Rippling Pages: Interviews with Writers

Camille Bordas on making difficult topics funny and crafting sharp dialogue

Camille Bordas is one heck of an exciting literary talent, and she’s joining me on the Rippling Pages to discuss her story collection, ONE SUN ONLY (Serpent’s Tail).

What I loved about these stories is their wonderfully dry humour, empathetic narratives of flawed characters, and deeply woven observations, within the stories, about how fiction works. 

Plaudits for Camille have come from George Saunders, Zadie Smith, and Percival Everett. She’s a regular contributor to the New Yorker.

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1.30 - bad backs and teaching
4.00 - writing and talking about death 
8.45 - creating character dynamics 
11.10 - camille’s sociology background
12.45 - experimenting in stories and novels  
15.10 - writing in French and English
17.40 - Rippling pages Patreon
19.55 - animation and jokes
22.15 - what animates a language
24.30 - writing dialogue 
26.30 - misunderstanding ourselves 
28.45 - illness and self growth 
30.15 - plotting
33.30 - how sopranos helps with plotting 
36.35 - recreating scenes from the sopranos
39.00 - acting and writing

Reference Points

Donald Barthelme 
Delphine Horvilleur
Karl Ove Knausgård
Gwendoline Riley
Katharina Volckmer 

 

TV
The Sopranos

Bonus! Lucy Caldwell on annotated Hamlet and Easter Eggs

It's Easter - and it's easter egg time.

In this bonus content, you're going to hear a lot about Easter Eggs, but not the chocolate kind. Instead, we’re talking those little secret insights to Lucy's work, both past, present and future.

This is bonus content and our objects of influence segment where we ask a writer to provide us with an object that has been with them during the writing of the book.

It's also a little Easter Egg from the Rippling Pages too. You're going to hear a snippet of the Patreon close-reads podcast for subscribers. If you like the sound of it, you can sign up for exclusive member benefits, including the full close read podcast exclusive to subscribers.

Get exclusive subscriber benefits from the Rippling Pages.

https://patreon.com/RipplingPagesPod?utm_medi 

 

Other useful links to heighten your Rippling Pages experience:

Check out the Rippling Pages Bookshop and buy all the books featured on the Rippling Pages:
https://uk.bookshop.org/shop/ripplingpagespod

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https://www.podbean.com/ripplingpages 

Chapters
- Close Read Patreon Preview 1.45
- Objects of Influence - 3.55

Reference Points
Anton Chekhov
Hamlet
Taylor Swift

Lucy Caldwell on writing transcendent psychic moments and finding meaning in life

Oh wow! It was my pleasure to have a coffee with and speak to the writer Lucy Caldwell about her new short story collection, DEVOTIONS (published by Faber and Faber).

That's right, we were live and in person having a coffee talking about Lucy's new collection

I revelled in a theatre troupe performing a choose your own version of Hamlet; I had a wry smile watching Christopher Plummer ponder on whether he really did love Julie Andrews, and among the many other stories, continued to marvel at Lucy's capacity to meditate on death, existence, light and love.

Lucy is from Belfast. She lives in Kent, but we had our conversation in London. 

Other useful links to heighten your Rippling Pages experience

Get exclusive subscriber benefits from the Rippling Pages. 
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Check out the Rippling Pages Bookshop and buy all the books featured on the Rippling Pages:
https://uk.bookshop.org/shop/ripplingpagespod

Interested in hosting your own podcast? Follow this link and find out how:
https://www.podbean.com/ripplingpages 

Chapters
2.00 - is 'master' the right word?
7.15 - Devotions forming a single whole
9.15 Lucy's relationship with her editor
12.50 - writing in real-time 
16.50 - Choose your own adventure stories.
18.10 - Hamlet.
21.10 - Writing about love
26.05 - Devotions easter egg!
28.35 finding meaning in the here and the now. 
32.20 - Patreon shoutouts!
33.50 - inspired by James Joyce
37.26 - writing great psychic movements.
42.00 - Special writing from Lucy. 
46.45 - Finding meaning in the darkness
51.25 - Suffering as a portal. 

Reference Points

Sebastian Barry

Elizabeth Bowen

Willa Cather

Anton Chekhov

Dante

Ram Dass

John Donne

T.S. Eliot

Anne Enright

Wendy Erskine

bell hooks

Kazuo Ishiguro

James Joyce

Claire Kilroy

Rosamond Lehman

Louis MacNeice

Alice Munro

Cardinal Newman

Edna O’Brien

Frank O’Hara

Rumi

Helen Simpson

John Updike

Sylvia Townsend Warner

Virginia Woolf

W.B. Yeats

Lucy’s Work

Being Various: New Irish Short Stories (edited by Lucy, Faber, 2021)

Multitudes (Faber, 2016)

Intimacies (Faber, 2021)

Leaves (Faber: 2007)

Where They Were Missed (Faber: 2005)

Plays

Hamlet

Music
Ludwig van Beethoven

Van Morrison

Taylor Swift

Films

The Sound of Music (1965: Robert Wise)

 

Bonus! Why a letter knife told Leon Craig everything she needed to know about her characters’ desires

Welcome to this bonus content with Leon Craig. We’re talking about how Leon found an old letter knife in a shop which helped her understand her characters desires. PLUS! You’ll hear Leon talking about plagues, the pandemic, and why she left the UK to write her novel about the UK.

 

Leon was here to discuss THE DECADENCE (Sceptre), a novel about a group of friends who find shelter in an old abandoned home, but encounter more than they bargained for. Leon Craig, whose previous collection of short stories, PARALLEL HELLS, was also published by Sceptre, is a graduate of the Birkbeck MFA Creative Writing course. Her work has been published by Hazlitt, the Sunday Times, the London Magazine and others and is forthcoming in Nulla magazine and Berlin Babel anthology.

 

Get exclusive subscriber benefits from the Rippling Pages. 
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Check out the Rippling Pages Bookshop and buy all the books featured on the Rippling Pages:

https://uk.bookshop.org/shop/ripplingpagespod

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Leon Craig on misunderstanding ghosts and getting what we want

I’m looking forward to diving into the crumbling and the haunted this week with Leon Craig. 

We’re discussing Leon Craig’s THE DECADENCE.

And you the listener picked Leon as one of the rising stars of literature that you wanted me to interview.

Have you ever walked past an old abandoned house and wondered what kinds of lives were lived there? Have you ever dared to explore one? Perhaps you wanted to escape and hide in the house. Or perhaps you wanted to use it for something a little more nefarious.

Leon Craig, whose previous collection of short stories, PARALLEL HELLS, was also published by Sceptre, is a graduate of the Birkbeck MFA Creative Writing course. Her work has been published by Hazlitt, the Sunday Times, the London Magazine and others and is forthcoming in Nulla magazine and Berlin Babel anthology.

 

Get exclusive subscriber benefits from the Rippling Pages. 
https://patreon.com/RipplingPagesPod?utm_medi

Check out the Rippling Pages Bookshop and buy all the books featured on the Rippling Pages:

https://uk.bookshop.org/shop/ripplingpagespod

Interested in hosting your own podcast? Follow this link and find out how:
https://www.podbean.com/ripplingpages 

Episode Chapters

1.30 - rising literary stars poll
3.30 - The crumbling haunted house
6.30 - the ensemble cast 
7.25 - early hauntings. 
10.10 - misunderstandings and humour 
11.50 -embracing imperfect characters.
14.25 - secret passageways 
16.05 - sexual elements to hauntings. 
19.10 - colonial legacies and trespassing
22.55 - Rippling Pages Patreon
24.20 - on beauty  
27.00 - getting what we want. 
29.50 - desire and disgust 
32.00 - The country housegenre
37.15 - Leon’s next novel

 

Reference Points

House of Leaves (2000, Mark Z. Danielewski).

Saltburn (2023, dir. Emerald Fennell)

Beowulf

The Great Gatsby (1925, F.Scott Fitzgerald)

White is for Witching(2009, Helen Oyeyemi)

Brideshead Revisited (1945, Evelyn Waugh)

Ana Schnabl on using childhood locations and memories in stories about unpleasant people

We’re going to the Slovenian coast this week during the final years Yugoslavia with Ana Schnabl. 

Dunja has finally launched her literary career, but the shadow and spectre of her brother’s death haunts both her and her family. What happens when she returns to investigate her brother’s death? And what happens when the truth becomes stranger than the fiction she writes?

Ana Schnabl’s novel is published by Divided Publishing. Ana is a Slovenian writer, and this is her second novel to be translated into English, by Rawley Grau. Her first novel to be translated into English was The Masterpiece, that time by David Limon. In Slovenia, she is a winner of Slovenia’s prestigious literary prize, the Kresnik award. She’s also a regular contributor to the journal The Guardian, writing on Balkan politics and culture.

Get exclusive subscriber benefits from the Rippling Pages. 
https://patreon.com/RipplingPagesPod?utm_medi

Check out the Rippling Pages Bookshop and buy all the books featured on the Rippling Pages:

https://uk.bookshop.org/shop/ripplingpagespod

Interested in hosting your own podcast? Follow this link and find out how:
https://www.podbean.com/ripplingpages 

Episode Chapters

1.30 - Ana's based in Slovenia
2.35 - Fake crime novels
3.50 - Djuna's relationship with her dead brother.
5.30 - Why has Djuna returned?
7.30 - Family dynamics. 
9.00 - Rockstars and the Slovene transition
10.35 - Michael Jackson
13.30 - a fake crime novel
15.00 - Rippling Pages Bookshop
16.00 - Not liking modernist novels
19.45 - Writing cerebral characters
21.00 - Sentimental feelings about home
24.15 - Ice cream and the Adriatic coast
27.30 - Not believing in legacies.
30.30 sitting with unpleasant people.
31.50 - who helps Djuna.
33.45 - Smoking

 

Reference Points

Agatha Christie 

Marcel Proust

Virginia Woolf