This is Awakeners, a Lit Hub Radio podcast about mentorship in the literary arts. Robert Frost allegedly said he was not a teacher but an “awakener.” On every episode of this podcast, host Lena Crown speaks with writers, artists, critics, and scholars across generations who have awakened something for one another. We chat about how their relationship has evolved, examine the connections and divergences in their writing and thinking, and dig into the archives for traces of their mutual influence.
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On this episode, Lena chats with writers T Bambrick and Jane Miller, who were connected by some fellow poets in Tucson when T found themselves at a crossroads in their writing. Jane had just retired from teaching (for the first time), but they began to meet regularly over brunch to talk about—well, everything.
We discuss what Jane told T when they were deciding which PhD program to attend in creative writing, how we might write about harmful experiences without making yourself sad, and poetry as a communal conversation with other artists. In the second half of the episode, T reads aloud a poem from their book Intimacies, Received inspired by a line from one of Jane’s poems, and Jane shares a poem about artmaking from Paper Banners. Bonus: we follow T down a research rabbit hole about the violent political history of skunks.
T says: “Jane told me, Say somebody hit you with a wooden spoon. You might write a book about spoons or wood. You can work your way around the site of the most intense pain, finding something to dive into and obsess over.”
Subscribe and connect with us on our website: awakenerspodcast.com
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Jane Miller has written twelve poetry books, most recently Paper Banners and Who Is Trixie the Trasher? and Other Questions, and two collections of essays, Working Time: Essays on Poetry, Culture, and Travel and From the Valley of Bronze Camels: A Primer, Some Lectures, & A Boondoggle on Poetry. She is the recipient of a Wallace Award for Poetry, a Guggenheim Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, the Western States Book Award, and the Audre Lorde Prize in Poetry. Jane has taught in several MFA programs, including The University of Arizona, The Michener Center for Writers, and the Iowa Writer’s Workshop.
T Bambrick is the author of Intimacies, Received (Copper Canyon Press 2022), and Vantage (American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Award 2019). Their work can be found in the New Yorker, The Nation, American Poetry Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Los Angeles and is a Dornsife Fellow in the creative writing PhD program at the University of Southern California.
Subscribe and connect with us on our website: awakenerspodcast.com.
More T: https://www.taneumbambrick.com/
More Jane: https://www.coppercanyonpress.org/authors/jane-miller/
