The Nervous Breakdown

Roisin Kiberd is the author of The Disconnect: A Personal Journey Through the Internet, available from Serpent’s Tail.

Kiberd’s essays have been published in the Dublin Review, the White Review, the Stinging Fly and Winter Papers. She has written features on technology and culture for publications including the Guardian, Vice and Motherboard, where she wrote a column about internet subcultures. Having spent some time in London as the online voice of a cheese brand, she now lives in Dublin.

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Otherppl with Brad Listi is a weekly literary podcast featuring in-depth interviews with today’s leading writers.

Launched in 2011. Books. Literature. Writing. Publishing. Authors. Screenwriters. Etc.

Support the show on Patreon

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Janice Lee is the author of the novel Imagine a Death, available from Texas Review Press.

Lee is a Korean-American writer, editor, publisher, and shamanic healer. Author of seven books of fiction, creative nonfiction and poetry, she is the founder & executive editor of Entropy, Co-Publisher at Civil Coping Mechanisms, Contributing Editor at Fanzine, and Co-Founder of The Accomplices LLC. She currently lives in Portland, OR where she is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Portland State University.

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Otherppl with Brad Listi is a weekly literary podcast featuring in-depth interviews with today’s leading writers.

Launched in 2011. Books. Literature. Writing. Publishing. Authors. Screenwriters. Etc.

Support the show on Patreon

Email the show: letters [at] otherppl [dot] com

The podcast is a proud affiliate partner of Bookshop, working to support local, independent bookstores.

Jocelyn Nicole Johnson is the author of the debut story collection My Monticello, available from Henry Holt & Co.

Johnson’s writing has appeared in Guernica, The Guardian, Phoebe, Prime Number Magazine, and elsewhere. Her short story “Control Negro” was anthologized in Best American Short Stories 2018, guest edited by Roxane Gay, and read live by LeVar Burton as part of PRI’s Selected Shorts series. Johnson has been a fellow at Hedgebrook, Tin House Summer Workshops, and VCCA. A veteran public school art teacher, she lives and writes in Charlottesville, Virginia.

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Otherppl with Brad Listi is a weekly literary podcast featuring in-depth interviews with today’s leading writers.

Launched in 2011. Books. Literature. Writing. Publishing. Authors. Screenwriters. Etc.

Support the show on Patreon

Email the show: letters [at] otherppl [dot] com

The podcast is a proud affiliate partner of Bookshop, working to support local, independent bookstores.

Sarah Hall is the author of the novel Burntcoat, available from Custom House. It is the official November pick of The Nervous Breakdown Book Club.

Hall was born in Cumbria. She is the prizewinning author of six novels and three short story collections. She is a recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters E. M. Forster Award, the Edge Hill Short Story Prize, among others, and the only person ever to win the BBC National Short Story Award twice.

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Otherppl with Brad Listi is a weekly literary podcast featuring in-depth interviews with today’s leading writers.

Launched in 2011. Books. Literature. Writing. Publishing. Authors. Screenwriters. Etc.

Support the show on Patreon

Email the show: letters [at] otherppl [dot] com

The podcast is a proud affiliate partner of Bookshop, working to support local, independent bookstores.

Below are four new poems by New Orleans-based musician Max Bien Kahn. His new EP, On the Floor EP, will be released on December 3rd. Preorder the EP here. Listen to a track from the EP right here.

small victory

got a full refund at the mall today
they asked me if anything was wrong
i told them:
it didn’t fit right
if i had told them:
i buried my mom in this shitty suit
and don’t want to look at it anymore
that would have been
something

chinese food

her last day was christmas
our last dinner was christmas eve
we sat around upstairs
in the tv room
the tv was off
she couldn’t walk downstairs anymore
i filled my plate with chinese takeout
and she choked on a bowl of tapioca
or whatever that nutritional slop was
spitting it up from time to time
and then declaring in her frail voice
i’m never gonna eat again
i put my plate down
i agreed

you did this on purpose
didn’t you
you brought us together for christmas
we always celebrated like good jews
we went to the movies
and ate chinese food
which you never wanted to eat
but we loved it
and you loved us
when we were all together
at a big round table
with a lazy susan
picking through the greasy pile
of what we call
chinese food
and you would swallow
and smile
because your family was eating together
and it was christmas

Dennis Cooper is the author of the novel I Wished, available from Soho Press.

Cooper is the author of the George Miles Cycle, an interconnected sequence of five novels: Closer, Frisk, Try, Guide, and Period. His other works include My Loose Thread; The Sluts, winner of France’s Prix Sade and the Lambda Literary Award; God Jr.; Wrong; The Dream Police; Ugly Man; and The Marbled Swarm. He divides his time between Los Angeles and Paris. He is the director (with Zac Farley) of Permanent Green Lightand Like Cattle Towards Glow.

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Otherppl with Brad Listi is a weekly literary podcast featuring in-depth interviews with today’s leading writers.

Launched in 2011. Books. Literature. Writing. Publishing. Authors. Screenwriters. Etc.

Support the show on Patreon

Email the show: letters [at] otherppl [dot] com

The podcast is a proud affiliate partner of Bookshop, working to support local, independent bookstores.

Larissa Pham is the author of the memoir-in-essays Pop Song, available from Catapult.

Pham is an artist and writer in Brooklyn. Born in Portland, Oregon, she studied painting and art history at Yale University. She has written essays and criticism for the Paris Review Daily, The Nation, Art in America, Guernica, and elsewhere. She was an inaugural Yi Dae Up fellowship recipient from the Jack Jones Literary Arts Retreat. She is also the author of Fantasian, a novella.

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Otherppl with Brad Listi is a weekly literary podcast featuring in-depth interviews with today’s leading writers.

Launched in 2011. Books. Literature. Writing. Publishing. Authors. Screenwriters. Etc.

Support the show on Patreon

Email the show: letters [at] otherppl [dot] com

The podcast is a proud affiliate partner of Bookshop, working to support local, independent bookstores.

FLIES

I sit in the kitchen with the back door open

and the man next door smokes

he sounds like he could be my uncle

or maybe one of the men

who used to play cards below my bedroom window

and hide from their wives in the summer

STRAWBERRY MARK

“the word for key again?”

“chiave, chiave, chiave”

to use the bathroom at the beach

the corner of a spiky house

the railing where I sat

and then swung back

I thought there would be a bump

when I shaved my head a decade later

but it was round as an allium flower

what a funny compliment

Mike DeCapite is the author of the novel Jacket Weather, available from Soft Skull Press.

DeCapite’s other books include the novel Through the Windshield, the chapbook Creamsicle Blue, and the short-prose collection Radiant Fog, published under the banner of Sparkle Street Books. Cuz Editions published his story “Sitting Pretty,” later anthologized in The Italian American Reader.

DeCapite grew up in Cleveland and has lived in London and San Francisco, but has spent most of his time in New York City, where he now resides.

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Otherppl with Brad Listi is a weekly literary podcast featuring in-depth interviews with today’s leading writers.

Launched in 2011. Books. Literature. Writing. Publishing. Authors. Screenwriters. Etc.

Support the show on Patreon

Email the show: letters [at] otherppl [dot] com

The podcast is a proud affiliate partner of Bookshop, working to support local, independent bookstores.

Below is an excerpt from Adam Soldofsky’s forthcoming novella, Telepaphone, which includes illustrations by Axel Wilhite. Preorder your copy here.

Before we were friends I used to watch him, half-lovesick, from a distance in art school. The low formation of academic buildings came together in a pavilion with large grassy flights descending onto a shady lawn. Axel would sit near the top only somewhat out of the sun, legs crossed in conversation with a classmate, listening with his chin raised and lips slightly pursed or pulling earnestly from the little vape pen he was never without. He was handsome, dressed cool, was smart and unpretentious and his work was excellent. The faculty knew he was going to be great and we all did too and there was no reason to begrudge him for it though that didn’t stop some. He’d already had a few paintings in a serious group show and it was known that a well-regarded gallerist was awaiting his final portfolio. I loved his work from the first time I encountered it. It was ravishing and self-evident. You knew it was the real thing, and by implication you knew your own work was not, which stung but what could you do? You could still have a career, maybe just not a memorable one.

We didn’t have a class together until our final semester. The professor was a rather important Conceptualist. She would only allow for “description” during crits and under that principle said a lot of cruel and unflattering things without seeming to realize just how cruel and unflattering, which could be funny if you weren’t too far up your own ass, which most of us were, so we suffered when we could have had a laugh. At the end of it we installed our supposed best work in the graduation show hoping for some interest beyond family and friends. I hadn’t said much to Axel all semester except to praise what he brought to crits. I tried not to but sometimes I would look at him across the circle of students where he sat and wonder about him. Every once in a while he would catch me and smile in a friendly way that made me ashamed to have been born. Something was definitely wrong with me. It’s not that I wasn’t liked by my peers. I’ve always had friends and gotten along. I usually gelled with my teammates. I had loved and been loved in return, at least as far as I could tell. It was mainly that, for as long as I could remember, I’d harbored a suspicion that I was basically, at my core, full of shit, and nothing that had transpired in my life thus far had convinced me otherwise.

The day when we were supposed to be clearing out our campus studios, I heard a knock at my door and there was Axel Wilhite, leaning in the threshold.

Louise Erdrich is the author of the novel The Sentence, available from Harper.

One of America’s most celebrated authors, Erdrich was awarded the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for her novel The Night Watchman. In 2012, she won the National Book Award for her novel The Round House, and twice she has been awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award, first for her debut novel Love Medicine in 1984, and again for her novel LaRose in 2016.

Erdrich is a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa. She is the author of many novels as well as volumes of poetry, children’s books, and a memoir of early motherhood. She lives in Minnesota with her daughters and is the owner of Birchbark Books, a small independent bookstore. A ghost lives in her creaky old house.

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Otherppl with Brad Listi is a weekly literary podcast featuring in-depth interviews with today’s leading writers.

Launched in 2011. Books. Literature. Writing. Publishing. Authors. Screenwriters. Etc.

Support the show on Patreon

Email the show: letters [at] otherppl [dot] com

The podcast is a proud affiliate partner of Bookshop, working to support local, independent bookstores.

Marlowe Granados is the author of the debut novel Happy Hour, available from Verso Books.

Granados is a writer and filmmaker living in Toronto. She co-hosts The Mean Reds, a podcast dedicated to women-led films. And her advice column, “Designs for Living,” appears in The Baffler.

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Otherppl with Brad Listi is a weekly literary podcast featuring in-depth interviews with today’s leading writers.

Launched in 2011. Books. Literature. Writing. Publishing. Authors. Screenwriters. Etc.

Support the show on Patreon

Email the show: letters [at] otherppl [dot] com

The podcast is a proud affiliate partner of Bookshop, working to support local, independent bookstores.

Matthew Clark Davison is the author of the debut novel Doubting Thomas, available from Amble Press.

Davison is a writer and educator living in San Francisco. He earned a BA and MFA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University, where he now teaches full-time. His prose has been recently anthologized in Empty The Pews and 580-Split, and published in Guernica, The Atlantic Monthly, Foglifter, Lumina Magazine, Fourteen Hills, Per Contra, Educe, and others; and has been recognized with a Creative Work Grant, (Inaugural Awardee/San Francisco State University), Cultural Equities Grant (San Francisco Arts Commission), the Clark Gross Award for a Novel-in-Progress, and a Stonewall Alumni Award.

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Otherppl with Brad Listi is a weekly literary podcast featuring in-depth interviews with today’s leading writers.

Launched in 2011. Books. Literature. Writing. Publishing. Authors. Screenwriters. Etc.

Support the show on Patreon

Email the show: letters [at] otherppl [dot] com

The podcast is a proud affiliate partner of Bookshop, working to support local, independent bookstores.

Emily Ladau is the author of Demystifying Disability: What to Know, What to Say, and How to Be an Ally, available from Ten Speed Press.

Ladau is an internationally known disability rights activist, writer, and speaker. She is the editor in chief of the Rooted in Rights blog, a platform dedicated to amplifying authentic narratives of the intersectional disability experience. She also co-hosts The Accessible Stall, a podcast about disability issues.

Ladau’s writing has been published in outlets including the New York Times, HuffPost, CNN, Self, Salon, Vice, The Daily Beast, Variety, and Marie Claire Australia. Her work is also included in the Criptiques Anthology and About Us: Essays from the Disability Series of the New York Times. She has served as an expert source on disability issues for outlets including NPR, Vox, Washington Post, and Teen Vogue, and has been featured in a range of press outlets including Newsday, BuzzFeed, CBS News, and U.S. News & World Report.

A transcript of this interview is available here.

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Show notes:

The Microsoft videos that Emily references during the interview can be found here.

Other useful resources:

Ableist words and terms to avoid.

2021 working definition of ableism.

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Otherppl with Brad Listi is a weekly literary podcast featuring in-depth interviews with today’s leading writers.

Launched in 2011. Books. Literature. Writing. Publishing. Authors. Screenwriters. Etc.

Support the show on Patreon

Email the show: letters [at] otherppl [dot] com

The podcast is a proud affiliate partner of Bookshop, working to support local, independent bookstores.

Lucy Corin is the author of The Swank Hotel, available from Graywolf Press. It is the official October pick of The Nervous Breakdown Book Club.

Corin’s other books include the story collections One Hundred Apocalypses and Other Apocalypses and The Entire Predicament, and the novel Everyday Psychokillers: A History for Girls. Her work has appeared in American Short Fiction, Conjunctions, Harper’s Magazine, Ploughshares, Bomb, Tin House Magazine, and the New American Stories anthology from Vintage Contemporaries. She is the recipient of an American Academy of Arts and Letters Rome Prize and a literature fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She teaches at the University of California at Davis and lives in Berkeley.

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Otherppl with Brad Listi is a weekly literary podcast featuring in-depth interviews with today’s leading writers.

Launched in 2011. Books. Literature. Writing. Publishing. Authors. Screenwriters. Etc.

Support the show on Patreon

Email the show: letters [at] otherppl [dot] com

The podcast is a proud affiliate partner of Bookshop, working to support local, independent bookstores.