By Corinna Kloth
About the Podcast
Between the Covers, a literary radio show and podcast hosted by David Naimon, is brought to you by Tin House. These long-form in-depth conversations have been singled out by the Guardian, Book Riot, the Financial Times, and BuzzFeed as one of the most notable book podcasts for writers and readers around. “If you haven’t peeped this podcast yet,” says poet Morgan Parker, “it’s one of my favorite interviews and my mom says it’s my ‘best one.’” Between the Covers queries can be sent to: btc.queries@gmail.com=
Tell us about yourself.
DN: I am a writer in Portland, Oregon. For 22 years I was a naturopathic physician, acupuncturist and herbalist and did the book podcast as a side project for the first decade of its existence. But for the past four years the show has been my full-time focus thanks to listener support.
How did you get started with Between the Covers?
DN: I was doing a health show at a local community radio station and after many years of hosting it I found it was lacking a certain dynamism. What I mean is, no matter how good a given book by a doctor or nutritionist or herbalist was, you roughly knew what their answer was going to be to your questions before you asked them. So, when the book show at the radio station needed people to fill-in, I thought I’d give it a try. Little did I know how much more I would enjoy having conversations about literature, where it wasn’t clear where a conversation might go and which often asked and explored meaningful questions about art-making and living. It probably didn’t hurt that the first person I interviewed was Anthony Doerr. This was long before he was a household name. He was still a writer’s writer back then. But despite my nerves, after every question he would respond with something like “what an incredible question, David!” I’m sure this was simply part of the generous and kind way he moves through the world, but I should thank him here for that. Who knows if I’d still be doing this 15 years later if that first conversation had been a disaster!
How would you describe your podcast?
DN: Between the Covers is a long-form literary podcast whose guests are writers of fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, science fiction & fantasy. While the show doesn’t shy away from exploring the craft of writing, it more broadly aims to create a space where creative writing is a lens into what it means to be alive, into how we make meaning within our lives. The conversations on literature and art-making often intersect with history, philosophy, science, religion and more. So while there are many writers, art-makers, translators and aspiring ones listening to the show, there are also anthropologists, social scientists, and political organizers who regularly listen too.
A good example of this is the limited series that ran in 2022 called “Crafting with Ursula,” a twelve episode series where twelve different writers were invited to discuss their own work in relation to an aspect of Ursula K. Le Guin’s. These included an episode with Becky Chambers on creating aliens and alien cultures, Maria Dahvana Headley on feminist translation and retellings of the classics, Will Alexander about writing for children, and Adrienne Maree Brown about social justice and science fiction. The breadth of this series I think is also true about Between the Covers at large.
What’s the most challenging and most satisfying part of running a podcast?
DN: There are so many satisfying things. Over the course of my encounters with writers over 15 years, and with the opportunity to follow my enduring questions and curiosities through who I invite on the show, both me and the show have transformed in ways I would’ve never anticipated. That process of discovery and self-discovery is deeply satisfying. I also particularly love the moment when a conversation is set free into the world and one can watch where it travels, and in whose hearts it lands. There is nothing more satisfying than learning that someone is using episodes in their classroom, or to discover that Between the Covers has influenced a poem or how a book was conceived. There is a unique joy when the conversations have escaped their container and become something else entirely. Last, but certainly not least, are the connections and community that have come into my life because of the show. I’m very grateful for all of it. With regards to challenges, it is really the time and labor—from scheduling to audio editing to promoting to all the preparation which goes into each conversation—all of which is never-ending. I’m not complaining, but I do need to be careful and vigilant about life-work balance.
What’s one of your favorite episodes?
DN: Among the many I adore, I should probably choose the one that changed my life. That would be the third conversation I had with Ursula K. Le Guin about her essay collection Words Are My Matter, which is the most listened to conversation in the show’s history. The first two times we talked were at the radio station but the third was in the upstairs reading room of her house. By then, we had established a really nice rapport, and were now talking in her home, her famous cat Pard (famous because Ursula would blog on behalf of and in the voice of Pard, to everyone’s delight) coming in and out to see what was going on. After the interview concluded I said to her that I couldn’t think of another writer I could’ve done this with, a writer who has written so enduringly, over a half century in fact, in every genre—fiction, poetry & nonfiction—where we could have three deep conversations across time about each one. In response she said “we should make a book.” Little did I know that this would change the trajectory of my life.
Together we made the book Ursula K. Le Guin: Conversations on Writing. And it was during the final copyedits of that book, just months before the book was to come out, that Le Guin passed away. Suddenly, it was one of her last books, and the first, I think, to come out in a world without her. I had always imagined we would celebrate it together in some wonderful way here in Portland, our shared home. But in her memory, the book took me to Seattle for the Locus awards, Dublin for the Hugo awards, and I was asked to think deeply and write about her for many publications over the subsequent year. It inspired the Crafting with Ursula series and even now, seven years later, I just finished an essay about Le Guin’s relationship to maps and mapping for an exhibition of her maps happening in London in the fall. It feels like I am still sailing on the winds that she set into motion for us.
Podster is a column for podcast listeners and serves as a curator for the best of known and unknown podcasts.
