If you read this column at, you have caught me referencing the incredible literary podcast Between the Covers. It’s a delight to have its host, the inimitable David Naimon, as a guest to celebrate the reissue of Ursula K. Le Guin: Conversations on Writing with David Naimon. As an interlocutor, Le Guin is magnanimous and playful in these pages. For his part, despite being in the presence of so formidable a mind, Naimon doesn’t crumple. Rather, he engages with Le Guin with rigorous curiosity—the kind of open flexibility that makes for a delightful conversation. (Clearly a deep longtime admirer of her writing and its legacies, Naimon also devoted a year of dazzling conversations with writers about elements of Le Guin’s work entitled “Crafting with Ursula.”)
The discussions between Naimon and Le Guin are divided into outwardly neat sections (“On Fiction,” “On Poetry,” “On Nonfiction”), each with the lovely preamble emblematic of Naimon. Of course, the conversations, unhurried and thoughtful, are varied, roaming from “grammar bullies” and dictators’ fear of poets and the function of myth. Somehow, the book is compact enough to fit into a bag, easy to dip into and draw from Le Guin’s wellspring of wisdoms.
If you’re a mondo-fan of Between the Covers, you know there is a particular glee of when Naimon reveals his latest guest when an episode drops. While Naimon doesn’t let any insights slip about future interlocutors (at least that I can tell), this gives us a lovely portrait of his desk where the magic happens, the talismans that maintain it, and the books he treasures and returns to.
–Diana Arterian
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I am a longtime reader of “The Annotated Nightstand” so it is thrilling and a little otherworldly to be here on the other side, Diana! You’ve graciously given me permission to bend the format a little bit, as many of my paraliterary talismans reside not on my nightstand but on my podcast desk. So for my “nightstand” photo I’ve allowed several of these cathected items on my desk to draw forth a corresponding book from my bookshelves, and hopefully this day-desk will still evoke something of the night.
Ursula K. Le Guin, Always Coming Home
If you look to the left of the stack of books, you’ll see a tall jar of pennies with a name tag hanging out of it, and just below my name a ribbon that says “Hugo Loser.” My book with Ursula (Ursula K. Le Guin: Conversations on Writing) brought me to the Hugo Awards in Dublin unprepared to learn just how great it is to be a loser. Just as the awards ceremony ends, while all the winners are on stage getting their glamour shots with their trophies, the losers are put on a loser shuttle and are the first to arrive at the post-gala loser party, set in the Guinness warehouse lofts rented out by George R.R. Martin for that purpose. A live band, various catered buffets, an open bar, the losers arrive together before the attendees. The last to arrive are the winners, who must go to the table of funny hats, and pick a hat that makes them look terribly ridiculous before they celebrate.
This nametag drew Le Guin’s Always Coming Home to the desk as a perfect nightstand book. Not meant to be read linearly, it deconstructs the notion of a novel. You can dip in to read a song, a recipe, a short story, a brief treatise on ritual, and more. I think of the quote of Le Guin’s “I see my job as holding doors open, or opening windows, but who comes in & out the doors, what you see out the window, how do I know?” This is a true “doors and windows” book.
Sabrina Orah Mark, Happily
Atop the stack of books you will see a golem figurine which normally sits at the base of my microphone boom arm, protecting the community of writers and these conversations from malevolent forces. Sabrina gifted me this golem and faithfully it attracted her hybrid memoir-essay-fairy tale fabulation Happily to the desk.
Evelyn Araluen, Dropbear
Over the years I’ve connected with the incredible organizer, therapist and facilitator Leah Manaema Avene. Eventually I took her course Fieldwork, whose subtitle is “collective recovery from Colonial Fragmentation Disorder,” which has a great international community gathered around it. At one point she sent me a kupega prototype that she wove (based on the Tuvaluan open weave fishing nets) and which is one of the metaphors she uses in her teaching. It hangs near the back of the microphone itself (you’ll see it coming up behind the golem and down the back of the microphone). She also sent me the Goorie and Koori poet, Evelyn Araluen’s first book, Dropbear. An important figure and force in Australian literature it is only a matter of time before we’re all talking about Araluen’s work in North America.
Mykaela Saunders (ed.), This All Come Back Now
Perhaps my longest standing correspondence that has arisen from the podcast is with the Koori/Goori and Lebanese writer Mykaela Saunders. She is doing amazing work and I hope one day her recent story collection Always Will Be will make it to us up north. Pictured is the anthology she edited, the first-ever anthology of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander speculative fiction. And just in front of it is an emu feather she sent to me, which, in Mykaela’s telling, is the only bird that has this double, bifurcated feather, a bird that is sacred to many nations in Australia, as well as being an Aboriginal constellation The Emu in the Sky.
Mila Menendez Krause, Vasos Oscuros
This last book, the thin blue book at the bottom of the stack, is perhaps my most cherished. I would’ve never heard of the Swiss-Colombian writer Mila Menendez Krause if it weren’t for Mark Haber championing her hard-to-find oeuvre. Vasos Oscuros is both out-of-print and was never translated into English. I’m not sure Mark even knows I found this copy. And much like his own discoveries of her books, barely in circulation, it was completely by chance that I found it—in a derelict free book exchange just outside of the mouth of the Rouffignac cave in the Dordogne region of France. Surely left by a tourist who didn’t know what they had. I dip in and out of this book, an unacknowledged/erased influence on Nabokov’s Pale Fire, nearly every night, despite my wildly insufficient Spanish reading comprehension. I’ll end with a taste of her words, translated by a friend of mine for us, the translator Flora Abenafia:
Outside the mouth, the world is a moth, powdery, calcified—a specimen of the interior. Inside smells of leaked fuel, of a century’s domestic dust—a toxic womb. If I don’t eat the fruit immediately, the fruit will begin its occupation. It will reverse the line of sight. (What happens to a woman who is eaten by a yellow apple? Where does the meat go?)