Tender Buttons tenderbuttonspodcast
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- Arts
A Bristol-based podcast chatting to writers and artists about their ideas, process and politics 🍑 hosted by Jessica Andrews and Jack Young.
With Storysmith bookshop, Bristol. https://storysmithbooks.com
Follow us on Twitter @buttons_tender and Instagram @tenderbuttonspodcast
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038 Jason Okundaye: Living Archives
In this episode, we speak to writer Jason Okundaye about his recent book, Revolutionary Acts. We discuss archives as living, moving things, and non-linearity as a mode of articulating queer Black histories. We think about the role of body language, tone of voice, feelings and vulnerabilities in the act of embodied transcription. We think about the notion of 'archival pleasure' and understanding the body and desire as sites of history. We discuss the necessity of oral histories being relational as opposed to extractive, and what it means to push against the 'deficit paradigm', recording stories of Black gay abundance, desire and celebration, as well as making space for mess and discomfort, refusing neat and simplistic narratives of unity within political activism.
Jason Okundaye was born to British-Nigerian parents in South London in 1997. He writes essays, features, and profiles on politics and culture for publications such as the Guardian, the London Review of Books, British Vogue, GQ, Vice, Dazed, and i-D. He also co-curates the digital archive
‘Black and Gay, Back in the Day’ documenting Black LGBT life in Britain since the 1970s. His first book, Revolutionary Acts, a social history of Black gay men in Britain, was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize in 2024.
References
Revolutionary Acts: Love & Brotherhood in Black Gay Britain by Jason Okundaye
Visit Storysmith for 10% discount on Jason's work. -
037 Helen Oyeyemi: The Surreal City
In this episode, we speak to novelist and short story writer Helen Oyeyemi about her most recent novel, Parasol Against the Axe. We discuss the use of non-linearity when attempting to write about a complex city like Prague. We chat about the city as a dissociative state, and the relationship to surrealism and conflicting histories. We speak about the intimate relationship between reading, writing and desire, and the way that books can reveal details about the reader, as well as the author. We explore the book as a living object which shifts across time and space, and the use of play and perplexity across Oyeyemi's work. We discuss what it means to resist master narratives and embrace slippery, shapeshifting narrators, subverting the reader's expectations. We examine a hunger for novels which require the reader to work, and what it means to be actively involved in the process of meaning-making.
Helen Oyeyeymi is the author of The Icarus Girl, The Opposite House, White is for Witching (which won a Somerset Maugham Award), Mr Fox, Boy, Snow, Bird, Gingerbread, What Is Not Yours Is Yours, and Peaces, which was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize. In 2013, Helen was included in Granta's Best Young British Novelists.
References
Parasol Against the Axe by Helen Oyeyemi
Peaces by Helen Oyeyemi
What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours by Helen Oyeyeymi
Gingerbread by Helen Oyeyemi
Boy, Snow, Bird by Helen Oyeyeymi
Mr Fox by Helen Oyeyeymi
White is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi
The Opposite House by Helen Oyeyeymi
The Icarus Girl by Helen Oyeyemi
De Profundis by Oscar Wilde
Prague Tales by Jan Neruda -
036 Andrew McMillan: Literature is not Elsewhere
In this episode, we chat to Andrew McMillan about his novel, Pity. We discuss intersections of masculinity, sexuality and class and the way the body might hold these ideas within fiction and poetry. We think about the ways in which the form of the novel can hold multiple truths and stories, and how this links to post-industrial identities. We explore the dangers of describing post-industrial towns by their lack or an absence, and consider what it would take to find new definitions of community. We chat about the need for more northern stories, and the idea that everyone's village, town or city is worthy of literature. We think about finding a new language to discuss the past, which honours its legacies and yet allows us to define ourselves on new terms, in order to move forwards.
Andrew McMillan’s debut collection physical was
the only ever poetry collection to win The Guardian First Book Award. The collection also won the Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize, a Somerset Maugham Award (2016), an Eric Gregory Award (2016) and a Northern Writers’ award (2014). It was shortlisted the Dylan Thomas Prize, the Costa Poetry Award, The Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year
2016, the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, the Roehampton Poetry Prize and the Polari First Book Prize. It was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation for Autumn 2015. In 2019 it was voted as one of the top 25 poetry books of the past 25 years by the Booksellers Association. His second collection, playtime, was published by Jonathan Cape in 2018; it was a Poetry Book Society
Recommendation for Autumn 2018, a Poetry Book of the Month in both The Observer and The Telegraph, a Poetry Book of the Year in The Sunday Times and won the inaugural Polari Prize. His third collection, pandemonium, was published by Jonathan Cape in 2021, and 100 Queer Poems, the acclaimed anthology he edited with Mary Jean Chan, was published by Vintage in 2022. Physical has been translated into French, Galician and Norwegian editions, with double-editions of physical & playtime published in Slovak and German in 2022. He is Professor of Contemporary Writing at the Manchester Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan University and is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. His debut novel, Pity, was published by Canongate in 2024.
References
Pity by Andrew McMillan
Pandemonium by Andrew McMillan
Playtime by Andrew McMillan
Physical by Andrew McMillan
As always, visit Storysmith for 10% discount on Andrew's work. -
035 Marianne Brooker: The Politics of Care
In this episode, we speak to writer Marianne Brooker about her book Intervals. We discuss the politics of care and the precarious economics of social, hospice and funeral care. We talk about the importance of interdependence, and how networks of care link to activism and writing. We think about the right to abundance and life, while considering what it means to die a good death. We chat about intersections of class, gender and disability, and beauty and maximalism as an act of resistance. We imagine writing as reparative magic and consider what it means to write into and with grief, as opposed to pushing against it. We speak about what it means to draw kinship with other writers and thinkers such as Denise Riley, Anne Boyer, Maggie Nelson and Lola Olufemi, among others.
Marianne Brooker is a writer based in Bristol, where she works for a charity campaigning on climate and social justice. She has a PhD from Birkbeck and a background in arts research and teaching. She won the 2022 Fitzcarraldo Essay Prize for Intervals, her first book, which was also longlisted for the inaugral Women's Prize for Non-Fiction in 2024.
You can now subscribe to our Patreon for £5 a month, which will enable us to keep bringing you more in-depth conversations with writers. As a subscriber, you will have access to:
10% listener discount on all books at Storysmith, either online or in person
Opportunities to submit questions to upcoming guests
Free book giveaways each month related to our featured guests
Early access to episodes each month
Exclusive free tickets each month to live Storysmith events
A free Storysmith tote bag after 3 months subscription
Please like, rate and subscribe to help promote the podcast and support our work.
References
Intervals by Marianne Brooker
Time Lived, Without its Flow by Denise Riley
The Undying by Anne Boyer
The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson
Experiments in Imagining Otherwise by Lola Olufemi
Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments by Saidiya Hartman
In the Wake: On Blackness and Being by Christina Sharpe -
034 Sheila Heti: Alphabetical Diaries
In this episode, we speak to author Sheila Heti about her brilliant new book, Alphabetical Diaries, in which she alphabetizes her diaries over a ten-year period, creating parallels and juxtapositions between past and present versions of the self. We speak about the role of formal constraints in her work and her resistance of linear time, progress and the notion of a complete, continuous narrative of selfhood. We think about rhythm and the materiality of language in relation to associative narrative structure. We chat about Heti's body of work, from How Should a Person Be? to Motherhood and Pure Colour, exploring the myriad ways in which she interrogates time and selfhood through hybrid forms, pushing the boundaries of the novel.
Sheila Heti is the author of eleven books, including Alphabetical Diaries, Pure Colour, Motherhood and How Should a Person Be? She was named one of "The New Vanguard" by The New York Times; a list of fifteen writers from around the world who are "shaping the way we read and write fiction in the 21st century." Her books have been translated into twenty-five languages.
She is the current Alice Munro Chair of Creativity at
Western University in London, Ontario. In 2022, she was the Franke
Visiting Fellow at Yale, and an Associate Research Scholar and Lecturer in Religious Studies, teaching Fate and Chance in Art and Experience with Noreen Khawaja.
You can now subscribe to our Patreon for £5 a month, which will enable us to keep bringing you more in-depth conversations with writers. As a subscriber, you will have access to:
10% listener discount on all books at Storysmith, either online or in person
Opportunities to submit questions to upcoming guests
Free book giveaways each month related to our featured guests
Early access to episodes each month
Exclusive free tickets each month to live Storysmith events
A free Storysmith tote bag after 3 months subscription
Please like, rate and subscribe to help promote the podcast and support our work.
References
Alphabetical Diaries by Sheila Heti
Pure Colour by Sheila Heti
Motherhood by Sheila Heti
How Should a Person Be? by Sheila Heti -
033 Noreen Masud: Psychology of Landscape
In this episode, we speak to academic, author and broadcaster Noreen Masud about her memoir, A Flat Place. We discuss the psychological, literary and philosophical histories and connotations of flat landscapes. We talk about Masud's experience growing up in Lahore, Pakistan, then moving to the UK and the complexity of language, culture and the post-colonial experience. We discuss what it means to resist the history of landscape writing, from white male colonial stories of nature as redemption and Romantic notions of landscape as revelation or a text to be interpreted 'correctly.' Instead, our conversation considers what it means to open space for failure, misinterpretation and post-colonial discomfort, without resolution.
We discuss memory as place, the importance of sitting with unknowingness, the connection between listening and mutual aid and the limits of empathy. We talk about counteracting the constant strive for meaning in literature with seeking play, sound and irreverance.
Noreen Masud was born and raised in Pakistan. She is a literary scholar working on the twentieth century, writing about things which, in one way or another, present variously as absurd, unrevealing, embarrassing or useless. These include aphorisms, flatness, spivs, puppets, nonsense, leftovers, earworms, footnotes, rhymes, hymns, surprises, folk songs, colours and superstition. She is an AHRC/BBC New Generation Thinker 2020, and a Lecturer in Twentieth Century Literature at the University of Bristol. She is the author of Hard Language: Stevie Smith and the Aphorism, and A Flat Place.
References
A Flat Place by Noreen Masud
Tender Buttons by Gertrude Stein
Willa Cather
Kangaroo by DH Lawrence
Against the Trauma Plot by Parul Sehgal
You can now subscribe to our Patreon for £5 a month, which will enable us to keep bringing you more in-depth conversations with writers. As a subscriber, you will have access to:
10% listener discount on all books at Storysmith, either online or in person
Opportunities to submit questions to upcoming guests
Free book giveaways each month related to our featured guests
Early access to episodes each month
Exclusive free tickets each month to live Storysmith events
A free Storysmith tote bag after 3 months subscription
Please like, rate and subscribe to help promote the podcast and support our work.