Story Behind the Story

Clara Sherley-Appel
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Story Behind the Story

Host Clara Sherley-Appel interviews authors about their creative process, from the inspiration behind the books they write to specific choices they make.

  1. 12/07/2024

    Episode 52: Hanna Pylväinen - THE END OF DRUM-TIME

    Hanna Pylväinen has been writing fiction about the small Finnish fundamentalist sect she was raised in for hers. In her 2012 debut novel, We Sinners, she follows a large, Midwestern family as they navigate their relationships to each other and to the church at the heart of their lives. Over the years since she wrote that novel, Pylväinen has learned more about the origins of that religious order, called Laestadianism after the pastor who founded it, and its relationship to the colonization of Finland and displacement of the Sami people and their traditions. Her new novel, The End of Drum-Time, takes a new look at Laestadianism, exploring the dynamics of imperialism, the instrumentalization of religion in settler-colonialism, and the limitations on our ability to see past our own perspective.

    54 min

  2. 12/06/2024

    Episode 51: Lev Grossman - THE BRIGHT SWORD

    In 2014, hot on the heels of the success of his Magicians trilogy, Lev Grossman announced that he was writing a Arthurian epic. As the project took shape, world events kept intruding: Donald Trump ascended to the presidency, a novel respiratory virus launched a pandemic, and Britain exited the European Union. Admist all this, Grossman realized that the question that had driven him to write this novel in the first place — What happens after Arthur dies? — was a question about the collapse of empires. And so The Bright Sword was reborn. In this interview, I talk to Lev about the politics of Camelot, the difficulty of seeing the themes that are present in your own work, and the difficulty of tracking changes across a 700-page tome. Special Guest: Lev Grossman.

    55 min

  3. 12/06/2024

    Episode 50: Tanzila Ahmed - GRASPING AT THIS PLANET JUST TO BELIEVE

    For ten years, Tanzila "Taz" Ahmed organized an annual poem-a-day project during the month of Ramadan. She began the project as an alternative form of reflection to prayer, which she had struggled to connect with, shortly after the death of her mother. In the decade that followed, the project turned into a community, and Taz's poetry turned into a collection, Grasping at This Planet Just to Believe. In this interview, Taz talks about the impetus behind and inspiration for the original project and the ways participating in it for a decade changed her relationship to Ramadan — and to writing.

    56 min

  4. 04/09/2024

    Episode 49: Tedd Siegel - SIGNS OF THE GREAT REFUSAL

    Tedd Siegel retired from his career as an academic administrator in late 2019 after wrestling with extreme stress, burnout, and PTSD — caused, in part, by the conditions of work as it is formulated today. He wrote Signs of the Great Refusal: The Coming Struggle for a Postwork Society in part to work through his own experiences and, more broadly, to understand what it was about contemporary work that felt so untenable and unsustainable. Throughout the book, Tedd leans into his background as a political philosopher (he attended the Ph.D. program in philosophy at the New School), grounding his understanding of “work-as-we-know-it” in the political and economic critiques of capital going back to Marx in the 19th century, putting them into dialog with philosophical understandings of work and labor in the 20th century from Arendt and others. The result is an exploration not only of the role and function of work in contemporary society, but what it might take to build a post-work politics out of the nascent anti-work movements alive today.

    47 min
  5. Episode 48: Katya Apekina - MOTHER DOLL

    03/03/2024

    Episode 48: Katya Apekina - MOTHER DOLL

    Novelist, screenwriter, and translator Katya Apekina returns to Story Behind the Story to talk about her latest novel, Mother Doll — an intergenerational ghost story, tying together a Russian revolutionary and her great-granddaughter, adrift in her 20s in LA. Special Guest: Katya Apekina.

    58 min
  6. Episode 47: Marcus Gazaway - BRIDGEWATER

    02/04/2024

    Episode 47: Marcus Gazaway - BRIDGEWATER

    Marcus Gazaway got his start as a writer right here on the central coast, when he joined the staff of CSU Monterey Bay’s student newspaper, The Otter Realm. Today, he works as a full-time author in Sarasota, Florida, where he can be seen reading and writing in coffee shops across the Gulf Coast. His first novel, the sci-fi thriller Bridgewater, follows a neurologist whose desperation to give his Deaf daughter a voice leads him down a dark and destructive path. It is the topic of our conversation today.

    53 min

  7. 12/03/2023

    Episode 46: Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo - INCANTATION

    This month, host Clara Sherley-Appel talks to poet and educator Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo. A former Steinbeck Fellow and Poets & Writers California Writers Exchange winner, Xochitl’s writing has been featured in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, On Being’s Poetry Unbound, and Poetry Unbound: 50 Poems to Open Your World. She has received residencies from Hedgebrook, Ragdale, Yefe Nof, and the National Parks Arts Foundation in partnership with the Getty National Military Park and Poetry Foundation. In 2011, she co-founded Women Who Submit, a literary organization that uses social media and community events to empower women and non-binary authors to submit work for publication, with Ashaki Jackson and Alyss Dixon, and she currently serves as the organization’s director. Xochitl wrote her debut collection, Posada: Offerings of Witness and Refuge, while living in a house in the shadows of Dodger Stadium in historic Solano Canyon. Today we are discussing her second collection, Incantation: Love Poems for Battle Sites, which explores US monuments, memorializes Black and brown bodies murdered by state-sanctioned violence, and shares love poems to family, friends, and dalliances in rituals of resistance and resilience.

    54 min

  8. 11/04/2023

    Episode 45: Sam Sax - PIG

    Sam Sax is a queer Jewish poet, writer, and educator. Their debut poetry collection, madness, won the National Poetry Series Competition when it came out, and their second collection, bury it, won the 2017 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. They are the two time Bay Area Grand Slam Champion with poems published in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Poetry Magazine, and Granta, to give just a few highlights. Sam has received fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts, The Poetry Foundation, Yaddo, Lambda Literary, and MacDowell, and they are currently serving as an ITALIC Lecturer at Stanford University. In this conversation, Clara talks to Sam about the purpose of filth in their poetry, their use of histories and etymologies as poetic techniques, and how to write a pandemic poem that doesn't feel dated. Special Guest: Sam Sax.

    54 min
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About

Host Clara Sherley-Appel interviews authors about their creative process, from the inspiration behind the books they write to specific choices they make.

Information

  • Creator
    Clara Sherley-Appel
  • Years Active
    2019 - 2024
  • Episodes
    48
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2025 Story Behind the Story
  • Show Website
    Story Behind the Story

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