BookLove Letter Lisa Carter

When thinking about how to describe this brilliant novella by renowned Mexican author Fabio Morábito, the juxtaposition of poetry, oddities and irony seemed to convey its breadth. Have a listen as I and two members of Wayfarers Book Club talk to translator Curtis Bauer, where he shares his approach, insights and takeaways.
~Lisa
Lisa Carter is Founder and Creative Director of Intralingo, helping authors and translators write and readers explore stories. Lisa brings two decades of professional literary experience, including nine books and multiple other pieces published in translation, and nearly as many years of contemplative and compassion practices to her work. Her inclusive, engaged, caring presence inspires people to share their stories, create new ones and feel truly heard.
GET THE BOOKIntralingo Bookshop * (US customers only)Or support the author and translator through your local, independent bookseller or library.
CONNECTCurtis BauerFabio Morábito and Other PressWayfarers Book Club
WATCH THE INTERVIEWVia the BookLove LetterOn YouTube
Thank you for listening!
*We often receive free books from publishers, authors and/or translators, and will always identify when that is the case. Recommendations are never paid. They are offered only when we genuinely want to share a book with you. Any links to the Intralingo store on Bookshop.org are affiliate links and may earn us a small commission on your purchase, at no extra cost to you. Bookshop is currently only available to US customers.


This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit booklove.intralingo.com

Hello, BookLoves.
In this episode of the Intralingo World Lit Podcast, I offer a short reading from the book Walking the Bowl: A True Story of Murder and Survival Among the Street Children of Lusaka, by Chris Lockhart & Daniel Mulilo Chama.
Below, I offer a whole lot more about it, what I took from it, and what I hope you might too.
From the publisher:
For readers of Behind the Beautiful Forevers and Nothing to Envy, this is a breathtaking real-life story of four street children in contemporary Zambia whose lives are drawn together and forever altered by the mysterious murder of a fellow street child.
This book is nothing short of a dedicated miracle.
Over a period of years, the co-authors, a graduate student and a team of four former street children lived and worked in the vast slums of Zambia’s capital city, getting to know a cross section of the population, taking hundreds of pages of notes and over a thousand hours of recordings.
When a young boy, who became known as the Ho Ho Kid, was found murdered at the city dump, the team dedicated their efforts to following the investigation in real time and discovered a connection to many of the children they were already in contact with.
Lusabilo, a self-titled “chief” and waste picker at the dump finds the Ho Ho Kid’s body and is forced to assist the police in their investigation. Along the way, he is led to Moonga, a recent arrival who has turned to begging, become hooked on sniffing glue and dreams of going to school; Timo, an ambitious and ruthless gang leader; and Kapula, an exhausted brothel worker who is saving to get out of the slum.
The connections between these four kids, who each eke out a brutal existence, and the murdered child is told unflinchingly, unsentimentally, yet with emotion and compassion.
Knowing they wanted to reach the wider public, to tell a very specific story that would humanize these individuals, rather than perpetuate the tropes or appeal only to a small circle of insider professionals, Lockhart and Chama cowrote these intertwined stories as a work of narrative non-fiction.
I felt a stabbing pain at how every one of these kids had been abandoned by family and society, left to survive on their own in unimaginably unforgiving conditions. And every time I felt compelled to DO SOMETHING, the authors reminded me how well-meaning but utterly ineffectual foreign “aid” often is.
Lockhart, an American medical anthropologist who has worked in Africa for decades, and Chama, a Zambian social worker who himself was a street child, hold nothing back. They expose what seems to be an unsolvable tragedy of poverty and corruption, helped little or even made worse by Western notions of “development.”
And yet they present a story that is ultimately one of hope.
In their preface, they say:
“If you were to ask us what we hope you learn from this book, we would say we hope you learn a little bit about the day-to-day lives and realities of street children and a great deal about the power of the smallest good.”
Walking the bowl—offering what little you can to another—is at the heart of this story. It’s a tale the Outreacher shares with every kid in the slums and with the White Man.
(And it’s the reading I offer here, in this podcast episode.)
Toward the end of the book, Kapula tells the Outreacher:
“I wonder how different things would be if everyone did the small things you do for us every day. Even if they only did one thing in their whole lives, especially if that one thing was passed on to others—like in your story. Myself, I think it would be a very different world.”
Myself, so do I.
This book achieved its aim. I learned a little about others and a lot about how I can live a more powerful life. I was reminded that I don’t have to go to Africa. I don’t have to change the whole world. All I have to do is offer a simple kindness to another, right where I am, right here, consciously, whenever I can.
Read this book. Because it’s

Season 03 Episode 05 of the Intralingo World Lit Podcast
Max is the most delightful guest who shared much about the wide-ranging themes he wanted to convey in this story and, as an extraordinarily talented and sensitive translator, Ros offered yet another dimension to this slim but deep novel.
~Lisa
Lisa Carter
Founder & Creative Director, Intralingo Inc.
 
00:00:36 – Introduction
00:01:35 – Max shares what he wanted to write about: migration from Africa to Europe, Boko Haram, religion, family and LGBT issues
00:03:33 – Max’s story of leaving Cameroon
00:06:36 – Ros and Max’s collaboration
00:09:00 – The language of Camfranglais
00:12:04 – The politics of translation choices
00:14:00 – Enriched the experience for readers
00:15:25 – A place for glossaries in fiction
00:15:51 – A tip for translators and varieties of English
00:17:20 – Max’s approach to language
00:19:32 – Awareness of English as a colonizing language
00:20:53 – Examples of how Max and Ros collaborated
00:23:17 – Vibrancy of sound, color, action in this novel
00:25:15 – Cameroonian students critiqued Ros’s translation
00:26:44 – The themes at the heart of the book
00:30:55 – Max’s personal connections to the themes
00:33:30 – Cameroon today
00:36:45 – The relationship between the protagonists
00:37:08 – The Gay Book Prize in France
00:39:30 – The universal human experience
00:41:10 – The particular experience Max wanted to explore
00:44:05 – Shame, breaking free and where Max wants to go next
 
GET THE BOOK
Intralingo Bookshop * (US customers only)
Or support the authors through your local, independent bookseller or library.
 
THIS EPISODE IS BROUGHT TO YOU BY…
Wayfarers Book Club, learn more at www.intralingo.com/wayfarers 
 
*We often receive free books from publishers, authors and/or translators, but our recommendations are never paid. They are offered only when we genuinely want to share a book with you. Any links to the Intralingo store on Bookshop.org are affiliate links and may earn us a small commission on your purchase, at no extra cost to you. Bookshop is currently only available to US customers.
Support the show (https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=BRYNFE5JTBFES&source=url)

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit booklove.intralingo.com

In Conversation with Michelle Grierson, author of Becoming Leidah
 
Season 03 Episode 04 of the Intralingo World Lit Podcast
We’re so happy to share a truly magical conversation with author Michelle Grierson about her debut novel, Becoming Leidah. This one includes questions from a number of readers and is filled with deeply personal shares and insights.
~Lisa
Lisa Carter
 Founder & Creative Director, Intralingo Inc.
 
00:00:11 – Introduction
00:03:00 – Michelle’s Norwegian ancestry and how “blood memory” played a role in telling this story
00:06:08 – The heart of the book as a mother-daughter story
00:08:52 – The myth of the Selkies
00:11:10 – The shapeshifter as the Norse God Odin
00:12:31 – How the book came to Michelle in “quilt patches”
00:13:28 – The state of liminality throughout the book
00:14:58 – Michelle’s use of trines and the Norse cosmology of time
00:19:05 – The oneness of everything and playing with space on the page
00:20:56 – Reader is completely engaged from the first paragraph
00:25:33 – Story structure and the writing process
00:28:01 – Letting go of a book once it’s published
00:32:07 – The mother-daughter relationship
00:37:00 – The father as the villain in this story
00:41:43 – Two personal things Michelle took away from writing this book
00:46:09 – Reader takeaways from experiencing this book
 
GET THE BOOK
Intralingo Bookshop * (US customers only)
Or support the author through your local, independent bookseller or library.
 
THIS EPISODE IS BROUGHT TO YOU BY…
Wayfarers Book Club, learn more at www.intralingo.com
 
*We often receive free books from publishers, authors and/or translators, but our recommendations are never paid. They are offered only when we genuinely want to share a book with you. Any links to the Intralingo store on Bookshop.org are affiliate links and may earn us a small commission on your purchase, at no extra cost to you. Bookshop is currently only available to US customers.
Support the show (https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=BRYNFE5JTBFES&source=url)

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit booklove.intralingo.com

Season 03 Episode 03 of the Intralingo World Lit Podcast
I hope you will enjoy this soulful, shifting, emotional –and fun!–  conversation with author Shugri Said Salh about her memoir, The Last Nomad: Coming of Age in the Somali Desert.
~Lisa
Lisa Carter
 Founder & Creative Director, Intralingo Inc.
 
00:00:11 – Introduction
00:02:11 – Our shared humanity
00:09:48 – Childhood as a nomad in the desert of Somalia
00:16:45 – Connection to storytelling
00:23:24 – Universal theme and the hardest chapter to write
00:26:18 – An aha moment
00:30:22 – The refugee experience
00:36:26 – Skating, on the river and through life
00:41:01 – The price of trauma and need for closure
00:44:26 – Healing through storytelling
00:48:08 – Supporting and hearing one another
 
GET THE BOOK
Intralingo Bookshop * (US customers only)
Or support the author through your local, independent bookseller or library.
Shugri talks about the audio version, read by a Kenyan actress, with proverbs recited and songs sung by Shugri herself. Check that out for sure!
 
THIS EPISODE IS BROUGHT TO YOU BY…
Wayfarers Book Club, learn more at www.intralingo.com
 
*We often receive free books from publishers, authors and/or translators, but our recommendations are never paid. They are offered only when we genuinely want to share a book with you. Any links to the Intralingo store on Bookshop.org are affiliate links and may earn us a small commission on your purchase, at no extra cost to you. Bookshop is currently only available to US customers.
Support the show (https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=BRYNFE5JTBFES&source=url)

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit booklove.intralingo.com

Season 3 Episode 02 of the Intralingo World Lit Podcast, featuring authors and translators from around the globe. 
Lisa Carter talks to Zhang Ling and Shelly Bryant about their novel, A Single Swallow. The discussion covers the themes of trauma, war and memory, informed by Ling’s work as a clinical audiologist, discoveries she made on her research trips to China, the voices of the narrators, the beauty of the language of the original, and so much more.
Zhang Ling is the award-winning author of nine novels and numerous collections of novellas and short stories. Born in China, she moved to Canada in 1986. In the mid-1990s, she began to write and publish fiction in Chinese while working as a clinical audiologist. Since then she has won the Chinese Media Literature Award for Author of the Year, the Grand Prize of Overseas Chinese Literary Award, and Taiwan’s Open Book Award. Among Zhang Ling’s work are Gold Mountain Blues and Aftershock, adapted into China’s first IMAX movie with unprecedented box-office success.
Shelly Bryant divides her year between Shanghai and Singapore, working as a poet, writer, and translator. She is the author of eleven volumes of poetry, a pair of travel guides for the cities of Suzhou and Shanghai, a book on classical Chinese gardens, and a short story collection. She has translated Chinese text for publishers such as Penguin Books and various organizations, including the National Library Board in Singapore and the Human Sciences Research Council. Her translation of Sheng Keyi’s Northern Girls was long-listed for the Man Asian Literary Prize in 2012, and her translation of You Jin’s In Time, Out of Place was short-listed for the Singapore Literature Prize in 2016. Shelly received a Distinguished Alumni award from Oklahoma Christian University in 2017.
 
The book is available in all formats and from all sellers. [Affiliate link] https://bookshop.org/a/4438/9781542041508
Join us at Intralingo (https://intralingo.com) to explore the world through books!
Thanks for listening!
~Lisa
Lisa Carter,  Founder & Creative Director, Intralingo Inc.
 
 
Support the show (https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=BRYNFE5JTBFES&source=url)

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit booklove.intralingo.com