Tender Buttons tenderbuttonspodcast

In this episode, we speak to writer Marianne Brooker about her book Intervals. We discuss the politics of care and the precarious economics of social, hospice and funeral care. We talk about the importance of interdependence, and how networks of care link to activism and writing. We think about the right to abundance and life, while considering what it means to die a good death. We chat about intersections of class, gender and disability, and beauty and maximalism as an act of resistance. We imagine writing as reparative magic and consider what it means to write into and with grief, as opposed to pushing against it. We speak about what it means to draw kinship with other writers and thinkers such as Denise Riley, Anne Boyer, Maggie Nelson and Lola Olufemi, among others.



Marianne Brooker is a writer based in Bristol, where she works for a charity campaigning on climate and social justice. She has a PhD from Birkbeck and a background in arts research and teaching. She won the 2022 Fitzcarraldo Essay Prize for Intervals, her first book, which was also longlisted for the inaugral Women's Prize for Non-Fiction in 2024.



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References

Intervals by Marianne Brooker

Time Lived, Without its Flow by Denise Riley

The Undying by Anne Boyer

The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson

Experiments in Imagining Otherwise by Lola Olufemi

Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments by Saidiya Hartman

In the Wake: On Blackness and Being by Christina Sharpe

In this episode, we speak to author Sheila Heti about her brilliant new book, Alphabetical Diaries, in which she alphabetizes her diaries over a ten-year period, creating parallels and juxtapositions between past and present versions of the self. We speak about the role of formal constraints in her work and her resistance of linear time, progress and the notion of a complete, continuous narrative of selfhood. We think about rhythm and the materiality of language in relation to associative narrative structure. We chat about Heti's body of work, from How Should a Person Be? to Motherhood and Pure Colour, exploring the myriad ways in which she interrogates time and selfhood through hybrid forms, pushing the boundaries of the novel.



Sheila Heti is the author of eleven books, including Alphabetical Diaries, Pure Colour, Motherhood and How Should a Person Be? She was named one of "The New Vanguard" by The New York Times; a list of fifteen writers from around the world who are "shaping the way we read and write fiction in the 21st century." Her books have been translated into twenty-five languages.

She is the current Alice Munro Chair of Creativity at
Western University in London, Ontario. In 2022, she was the Franke
Visiting Fellow at Yale, and an Associate Research Scholar and Lecturer in Religious Studies, teaching Fate and Chance in Art and Experience with ⁠Noreen Khawaja⁠.



You can now subscribe to our ⁠⁠⁠Patreon ⁠⁠⁠for £5 a month, which will enable us to keep bringing you more in-depth conversations with writers. As a subscriber, you will have access to:


10% listener discount on all books at Storysmith, either online or in person
Opportunities to submit questions to upcoming guests
Free book giveaways each month related to our featured guests
Early access to episodes each month
Exclusive free tickets each month to live Storysmith events
A free Storysmith tote bag after 3 months subscription

Please like, rate and subscribe to help promote the podcast and support our work.



References

Alphabetical Diaries by Sheila Heti

Pure Colour by Sheila Heti

Motherhood by Sheila Heti

How Should a Person Be? by Sheila Heti

In this episode, we speak to academic, author and broadcaster Noreen Masud about her memoir, A Flat Place. We discuss the psychological, literary and philosophical histories and connotations of flat landscapes. We talk about Masud's experience growing up in Lahore, Pakistan, then moving to the UK and the complexity of language, culture and the post-colonial experience. We discuss what it means to resist the history of landscape writing, from white male colonial stories of nature as redemption and Romantic notions of landscape as revelation or a text to be interpreted 'correctly.' Instead, our conversation considers what it means to open space for failure, misinterpretation and post-colonial discomfort, without resolution.



We discuss memory as place, the importance of sitting with unknowingness, the connection between listening and mutual aid and the limits of empathy. We talk about counteracting the constant strive for meaning in literature with seeking play, sound and irreverance.



Noreen Masud was born and raised in Pakistan. She is a literary scholar working on the twentieth century, writing about things which, in one way or another, present variously as absurd, unrevealing, embarrassing or useless. These include aphorisms, flatness, spivs, puppets, nonsense, leftovers, earworms, footnotes, rhymes, hymns, surprises, folk songs, colours and superstition. She is an AHRC/BBC New Generation Thinker 2020, and a Lecturer in Twentieth Century Literature at the University of Bristol. She is the author of Hard Language: Stevie Smith and the Aphorism, and A Flat Place.



References

A Flat Place by Noreen Masud

Tender Buttons by Gertrude Stein

Willa Cather

Kangaroo by DH Lawrence

Against the Trauma Plot by Parul Sehgal



You can now subscribe to our ⁠Patreon ⁠for £5 a month, which will enable us to keep bringing you more in-depth conversations with writers. As a subscriber, you will have access to:


10% listener discount on all books at Storysmith, either online or in person
Opportunities to submit questions to upcoming guests
Free book giveaways each month related to our featured guests
Early access to episodes each month
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A free Storysmith tote bag after 3 months subscription

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In this episode, we speak to Nathalie Olah about her book Bad Taste: Or The Politics of Ugliness. We discuss notions of taste and the intersection with social class and cultural capital. We think about the ways in which a fear of judgement is intrinsic to working-class survival and the construction of working-class femininities within this. We chat about the ways in which ideas of social mobility force working-class people to assimilate to middle-class ideas of taste, and the loss and displacement caused by this. We highlight the importance of working-class writers amplifying the people, places, objects and events that are significant to them, from Pamela Anderson's hyper-feminized look in the film Barb Wire (1996) to Dolly Parton's embrace of 'trashy' aesthetics. We discuss the role of austerity and scarcity within contemporary notions of 'style' and 'class' and how this links to the wealth and power of dominant taste-makers. We explore the role of culture and beauty in upholding power hierarchies and the way this shapes our lives.



Nathalie Olah is a writer currently living and working in London. Her political awakening happened when she was living in the Netherlands in 2014, completing an MA (global political economy, University of Sussex / Utrecht University) and working for research organisations and grassroots protest groups challenging the biases of the international courts and witnessing the distant, passive cruelty of EU bureaucrats subjecting millions of people to misery during the Greek debt crisis. She came back to the UK in 2016 when electoral politics was just starting to get interesting; joined a few organisations, wrote a few things. This all led to the publication of her first book, Steal As Much As You Can in 2019.

Her background has always been aesthetics, philosophy and literature. She first studied English Language and Literature, but her professor, Christopher Butler, was a philosopher and art historian. Her main interest is media spectacle and propaganda, and the quaint exceptionalisms of the western psyche and that of the upper/middle class in particular. She is always trying to challenge the assumption — in a visually over-saturated world — that seeing is knowing, and ultimately prevent the slide into what academic Eva Illouz has termed ‘scopic capitalism’.

Her new book, Bad Taste: or the politics of ugliness is about the industries of taste (which prospered after 2008), how they aestheticise and valorise scarcity, which is an invention of capitalism, and create a false hierarchy of virtue centred on consumerism.

Her essays, fiction and reviews have been published widely in Five Dials, Dazed, AnOther, i-D, the Guardian, the Sunday Times, the Independent and the Times Literary Supplement.



References

Bad Taste by Nathalie Olah

Look Again: Class by Nathalie Olah

Steal as Much as You Can by Nathalie Olah

In this episode, we speak to novelist and short story writer Eliza Clark about her novel, Penance. We discuss violence and transgression within fiction, and what this can reveal about wider society. We chat about the satirisation of the true crime genre, and the socio-political context which surrounds violent acts. We examine the role of the internet in writing, publishing and how it effects our experiences of our bodies and desires. We discuss the influence of both mainstream and social media in shaping narratives about people and places, as well as aspects of social class and regional inequality between the north-east and London. We chat about what it means to write difficult female characters and the difference between writing first and second novels.



Eliza Clark is from Newcastle. In 2018, she received a grant from New Writing North's 'Young Writers Talent Fund'. Her debut novel, Boy Parts, was published by Influx Press in July 2020 and was Blackwell's Fiction Book of the Year. In 2022, Eliza was chosen as a finalist for the Women's Prize Futures Award for writers under thirty-five, and she was selected as one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists in 2023. Penance was published by Faber in 2023.



References

Boy Parts by Eliza Clark

Penance by Eliza Clark



You can now subscribe to our Patreon for £5 a month, which will enable us to keep bringing you more in-depth conversations with writers. As a subscriber, you will have access to:


10% listener discount on all books at Storysmith, either online or in person
Opportunities to submit questions to upcoming guests
Free book giveaways each month related to our featured guests
Early access to episodes each month
Exclusive free tickets each month to live Storysmith events
A free Storysmith tote bag after 3 months subscription



Please like, rate and subscribe to help promote the podcast and support our work.

In this special live episode, we speak to writer and broadcaster Octavia Bright about her memoir, This Ragged Grace. We discuss the ways in which Octavia's roles as an interviewer, carer and linguist informed her process as an active listener and developed her writing voice. We explore the distinction between the pornographic and the erotic in relation to memoir writing, and discuss the process of revealing and concealment when writing from lived experience. We chat about the importance of images and symbols in articulating trauma, with reference to Louise Bourgeois' 'Spiral Woman' as a symbol which holds contradictions within recovery. We speak about the interweaving of presence, loss, memory and history within writing and discuss the influence of artists and writers such as Louise Bourgeois, Deborah Levy and Marlene Dumas on Octavia's work.



Octavia Bright is a writer and broadcaster. She co-hosts Literary Friction, the literary podcast and NTS Radio show, with Carrie Plitt. Recommended by The New York Times, Guardian, BBC Culture, Electric Literature, The Sunday Times and others, it has run for ten years and has listeners worldwide. She also presents programmes for BBC R4 including Open Book, and hosts literary events for bookshops, publishers, and festivals – such as Cheltenham Literature Festival and events for The Southbank Centre. Her writing has been published in a number of magazines including the White Review, Harper’s Bazaar, ELLE, Wasafiri, Somesuch Stories, and The Sunday Times, amongst others. She has a PhD from UCL where she wrote about hysteria and desire in Spanish cinema.



References

This Ragged Grace by Octavia Bright

Living Autobiography series by Deborah Levy

Louise Bourgeois

Marlene Dumas



As always, listen for the discount code and visit Storysmith for 10% discount on Octavia's work.