Wander Through the Ruins of Coal Country with Meghan Lamb

In the intro we talk about Lynne Ramsay’s Ratcatcher and animating atmosphere of the desolate landscape of Pennsylvania's coal region with author Meghan Lamb. 

Failure to Thrive (Apocalypse Party, 2022) follows the interconnected stories of three families as they navigate issues of disability, illness, and substance abuse in a former coal town: a landscape that is itself sick. A married couple argues over how to raise their neuroatypical child. A former nurse cares for her aging father, processing guilt over her addiction. A young man returns home after experiencing a traumatic brain injury, rediscovering a space where the past and present bleed uncannily together. Meanwhile, a two hundred-year mine fire burns beneath the town, a whispering dread that pervades the atmosphere. 

In addition to Failure to Thrive, Meghan Lamb is the author of All of Your Most Private Places (Spork Press, 2020) and Silk Flowers (Birds of Lace, 2017). She currently serves as the nonfiction editor of Nat. Brut, a Whiting Award-winning journal of art and literature dedicated to advancing inclusivity in all creative fields. 

“Bridging the gap between dirty realism of Diane Williams and the uncanny ambiance of Tarkovsky, Meghan Lamb’s All of Your Most Private Places is an astonishing debut, one that immediately defines her as a force of expectation-bending, deep psyche fiction, culled from the most intimate, oft-suppressed depths of who we are.” — Blake Butler, author of Alice Knot 

 “Failure to Thrive captures slow collapse like nothing else I've read. It is packed with heartbreakingly acute observation, and yet it is uncrowded and spacious, with a gauzy, hallucinatory quality. Both expansive and economical, it does more with the form of the novel than most books will ever attempt. It's a gem glittering in the dark.” —Lindsay Lerman, author of I'm From Nowhere 

“Meghan Lamb is such an exquisite, comprehensively intelligent, dreamy writer. Failure to Thrive exudes utmost pleasure and a defying ache from every dot of its ink, like the sun.” —Dennis Cooper, author of The Marbled Swarm 

Theme music by Joseph E. Martinez of Junius 

Follow us on social at: 

Twitter: @WakeIslandPod 

Instagram: @wakeislandpod

David's Twitter: @raviddice 

Apocalypse Party's Twitter: @apocpartypress

Meghan's Instagram: @lamb.like.the.animal & @significant_others_series

---

Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/wake-island/message
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/wake-island/support