Story Behind the Story
46 episodes - English - Latest episode: 3 months ago - ★★★★★ - 1 ratingHost Clara Sherley-Appel interviews authors about their creative process, from the inspiration behind the books they write to specific choices they make.
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Episodes
Episode 49: Tedd Siegel - SIGNS OF THE GREAT REFUSAL
April 09, 2024 03:00 - 46 minutes - 42.7 MBTedd Siegel retired from his career as an academic administrator in late 2019 after wrestling with extreme stress, burnout, and PTSD — caused, in part, by the conditions of work as it is formulated today. He wrote Signs of the Great Refusal: The Coming Struggle for a Postwork Society in part to work through his own experiences and, more broadly, to understand what it was about contemporary work that felt so untenable and unsustainable. Throughout the book, Tedd leans into his background as a ...
Episode 48: Katya Apekina - MOTHER DOLL
March 03, 2024 01:00 - 58 minutes - 66.9 MBNovelist, screenwriter, and translator Katya Apekina returns to Story Behind the Story to talk about her latest novel, Mother Doll — an intergenerational ghost story, tying together a Russian revolutionary and her great-granddaughter, adrift in her 20s in LA. Special Guest: Katya Apekina.
Episode 47: Marcus Gazaway - BRIDGEWATER
February 04, 2024 01:00 - 52 minutes - 60.3 MBMarcus Gazaway got his start as a writer right here on the central coast, when he joined the staff of CSU Monterey Bay’s student newspaper, The Otter Realm (https://digitalcommons.csumb.edu/otterrealm/). Today, he works as a full-time author in Sarasota, Florida, where he can be seen reading and writing in coffee shops across the Gulf Coast. His first novel, the sci-fi thriller Bridgewater, follows a neurologist whose desperation to give his Deaf daughter a voice leads him down a dark and des...
Episode 46: Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo - INCANTATION
December 03, 2023 01:00 - 54 minutes - 62 MBThis month, host Clara Sherley-Appel talks to poet and educator Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo. A former Steinbeck Fellow and Poets & Writers California Writers Exchange winner, Xochitl’s writing has been featured in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, On Being’s Poetry Unbound, and Poetry Unbound: 50 Poems to Open Your World. She has received residencies from Hedgebrook, Ragdale, Yefe Nof, and the National Parks Arts Foundation in partnership with the Getty National Military Park and Poetry F...
Episode 45: Sam Sax - PIG
November 04, 2023 16:00 - 54 minutes - 62.3 MBSam Sax is a queer Jewish poet, writer, and educator. Their debut poetry collection, madness, won the National Poetry Series Competition when it came out, and their second collection, bury it, won the 2017 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. They are the two time Bay Area Grand Slam Champion with poems published in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Poetry Magazine, and Granta, to give just a few highlights. Sam has received fellowships from The National Endowment for the ...
Episode 44: Jenn Shapland - THIN SKIN
October 08, 2023 00:00 - 55 minutes - 63.3 MBJenn Shapland's first book, My Autobiography of Carson McCullers, was a finalist for the 2020 National Book Award and the Southern Book Prize, and it won the 2021 Lambda Literary Award, the Judy Grahn Award, and the Christian Gauss Award. In her new essay collection, Thin Skin, Shapland explores the porousness of boundaries between humans and the environments we inhabit, between us and other people, and between us and the social constructs we create. What does it mean to be sensitive when we...
Episode 43: Brett Christophers - RENTIER CAPITALISM
September 03, 2023 00:00 - 53 minutes - 61.7 MBHost Clara Sherley Appel speaks with Brett Christophers, author of Rentier Capitalism. A geographer based out of the Institute for Housing and Urban Research at Uppsala University, Brett's work focuses on various aspects of Western capitalism, both historically and in the present day. In 2018, he wrote The New Enclosure, about Margaret Thatcher’s immensely successful program to privatize land in the UK, for which he won the 2019 Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Memorial Prize. In 2020 he published ...
Episode 42: Cheryl Harawitz - WHEN THE MAGPIE CALLS
June 02, 2023 16:00 - 54 minutes - 49.6 MBCheryl Harawitz is an artist and retired social worker living in Alameda. A few years ago, she published her debut middle-grade novel, When the Magpie Calls, the story of a nine year old girl named Morgwyth with special abilities and a remarkable connection to animals, for which she is bullied by her peers and targeted by supernatural forces who see her as a threat. But as Morgwyth begins to accept herself and her differences, she discovers a wellspring of internal strength that serves her we...
Episode 41: Joss Lake - FUTURE FEELING
May 07, 2023 00:00 - 42 minutes - 48.3 MBThis month, Clara talks to author Joss Lake. A trans writer and educator based in New York, Joss teaches critical and creative writing throughout the city and runs a literary sauna series called Trans at Rest. His work has been supported by the Queens Council of the Arts, the Women and Performance Studies Collective, the Watermill Center, and Columbia University. Joss's debut novel, Future Feeling, tells a story about an embittered dog-walker who accidentally puts a curse on a young trans man...
Episode 40: Elaine Hsieh Chou - DISORIENTATION
April 07, 2023 16:00 - 55 minutes - 50.6 MBIn Elaine Hsieh Chou's 2022 debut novel, Disorientation, a Taiwanese-American graduate student named Ingrid Yang discovers that the subject of her dissertation is a fraud: Xiao-Wen Chou is not a Chinese-American poet, but is in fact a white man who built his career on stereotypes and yellowface. This discovery launches her own awakening to the racism she has faced her entire life and the many ways she's built her identity around what white people expect of her. In our conversation, we talk ab...
Episode 39: Ruthanna Emrys - A HALF-BUILT GARDEN
September 01, 2022 16:00 - 54 minutes - 62.1 MBHost Clara Sherley-Appel talks to author Ruthanna Emrys about her hopepunk novel, A HALF-BUILT GARDEN.
Episode 38: Isaac Fellman - DEAD COLLECTIONS
July 01, 2022 16:00 - 54 minutes - 61.9 MBIsaac Fellman is an author and archivist living in San Francisco. His debut novel, The Breath of the Sun, won the 2019 Lambda Literary Award for LGBT Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror. In this episode, we discuss about his second novel, Dead Collections, which was published by Penguin Random House in 2022. It follows Sol, who works – like Isaac – as an archivist at a queer historical society in San Francisco, and who – presumably unlike Isaac – is a vampire. It’s a delightful story about l...
Episode 37: Gretchen Felker-Martin - MANHUNT
May 06, 2022 16:00 - 52 minutes - 62.2 MBGretchen Felker-Martin is a writer, film critic, and self-described professional cenobite who writes about sexual revulsion, body horror, and how violence forms and fits into our lives. In addition to her fiction and essays available on Patreon, she has written criticism for outlets like Polygon, FanByte, The Outline, and Nylon. Her 2022 novel, Manhunt, follows two trans women trying to survive in a world ravaged by a testosterone-targeting plague. It is a brutal, gruesome exploration of gen...
Episode 36: Stephanie Foo - WHAT MY BONES KNOW
April 01, 2022 16:00 - 54 minutes - 63.6 MBIf you listen to the radio, you have almost certainly encountered Stephanie Foo's work. After graduating from UC Santa Cruz in just 3 years, she joined the staff of Snap Judgment, first as an intern and then as a full-time producer, before she moved to New York to work on This American Life. But Stephanie’s numerous accomplishments and accolades hid an intense internal struggle that ultimately led her to leave her dream job: in 2018, she was diagnosed with C-PTSD. In March 2022, she published...
Episode 35: Calvin Kasulke - SEVERAL PEOPLE ARE TYPING
March 06, 2022 01:00 - 54 minutes - 63.4 MBI talk to author and playwright Calvin Kasulke about his debut novel, Several People Are Typing.
Episode 34: Kent Leatham - MONTEREY POETRY FESTIVAL
February 06, 2022 23:15 - 56 minutes - 64.1 MBI talk to Monterey Bay Area poet, translator, and educator Kent Leatham about his writing.
Episode 33: Jamey Williams - BREATHING UNDER WATER and TO BE BLACK IS TO LOVE
December 03, 2021 23:00 - 55 minutes - 64 MBI talk to Bay Area poet and educator Jamey Williams about his poetry collections BREATHING UNDER WATER and TO BE BLACK IS TO LOVE.
Episode 32: Kenny Garcia - MONTEREY POETRY FESTIVAL
November 06, 2021 22:00 - 55 minutes - 51 MBI talk to Monterey Bay Area writer Kenny Garcia about his poetry, the Monterey Poetry Festival, and his involvement with Boukra Press.
Episode 31: Rémy Ngamije - THE ETERNAL AUDIENCE OF ONE
September 04, 2021 22:00 - 56 minutes - 52.8 MBI talk to Namibian author Rémy Ngamije about his debut novel, THE ETERNAL AUDIENCE OF ONE.
Episode 30: Alice Sparkly Kat - POSTCOLONIAL ASTROLOGY
August 07, 2021 22:00 - 55 minutes - 63.9 MBI talk to astrologer and writer Alice Sparkly Kat, author of POSTCOLONIAL ASTROLOGY.
Episode 29: Stephen Granade - LOSING YOUR GRIP
July 06, 2021 22:00 - 56 minutes - 65.7 MBI talk to writer / game designer Stephen Granade about the differences between interactive and traditional fiction.
Episode 28: Ethel Rohan - IN THE EVENT OF CONTACT
June 05, 2021 21:00 - 56 minutes - 65.7 MBI talk to Bay Area local Ethel Rohan, author of IN THE EVENT OF CONTACT.
Episode 27: Muriel Leung - IMAGINE US, THE SWARM
May 09, 2021 18:00 - 54 minutes - 63.6 MBMuriel Leung is a recipient of fellowships to Kundiman, VONA/Voices Workshop and the Community of Writers, and she has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Her writing can be found in The Baffler, Cream City Review, Gulf Coast, The Collagist, and the Fairy Tale Review, among others. Her first book of poetry, Bone Confetti, won the 2015 Noemi Press Book Award. Of it, one reviewer said, “It made the words into a bell, and the bell made me stop what I was doing.” In this episode, I talk to Mu...
Episode 26: Jeff VanderMeer - HUMMINGBIRD SALAMANDER
April 03, 2021 19:00 - 52 minutes - 61.2 MBOver his 35 year career, Jeff VanderMeer has published more than a dozen novels, and his non-fiction writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Atlantic, Slate, Salon, and the Washington Post. His genre-defying novels and short stories frequently engage with ecological themes, including climate change, causing the New Yorker to dub him “weird Thoreau.” In 2014, Annihilation, the first book in his New York Times-bestselling Southern Reach trilogy, won the Nebula and...
Episode 25: Finola Austin - BRONTË'S MISTRESS
March 11, 2021 17:00 - 56 minutes - 77.2 MBFinola Austin was born in England and moved to Northern Ireland when she was five; she is now based in Brooklyn, New York. Her debut novel Brontë’s Mistress, is a retelling of the infamous affair between Anne, Charlotte, and Emily’s brother Branwell and a long-maligned married woman, Lydia Robinson, from Lydia’s perspective. Using themes from the Brontë sisters’ novels and weaving in original and secondary sources on the affair, Austin gives voice to a woman torn between her desires and what ...
Episode 22: Kamala Puligandla - YOU CAN VIBE ME ON MY FEMMEPHONE
February 21, 2021 20:00 - 55 minutes - 63.4 MBIn this episode, I talk to author Kamala Puligandla about her new novella, You Can Vibe Me on My FemmePhone, queer coming of age stories, and the function of humor in her writing. Puligandla lives in Los Angeles, where she also eats, snobs, wears elastic-waisted pants, skulks around the farmer's market, attempts to go to the Y, swipes on Tinder, and thrifts for flair that makes style pop. She is from Oakland, CA and has previously lived there, Portland, OR, and Chicago, IL. She is currently t...
Episode 24: Kamala Puligandla - YOU CAN VIBE ME ON MY FEMMEPHONE
February 21, 2021 20:00 - 55 minutes - 63.4 MBIn this episode, I talk to author Kamala Puligandla about her new novella, You Can Vibe Me on My FemmePhone, queer coming of age stories, and the function of humor in her writing. Puligandla lives in Los Angeles, where she also eats, snobs, wears elastic-waisted pants, skulks around the farmer's market, attempts to go to the Y, swipes on Tinder, and thrifts for flair that makes style pop. She is from Oakland, CA and has previously lived there, Portland, OR, and Chicago, IL. She is currently t...
Episode 21: Elisa Gabbert - THE UNREALITY OF MEMORY
November 06, 2020 20:00 - 53 minutes - 73.9 MBElisa Gabbert is obsessed with disasters and how we perceive them. In The Unreality of Memory, which was released last year in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, Gabbert tackles pandemics, environmental disasters, the nature of pain and its perception, nostalgia and more. We talk about Gabbert's interest in these topics, the relationship between her poetry and her essays, and getting burned out on empathy. -- Elisa Gabbert is the author of five collections of poetry, essays, and criticis...
Episode 20: Lev Grossman - THE SILVER ARROW
October 07, 2020 19:00 - 54 minutes - 63.4 MBIn this month's episode, I talk to New York Times-bestselling author Lev Grossman about his new middle-grade fantasy novel, The Silver Arrow, which follows 11-year-old Kate and her younger brother Tom on a magical ecological adventure. It's a classic children's adventure novel in the style of The Phantom Tollbooth or The Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankwiler with an important modern message. In this live online event, produced for Kepler's Literary Foundation, we discuss the difference b...
Episode 19: Adam Sass - SURRENDER YOUR SONS
September 05, 2020 01:00 - 59 minutes - 55.7 MBIn this month's episode, I talk to author Adam Sass about his debut novel, Surrender Your Sons, a queer YA thriller set in a conversion therapy center in Costa Rica. Sass is a gay man himself, and he says he wrote Surrender Your Sons not as a story about queer pain, but as one of queer triumph. Over the course of this hour, we talk about depictions of coming out and conversion therapy in media, the importance of solidarity, and the difficulty of talking honestly about conversion therapy when ...
Episode 18: Zaina Arafat - YOU EXIST TOO MUCH
August 08, 2020 19:00 - 54 minutes - 62.3 MBZaina Arafat grew up in two very different worlds with different sets of expectations. It left her with a profound sense of alienation and the feeling of being caught between two identities. As a queer woman who identifies as bisexual, she felt similarly torn. In her debut novel, You Exist Too Much, Arafat explores that feeling of unbelonging through an unnamed narrator who disappears into romantic relationships and leaves when her partners begin to see her. We talk in this interview about th...
Episode 17: Kawai Strong Washburn - SHARKS IN THE TIME OF SAVIORS
August 07, 2020 17:30 - 55 minutes - 64.6 MBKawai Strong Washburn grew up on the Big Island of Hawaiʻi. Life on the Hāmākua coast gave him an appreciation for the natural landscape, as well as the stories and myths he learned in school and from his peers. In his debut novel, Sharks in the Time of Saviors, Washburn follows the Hawai'ian-Filipino Flores family as they navigate the changing physical and socioeconomic landscape in Hawai'i. The story of the Flores family is set against the backdrop of Hawai'ian myth: when the youngest child...
Episode 16: Jillian Christmas - THE GOSPEL OF BREAKING
June 07, 2020 03:00 - 56 minutes - 64.7 MBBorn and raised in Markham, Ontario, Jillian Christmas is a poet, enthusiastic organizer, and activist in the Canadian arts community with a focus on increasing anti-oppression initiatives in spoken word. Her work has been featured in The Huffington Post and many other publications, including collections such as Matrix New Queer Writing (Issue 98), The Post Feminist Post, and the celebrated anthology, The Great Black North. In March, Christmas published a collection of her poetry. The Gospel...
Episode 15: Rishi Reddi - PASSAGE WEST
May 02, 2020 19:00 - 50 minutes - 46.3 MBEnvironmental lawyer Rishi Reddi came to prominence as a writer in the early 2000s. Her short fiction has earned her a PEN Award as well as a nomination for the Pushcart Prize, and her story "Justice Shiva Ram Murthy" appeared in the 2005 edition of The Best American Short Stories. It was also featured on NPR’s “Selected Shorts.” In April 2020, she published her first novel. Passage West explores the lives of Indian-American immigrants in California's Imperial Valley near the turn of the twe...
Episode 13: Alka Joshi - THE HENNA ARTIST
March 07, 2020 02:00 - 55 minutes - 64.5 MBAlka Joshi had a complicated relationship to her Indian heritage as a young girl. After immigrating from Rajasthan to the American midwest when she was 9, she was frequently bullied because of her race. It wasn't until she started writing The Henna Artist as an adult that she began to reclaim her cultural heritage. In our conversation, Joshi tells me that writing The Henna Artist allowed her to imagine a different kind of life for her mother, who entered into an arranged marriage at the age o...
Episode 12: Carmen Maria Machado - IN THE DREAM HOUSE
February 08, 2020 02:00 - 1 hour - 69.4 MBCARMEN MARIA MACHADO is the author of the sparklingly surreal short story collection Her Body and Other Parties, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and a winner of the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize. Her memoir, In the Dream House, was named “Best Book of the Year” in 2019 by just about every major media outlet, including The New Yorker, TIME Magazine, The New York Times, NPR, Entertainment Weekly, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, and Vogue. It is a bold, capti...
Episode 11: Daniel Summerhill - DIVINE, DIVINE, DIVINE
February 06, 2020 23:00 - 55 minutes - 64.4 MBDaniel Summerhill is a poet, a professor of Poetry and Social Action and Composition Studies at CSU Monterey Bay, and an Oakland native. He has performed his poetry on stages around the world, including at the Kwamashu Center in South Africa as part of a workshop sponsored by the US Embassy. He is the 2015 New York Empire State Grand Slam Champion, a 2015 Nitty Gritty Grand Slam Champion, and a recipient of the Sharon Olds Fellowship for Poetry. His poems have been published in the Lilly Revi...
Episode 9: Lilah Sturges - LUMBERJANES: THE SHAPE OF FRIENDSHIP
January 03, 2020 17:00 - 54 minutes - 62.6 MBIn this episode, I talk to comic writer Lilah Sturges about her work on Lumberjanes: The Shape of Friendship. Lumberjanes is a youth-oriented series that follows the adventures of a group of girls at a summer camp. It's known for its positive outlook and inclusivity, as well as its creative introduction of educational content. My conversation with Lilah touches on writing for a younger audience, including educational content in ways that feel organic and entertaining, and how stories can help...
Episode 8: Adam Becker - WHAT IS REAL?
October 25, 2019 21:00 - 1 hour - 55.3 MBIn What is real?, Adam Becker details the century-long fight over the interpretation of quantum physics -- what this enormously successful theory, which has given us so much of the technology we use today, is actually saying about the world. Becker first encountered this controversy when, as an undergraduate student of physics at Cornell, a professor pooh-poohed his concerns over the implications of the standard model of quantum theory, developed by Bohr and others in the early 20th century, ...
Episode 7: Lauren Eggert-Crowe - BITCHES OF THE DROUGHT
September 07, 2019 20:00 - 59 minutes - 83.1 MBIn her 2017 chapbook, Bitches of the Drought, poet and former Santa Cruz resident Lauren Eggert-Crowe explores what it's like when a woman's anger comes to the surface years after the object of her anger has left her life. Lauren's writing process in many ways mirrors those themes: while she wrote many of the poems in Bitches of the Drought over a single summer, it wasn't until years later that she thought to combine them into a single book. In our conversation, we touch on the emotional impa...
Episode 6: Andy Couturier - THE ABUNDANCE OF LESS
August 04, 2019 09:30 - 58 minutes - 80.7 MBWhen Andy Couturier was in his 20s, he and his wife Cynthia traveled to Japan to teach English and raise money to buy their own home. While there, he became friends with a group of people who organize their lives differently from the way most of us are used to. Instead of working full-time for a corporation, they grow their own food and work just enough to get by, spending their abundant free time on subsistance farming, environmental activism, art, music, and time spent with family and frien...
Episode 5: Xago Juarez - REALISAL: STORIES FROM EAST SALINAS
July 06, 2019 20:00 - 58 minutes - 53.8 MBDrawing inspiration for documentary theater practitioners like Anna Deveare Smith and Culture Clash, Luis 'xago' Juarez interviewed nearly 40 residents of East Salinas before writing reAlisal: Stories of East Salinas and the two other reAlisal plays that came before it. He wanted to tell the history of the Alisal using the words of the people who lived there, using their voices, and reshape the narrative of the region in the process. In this interview, I talk to xago about the reAlisal plays,...
Episode 4: Charlie Jane Anders - THE CITY IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT
June 08, 2019 22:00 - 50 minutes - 46.3 MBTHE CITY IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT is the latest novel from Bay Area author giant Charlie Jane Anders. This critically acclaimed novel has led some to label Anders the successor to the queen of science fiction herself, Ursula K. Leguin. But Anders is a giant in the sci-fi and fantasy community in her own right. Her 2016 novel, ALL THE BIRDS IN THE SKY, won the 2017 Nebula Award for Best Novel, the Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel, and the Crawford Award. It was also a finalist for the 2017...
Episode 3: M.K. England - THE DISASTERS
February 02, 2019 18:00 - 1 hour - 84.1 MBThe Disasters is M.K. England's debut young adult novel about a group of space academy washouts who are forced to step up and save the world after escaping a terrorist attack. It's a wildly entertaining romp through space that has been lauded for its nuanced representation of LGBTQIA characters and the way it handles mental health issues such as depression and anxiety. In this episode, I talk to England about these issues and more, including what it's like to write action scenes, how publishi...
Episode 2: Katya Apekina - THE DEEPER THE WATER THE UGLIER THE FISH
January 05, 2019 18:00 - 59 minutes - 68.1 MBKatya Apekina's debut novel, The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish, tells the story of Edie and Mae, two sisters who go to live with their estranged father in New York after their mother’s suicide attempt. It has received a great deal of attention for its unique form: the book is structured like an oral history, with a different narrator from one chapter to the next, interspersed with archival content, including poetry, letters, and interviews. In this episode, I talk to Katya about The De...
Episode 1: Carly Gelsinger - ONCE YOU GO IN
November 25, 2018 04:00 - 47 minutes - 65.2 MBWhen Carly Gelsinger was thirteen, she joined Pine Canyon Assemblies of God, a radical evangelical church in rural Monterey County. For years, she was “on fire for God,” speaking in tongues, slaying demons, and following her angry and abusive pastor’s every word. Only when her life literally burned to the ground did she start to make the choices that would lead her to leave the church several years later. In Once You Go In: A Memoir of Radical Faith, Gelsinger tells the story of the lengths s...