Firefly by LUMINA Journal

Sarah Manguso speaks with Lumina Journal about her books, 300 Arguments and Ongoingness: The End of a Diary. Sarah Manguso is the author, most recently, of 300 Arguments (2017), a work of aphoristic autobiography. Her other nonfiction books include Ongoingness: The End of a Diary (2015), an essay on self-documentation, motherhood, and time; The Guardians (2012), an essay on friendship and suicide; and The Two Kinds of Decay (2008), an essay on living with chronic illness. Her work has been supported by Hodder and Guggenheim fellowships and the Rome Prize, and her books have been translated into six languages. She lives in Los Angeles.

The Lumina Podcast team speaks with Adam Nemett about his debut novel, We Can Save Us All. Adam Nemett graduated from Princeton University and received his MFA in Fiction/Screenwriting from California College of the Arts. He serves as creative director and author for History Factory, where he's written award-winning nonfiction books for Lockheed Martin, Brooks Brothers, City of Hope Medical Center, and Huntington Bank, and directed campaigns for 21st Century Fox, Adobe Systems, HarperCollins, National Renewable Energy Laboratory, New Balance, Pfizer and Whirlpool. An excerpt of his debut novel, We Can Save Us All, was anthologized in The Apocalypse Reader. 

The Lumina Podcast team speaks with Donna Stonecipher about her poetry collections, Model City and Transaction Histories.  Donna Stonecipher grew up in Seattle and Tehran. She is the author of five books of poetry: The Reservoir, Souvenir de Constantinople, The Cosmopolitan, Model City, and Transaction Histories. She also published a book of criticism titled Prose Poetry and the City. Her poems have been published in The Paris Review, New American Writing, and Conjunctions, and have been translated into eight languages. She translates from German, and her translation of Swiss author Ludwig Hohl's novella Ascent was published in 2012. She lives in Berlin.

Philip Matthews speaks with Lumina Journal about his recently published poetry collection, Witch. Philip Matthews is from Eastern North Carolina. He is the author of Witch, recently published by Alice James Books. He also collaborated with the photographer David Johnson on the project, Wig Heavier Than A Boot, which was launched in October 2019 by Kris Graves Projects. His work investigates the spiritual, queer power, questions of home, and ecological shift.

George Saunders discusses the importance of humor, the myth of bad story ideas, trusting the subconscious, and the “great relief” of his writing life in this final episode of season one. George Saunders is a Syracuse University graduate and professor of creative writing, the author of the short story collections CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, Pastoralia, In Persuasion Nation, Tenth of December, and the novel Lincoln in the Bardo. He has been a finalist for the National Book Award, received both the Guggenheim and MacArthur fellowships, and his novel won the 2017 Man Booker Prize.

Part two of our genre-specific series. LUMINA’s Poetry Editor, Anna Binkovitz, and sam sax, discuss poetry craft, the intersections of community and creation, and what it means to embody the heritage of Judaism while eschewing a Zionist framework. Also discussed: sweaty basements, tiaras, and pigs.  Theme music by Myles Karp. 

In our curated poetry content episode, Assistant Poetry Editor Brynn Bogert invites three Sarah Lawrence graduate poets to share current work and to discuss the various facets of their pieces in casual post-reading interviews. We hear from Shuang Ang, Emma Stewart, and Lucy Walker. Throughout these poems, a sense of permeability and duality weaves itself into three very different narratives. These poems explore borderlands; thresholds; tent flaps, and the impermanence of petals and pearls. They travel the spaces between what is true, what is allowed, and what is lurking just beneath or behind what our eyes can register. Theme music for the podcast was composed by musical artist and producer, Myles Karp.

Firefly is excited to launch our spring genre-specific series. This episode is brought to you by Casey Haymes, LUMINA’s Nonfiction Editor. Last month, Casey brought to the studio three Sarah Lawrence MFA writers with distinct voices, whose pieces all happen to orbit a unifying question: what does it mean to be at home? While these essays explore a range of styles and themes, each one engages in contemplation of what it means to be at home; whether that home is defined as a body, a city, a society, or a religion. Through their musings, we begin to get a sense for what it means inhabit the spaces where we find ourselves, and to find ourselves changed by that space. This episode features the work of Brynn Bogert, Amanda Claire Buckley, and Vanessa Friedman. Theme music for the podcast was composed by musical artist and producer, Myles Karp. 

LUMINA Journal’s Nonfiction Editor, Casey Haymes, sits down with author Angela Palm to discuss the craft of memoir and essay: the power and pitfalls of accessing memory as a part of writing about trauma, how to experiment with time, and what the use of an exclamation point! can say about our collective mental health. Palm also shares an excerpt from new work that is forthcoming. Angela Palm wrote Riverine, A Memoir from Anywhere But Here, winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize and a Kirkus Best Book. Her work has been published in Tin House, Long Reads. Ecotone, Creative Nonfiction, and elsewhere. She’s been a finalist for the Vermont Book Award, Indiana Emerging Author Award, and Stanford Library Soroyan International Writing Prize. For more on Palm: http://www.angipalm.com/

Talking craft with David Ryan and his thoughts on the lines between literary and musical theory. David Ryan is the author of the story collection Animals in Motion (Roundabout Press) and Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano: Bookmarked (Ig Publishing). His fiction is forthcoming, or has appeared, in Conjunctions, Bellevue Literary Review, Esquire, BOMB, Tin House, Fence, Electric Literature, No Tokens, The Encyclopedia Project, Booth, Denver Quarterly, Alaska Quarterly Review, New Orleans Review, Cimarron Review, the Mississippi Review, and elsewhere, and anthologized in WW Norton’s Flash Fiction Forward, The Mississippi Review: 30, and Akashic Book’s Boston Noir 2: The Classics. Essays, reviews and interviews have appeared in The Paris Review, The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature, Tin House, BookForum, and elsewhere. A recipient of the Elizabeth Yates McGreal Writer in Residence, a Connecticut state arts grant and a Macdowell fellowship, he currently teaches in the writing program at Sarah Lawrence College and in the low residency program at New England College.

Today we're talking music, sound, and writing. In this opening episode, we have "The Blues Man," followed by an essay "Chunks of Inspiration: John Zorn and the Craft of Writing," both by Anonymous, a Fiction Student Sarah Lawrence Class of 2019. We end on part one of four of the "Father Fox" Series written by Andrew Scheid, read by Mike Lang. 

Talking craft with Fred Lit Yu and his thoughts on the genre of Wu Xia, martial arts, Yin Yang blades, and baseball strategy. Lit Yu writes fiction in the Asian Fantasy Martial Arts epic genre. He is a filmmaker, chef, Feng Shui practitioner, martial artist, and for over a decade was a risk manager in a bank. He graduated from New York University majoring in film and television, and has directed a number of documentaries and short films while working in the financial services industry. Yu’s first publication, The Legend of Snow Wolf, was published by China Books in 2012, followed by a cookbook in 2017, Haute Tea Cuisine, representing his innovations in extracting artisan teas in French sauces. A martial arts instructional book on his knife system, Yin Yang Blades, was released in May 2018. Yu is currently a full-time writer and lives in New York City. Website: https://www.flityu.com Theme music for the podcast was composed by musical artist, producer, and songwriter Myles Karp.  

Today, in this episode, we’re casting a light to voices across worlds, and to all the worlds in between. We have poetry and prose which capture the places created by the voices inside of the different lives we lead: the world of childhood perspective in the face of a catastrophic flood, featuring Jack Human. The world we hold inside ourselves in the face of family and community, and the places we take refuge and rebellion – including the fridge. We also have worlds inside walls, and the creatures that wiggle through them. And, finally, we have a question about this world: who do we write stories for? A feminist perspective on the MFA workshop. Contributors include: “The Holy Flood” by Vanessa Stone. “Ode to Joy,” “No,” “Matriphagy” by Shu Yang “In Search for Audience: Can a South-Asian Writer Speak To The World?” by Meher Manda “Nobody said anything about the pig” by Rhea DhanBhoora Theme music composed by musical artist and producer, Myles Karp.

Talking craft of speculative fiction with Paul La Farge. La Farge is the author of four novels: The Night Ocean, The Artist of the Missing, Haussmann, or the Distinction, and Luminous Airplanes; and a book of imaginary dreams, The Facts of Winter. His stories and nonfiction have appeared in The New Yorker, The New Republic, The Paris Review, Harper's, and elsewhere. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Bard Fiction Prize, and fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, and the American Academy in Berlin. He lives in upstate New York.

Part two of our speculative fiction episode features: “The Kill Switch” by James C. Opperman; an interview with LUMINA’s former Fiction Genre editor and author Patrick Lofgren. Patrick is a writer living in Long Island. He holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. His first short story is forthcoming in The True History of The Strange Brigade. You can find him on twitter @Patrick_Lofgren. Finally, we bring this episode to a close with a poetry piece, “Persephone’s Choice” by Shaina Clingempeel.  

Warming up this November with our special speculative fiction episode. Today we have pieces and interviews that discuss the nature of this area of literature that has emerged from the constraints of its own archetypes and shown what it can truly be.   Part one of this episode features: “Balloon Animals” by Colleen Ennen, originally published in Breadcrumbs Magazine; and “Everything is Gay: Reading While Queer” by Andrew Esposito.