Nov 19 2023 9 mins 2
Show Notes
On our inaugural episode, co-hosts Annie Liontas and Lito Velázquez introduce LitFriends, a podcast. Each week, we welcome two literary friends to discuss the writing life, how literary friendships get us through tough times, and what they love about their literary bestie.
Join Annie and Lito for Season One as they speak with today's most engaging literary talents and their lit friends.
Coming up this season, conversations with:
* Justin Torres & Angela Flournoy
* Lucy Corin & Deb Olin Unferth
* Melissa Febos & Donika Kelly
* Yiyun Li & Edmund White
* George Saunders & Paula Saunders
* Liz Moore & Asali Solomon
* CJ Hauser & Marie-Helene Bertino
* and more!
Links
https://sites.libsyn.com/494238
https://linktr.ee/litfriendspodcast
https://www.instagram.com/litfriendspodcast/
https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61553436475678
https://www.angelaflournoy.com/
https://georgesaundersbooks.com/
https://paulasaundersbooks.com/
https://www.mariehelenebertino.com/
Transcript
Annie & Lito: (00:01)
Hey, LitFriends!
Annie:
Thanks for joining us for episode zero. This episode is a little special because we'll introduce you, our LitFam, to the LitFriends podcast. We'll talk about our origins, our season one guests, and how much I love Lito.
Aww, and how much I love you, Annie.
Annie:
This is Annie Liontas.
Lito:
And I'm Lito Velázquez. Welcome to LitFriends, a podcast in which we speak with novelists, poets, memoirists, writers, and thinkers of all kinds about the great work that they do in the world, on and off the page, and about their great literary friendships.
Annie:
This show has everything, British nicknames, e-flirtations, picking up fam when they're down, literary competition, rooting for one another, and more.
Lito:
And much, much more. Join us this season as we welcome the amazing writers:
Annie & Lito:
* Marie-Helene Bertino and CJ Hauser
* Liz Moore and Asali Solomon
* George Saunders and Paula Saunders
* Yiyun Lee and Edmund White
* Melissa Febos and Danika Kelly
* Deb Olin-Unferth and Lucy Corin
* Justin Torres and Angela Flournoy
Annie & Lito:
Get ready to get lit!
Lito:
Welcome to the show. I'm so glad we're here, Annie. It's been a long time coming. We've been thinking about–
Annie:
Ages!
Lito:
…making this show for over a year and a half, pretty much since the pandemic, though. So maybe more like two or three years.
Annie:
Yeah, I feel like I've waited my whole life to do this show with you, Lito.
Lito:
I know I've been wanting someone to collaborate with, and you're the perfect friend to do this with. A show about two of our greatest loves, writing, literature—
Annie: Friendship!
Lito:
And friendship. Yeah, I guess that's three things.
Annie:
The more the merrier.
Lito:
The more the merrier. Every week we're going to have writers on the show who we admire, whose work has moved us deeply, and whose friendships we think are really impressive and interesting.
Annie:
Yeah, we're going to talk about literary competition between friends, hardships, how you pick one another up when you're down. Heartbreak.
Lito:
Big wins, like celebrating things. It's amazing the stories that have come out of these conversations because people get to talk about their friends, and how great is that?
Annie:
They really talk about parts of their friendship that they don't even talk about with one another.
Lito:
That's right, because when do you get a chance to really talk to your friend about them.
Annie: (02:20)
When do you say to your friend, I love you?
Lito:
I love you. But beyond just I love you, like, here's all the reasons why I love you. Here's what you do in my life. That's really great. Here's why you're beautiful, not just in the work that you do, but how you show up as a person. And that's not how writers get portrayed. We were looking for a project to interview people who we thought were great and interesting. And you were already doing that, right?
Annie:
Yeah, I was doing that with the Gloss interview series with Marie-Helene Bertino, and a number of others, through Electric Lit, Bomb, The Believer. That really arose out of pandemic, when I saw all of these amazing writers who weren't really able to share their work because of the pandemic.
Lito:
So, one day we were sitting at your house, Annie, I don't know if you remember this, on your couch and we were talking about writing podcasts and making podcasts. I've been wanting to do one for a really long time and I've been writing for a long time, and I’ve spoken with different people about it, and it's never quite worked out. This is the first time when we both came up with a great idea. I said, "I think it would be really great to talk to people about their friendships, because no one really does that enough." And then you said, I don't know if you remember, you said, "what if we got literary friendships? Because they're so special, like ours." Ours is a friendship on a deep, deep level, but we’re like family, but we're also in this very unique world, which is the writing world.
Annie:
In the struggle.
Lito:
In the struggle!
Annie:
In the never ending struggle! Yes.
In the never ending struggle that is writing. We know a lot about the industry. We both got our MFA at Syracuse University, though at very different times. And we love people, we love friends, and we love great writing. And so it made perfect sense to make a podcast about it.
Annie:
You know, and I don't think I could do this with anybody else. I have a lot of lit friends—making this with you is has been so special. It's something I'm going to hold on to forever.
Lito:
It's such a pleasure and a joy.
Annie:
One of the great similarities and worldviews that we share. I mean, we're both queer. We both have the immigrant experience.
Lito:
That's right.
Annie: (04:39)
And I think that a lot of what literary friendships are, are in fact quite queer, right? Like there is a there's a queering of the experience simply in recognizing. This is chosen family and this is how we get through.
Lito:
The thing that surprises me the most and you'll see when you hear these interviews is the material that comes out. It's like nothing else. And people want to get so intimate and so comfortable because they're speaking about their favorite person who's intimate in their lives, but in a special way that has to do with writing.
Annie:
Yeah. You know, and this for me came out of thinking a lot about the function and the role of literary friendships. I mean, we can all remember back to Bad Art Friend and other pieces that were run in places like the New York Times, maybe unnecessarily glorifying and dramatizing the kinds of drama, just straight drama between former friends, right? And there's a whole lot of, I mean, there's an entire lineage and inheritance of this. And the writer, Isle McElroy writes about this in Esquire and talks about, you know, there are like all those great historical feuds, usually between straight white dudes. Like— We're not wrong. Like when Mailer headbutts Gore Vidal or Gabriel Garcia Marquez gets punched out by Mario Vargas Llosa because he told his wife to divorce him. You know, and so that's what we remember culturally. That's sort of what we glorify. But the reality, and what we're hearing in all of these conversations is what feeds us and what nourishes us is actually these friendships that pick us up when we're down, that celebrate us when we have these successes, without limitation or inhibition, really allow us to rise to our better selves to put our egos and fears and insecurities about our own writing success down so that we can do that for one another. And so for me, this podcast is actually the reality. This is the reality of how writers get by, and how they get through.
Lito: (07:02)
That's right. I think we have this idea in our cultural imagination that writers sit in a room by themselves in the dark or with a candlelight and a pencil, and they just, from their brain, pull out a story out of nowhere because they are "inspired to." Whereas actually all writing is generated, I think from lots of conversations with people living and dead, but especially close literary friendships in which the intimacy revolves around writing. It's a community practice, but it's a friend practice. We don't show our work to just everyone. We show it to our literary friends, our first readers. And we talk about literature in a certain way with other writers who we admire and whose work we think is somehow symbiotic with our own, even if we're doing completely different practices.
Annie:
Yeah, it's about sharing the work, but it's also about sharing the vulnerabilities. I'm thinking about Asali Solomon and Liz Moore, who will have later this season, who are both part of the Claw, a writer's salon for women and non-binary writers in Philadelphia. And, you know, they don't necessarily share work, but they share experiences. They commiserate, they talk about their anxieties, they talk about their successes. And it really makes me think about the industry necessity of having mutual knowledge like this. When publishers want to keep us really divided as writers and artists, right? If we are quiet in our corners and not collaborating, then we actually don't have the kind of collective understanding of how to advocate for ourselves, how to protect our work, and how to support one another.
Lito:
Yes, and I'm thinking of Angela Flournoy, whose first novel was shortlisted for the National Book Award, and Justin Torres, who just won the National Book Award. And their conversation with us, in which they really get into the boostering of each other, the promoting of each other, the helping each other through, the counseling each other through, that happens in these quiet spaces between friends on the phone, like with Lucy Corin and Deb Olin Unferth. I think you'll join us for an incredible season of inspiring conversations in which we talk to some of the best thinkers of our time.
Both:
Happy Friendsgiving LitFam!
Lito:
In our first episode, we speak with Justin Torres and Angela Flournoy, available for download on Friendsgiving, Friday, November 24th. Join us.
Annie:
Find us on all your socials at LitFriends Podcast.
Annie & Lito: (09:24)
Thank you to our production squad for all their hard work. Our show is edited by Justin Hamilton. Our logo was designed by Sam Schlenker. Lizette Saldana is our marketing director. Our theme song was written and produced by Robert Maresca. And special thanks to our show producer, Tula Nunez.
Annie:
This was LitFriends, Episode 0.
