Writers and Company: Great Interviews with Writers You May Not Have Heard of--But Should

Rainy afternoon with a pile of mending that I've put off forever.  The CBC's Writers and Company hosted by Eleanor Wachtel comes on at 3 p.m. but I had a chance to start the domestic task earlier.  What to do to keep my mind occupied while my hands sewed?

Listen on-line!  Don't know why I hadn't thought of it before, but not only can you listen whenever you want to this series of extremely intelligent and often amusing interviews, you can listen to more than one.

Today's original broadcast was of Wachtel talking to James Lusdan about his memoir  Give Me Everything You Have.  A poet and novelist, his recent fame comes from his account of the five years during which he was stalked by a former student.  Stated baldly, it doesn't sound like much, but obviously it's a lot more, including many references to  Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the 14th century poem in Old English that many of us were supposed to have read, but didn't.  The interview made we want to read both: I have a copy of the latter kicking around here somewhere, and I'll be on the look out for Lasdun book.

Then, not having finished my nending, I turned to the interview from the previous week, with Mia Couto, a poet, novelist, biologist and former freedom fight from Mozambique.  The child of immigrants from Portugal, he was a featured guest at last May's Blue Metropolis International Literary Festival in Montreal.  I'd wanted to hear him, but couldn't so it was wonderful to listen to this writer whose work Doris Lessing says is "Quite unlike anything else I have read from Africa."  His The Tuner of Silences has just been published in English by Biblioasis.

The juxtaposition of the interviews is interesting, not  least because of the references each makes to myths and stories that don't have straight forward explanations--a green knight whose head is chopped off but who continues living, and a boy who has been told that crying and praying are the same thing, and that both are forbidden.

The Writers and Company archives are a treasure trove.  How nice to have them on line.