuss why Jemimah stood out to Tash in class, how to make a writing life (especially coming from outside the U.S.), being “genre-agnostic,” revising book-length projects, and what to look for in a literary agent.  In the second half of the episode, Jemimah and Tash share an excerpt from THE ORIGINAL DAUGHTER and THE SOUTH, and we zoom in on the very themes from Tash’s master class ten years ago: time and place. We focus especially on the factors that influence how we experience time – things like age and maturity level, as well as culture, labor, economics, and the pressure to produce or succeed – and also how we experience time as readers through craft elements like verb tense and perspective, or what Jemimah calls the narrator’s “narrative perch” with respect to past or present events. Jemimah says, “Sometimes when you fall outside the stream of time, you can’t climb back in. Time keeps moving forward.”  Tash Aw is the author of five novels and a memoir of a Chinese-Malaysian family, Strangers on a Pier, finalist for the Los Angeles Book Prize. His work has won the Whitbread and Commonwealth Prizes, an O. Henry Award and twice been longlisted for the MAN Booker Prize. His novels have been translated into 23 languages. As an essayist and critic, he has contributed to the Paris Review, New York Review of Books, New York Times and the Guardian, among many other publications. He is currently a DAAD Artist-in-Berlin.  Jemimah Wei is the author of THE ORIGINAL DAUGHTER. Born and raised in Singapore, she is now based between Singapore and the United States. She was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and Felipe P. De Alba Fellow at Columbia University, where she earned her MFA. A recipient of awards and fellowships from Singapore’s National Arts Council, Hemmingway House, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and Writers in Paradise, she was named one of Narrative’s “30 below 30” writers and is a Francine Ringold Award for New Writers honouree. Her fiction has won the William Van Dyke Short Story Prize and appears in Guernica, Narrative, Joyland, amongst others. For close to a decade, Jemimah was a host for various broadcast and digital channels, and has written and produced short films and travel guides for Laneige, Airbnb, and Nikon.  More Jemimah: https://jemmawei.com/ More Tash: https://www.instagram.com/tash.aw/?hl=en Subscribe and connect with us on our website: awakenerspodcast.com.

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• Lydi Conklin & Melissa Febos

  On the first episode of Season 2 of Awakeners, Lena speaks with the writers Melissa Febos and Lydi Conklin, who met at the MacDowell artist residency back in 2011.  Melissa had just published Whip Smart, her first book, a propulsive memoir about her experience working as a professional dominatrix in a dungeon in New York. Lydi was still an MFA student when they met Melissa—this was back when MacDowell let you attend the residency as a grad student—and according to Lydi, they desperately wanted to be Melissa’s friend. Now, more than ten years later, in this episode you’ll hear Melissa call Lydi her most reliable reader.  We cover what it’s like to be at a writing residency like MacDowell, Lydi’s first (slightly hilarious) appearance at Melissa’s studio door, memorable margin notes they’ve exchanged, the abandoned projects they wish the other would return to, and the advice Melissa gave Lydi that kept them from doing something, quote, “wildly inappropriate.” In the second half of the conversation, we turn more explicitly to their new books. We discuss queerness, world-building, and the research process behind The Dry Season and Songs of No Provenance, including the choice Melissa almost made that could have produced a very different book.  Melissa Febos is the national bestselling author of five books, including Girlhood—winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative, and the forthcoming memoir The Dry Season. She is the recipient of awards and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell, LAMBDA Literary, the Black Mountain Institute, the British Library, the Bogliasco Foundation, and others. Her work has appeared in The Paris Review, The New Yorker, The Best American Essays, Vogue, and The New York Times Magazine. She is a full professor at the University of Iowa. Lydi Conklin has received a Stegner Fellowship, four Pushcart Prizes, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award, a Creative Writing Fulbright in Poland, a grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation, work-study and tuition scholarships from Bread Loaf, and fellowships from MacDowell, Yaddo, Sewanee Writers Conference, Emory University, Hedgebrook, Djerassi, the James Merrill House, Lighthouse Works, and elsewhere. Their fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, One Story, McSweeney’s, American Short Fiction, and VQR. They have drawn cartoons for The New Yorker and Narrative Magazine, and graphic fiction for The Believer, Lenny Letter, and the Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago. They’ve served as the Helen Zell Visiting Professor at the University of Michigan and are now an Assistant Professor of Fiction at Vanderbilt University. Their story collection, Rainbow Rainbow, was longlisted for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Award and The Story Prize. Their novel, Songs of No Provenance, is forthcoming in June 2025 from Catapult in the US and Vintage in the UK. More Lydi: https://lydia-conklin.com/ More Melissa: https://www.melissafebos.com/ Subscribe and connect with us on our website: awakenerspodcast.com. Mentioned in the episode: MacDowell artist residency Melissa’s first memoir, Whip Smart Lydi’s first story collection, Rainbow Rainbow Melissa’s Abandon Me and Girlhood Young Jean Lee Kirsten Valdez Quade Brenda Shaughnessy Portrait of a Lady by Henry James

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• Re-Awakeners: Tiana Clark

  On this special bonus episode of Awakeners, Lena speaks with writer Tiana Clark about the person who first told her she was a poet: her late mentor and high school teacher, Mr. Bill Brown. Tiana was a rebellious teenager. “They’re talking about you in the teacher’s lounge,” Mr. Brown warned her once. But instead of punishing Tiana for acting out, Mr. Brown gifted her the poetry of Rita Dove, Li-Young Lee, and Sharon Olds, writers whose work broke all the rules Tiana had learned in school. He continued to support Tiana for the next twenty years, cheering her on through her MFA applications, her chapbook publication, and the publication of her first book. In the first half of the episode, we discuss Mr. Brown’s legacy in Tiana’s poetry, pedagogy, and attention to the natural world (since he could name every tree on their walks around the neighborhood). Later on, Tiana reads “Broken Sestina Reaching for Black Joy” from her new collection Scorched Earth, a poem that illuminates the darker history behind the pedestrian greenway where Tiana walked every day in the pandemic, and where she saw Mr. Brown for the last time. We talk about the form of the sestina and what it means to “break” it or “fail” at it. We also cover Tiana’s revised future as a historian, the politics of traveling (and writing about travel) as a Black woman, and the elegy form as an attempt to resurrect those we’ve lost.  Tiana Clark is the author of the poetry collections Scorched Earth; I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood, which won the 2017 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize; and Equilibrium, which won the 2016 Frost Place Chapbook Competition. Clark’s other honors include a Pushcart Prize, a Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She is a graduate of Vanderbilt University and Tennessee State University, where she studied Africana and women’s studies. She is the Grace Hazard Conkling Writer-in-Residence at Smith College. Find out more at TianaClark.com. This episode marks the end of Season 1, but stay tuned in summer for Season 2! Subscribe and connect with us on our website for updates: awakenerspodcast.com. More Tiana: https://www.tianaclark.com/ Order Scorched Earth, out March 4, 2025: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Scorched-Earth/Tiana-Clark/9781668052075 Definition of pastoral: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/education/glossary/pastoral Definition of sestina: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/education/glossary/sestina Definition of elegy: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/education/glossary/elegy Definition of ekphrasis: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/education/glossary/ekphrasis Mentioned in the episode:  Sharon Olds, Rita Dove, Li-Young Lee, Ross Gay, Gwendolyn Brooks, Phillis Wheatley, Rick Barot, Maggie Nelson

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