Join co-hosts Annie Liontas and Lito Velázquez in conversation with LitFriends Lucy Corin & Deb Olin Unferth about their travels in the Sahara, ancient chickens, disappointments, true love, and why great books are so necessary. Our next episode will feature Melissa Febos & Donika Kelly, out December 22, 2023. Links Libsyn Blog www.annieliontas.com www.litovelazquez.com https://www.lucycorin.com https://debolinunferth.com LitFriends LinkTree LitFriends Insta LitFriends Facebook Transcript Annie Lito (00:00.118) Welcome to Lit Friends! Hey Lit Friends! Lito: Welcome to the show. Annie: Today we're speaking with Lucy Corin and Deb Olin Unferth, great writers, thinkers, and LitFriend besties. Lito: About chickens, the Sahara, and bad reviews. Annie: So grab your bestie Annie & Lito: And get ready to get lit! Lito: You know those like stones that you can get when you're on like a trip to like Tennessee somewhere or something, they're like worry stones? Like people used to like worry them with their thumb or something whenever they had a problem and it would like supposedly calm you down. Well, it's not quite the same thing, but I love how Deb describes her and Lucy's relationship is like, “worry a problem with me.” Like let's, let's cut this gem from all the angles and really like rub it down to its essential context and meaning and understanding. And I think essentially that's what like writers, great writers, offer the world. They've worked through a problem and they have answers. There's not one answer, there's not a resolution to it, but the answers that lead to better, more better questions. Annie: Yeah, and there's something so special about them because they're, worry tends to be something we do in isolation, almost kind of worrying ourselves into the ground. Lito: Right. Annie: But they're doing it together in collaboration. Lito: It's a collaborative worry. Yes, I love that. Annie: A less lonely worrying. Lito: It's a less lonely place to think through these things. And the intimacy between them is so special. The way I think they just weave in and out of their lives with each other, even though they're far away from each other. I think there's a romantic notion that you're tuned into about Lucy and Deb's trip to the desert. Do you want to say something about that? There's a metaphor in it that you really love, right? Annie: (1:52) Yeah. Well, so I remember when we first talked about doing this podcast and invited them, we were at a bar at AWP, the writer's conference. And they were like, oh, this is perfect. We just went to the Sahara together. And I was like, what? You writers just decided to take a trip together through the desert? And they said, yeah, it was perfect. And they have adorable photos, which we of course are going to share with the world. Um, but it felt like such a, I mean, the fact that they would go on that kind of adventure together and didn't really plan ahead, I think it was just Deb saying, I really want to go to the desert. And Lucy saying, sure, let's go. Which feels very much a kind of metonym of their friendship in some ways. Lito: Absolutely. Annie: (2:42) Yeah. That they wandered these spaces together. They come back to art, right? Art is a way for them to recreate themselves and recreate their friendship. And they're doing such different things on the page. Lito: Oh yeah, no, they're very different writers but they do share a curiosity that's unique I think in their friendship, then unique to them. Annie: Yeah and a kind of rigorousness and a love for the word. Lito: (3:10) Oh and a love for thinking and reading the world in every capacity. Annie: Tell me about your friendship with Lucy because you're quite close. Lito: I was at UC Davis before it was an MFA program. It was just a Master's. After undergrad, I went to the master's program because I wasn't sure if I wanted to be an academic or do the studio option and get an MFA. I loved how Lucy and the other professors there, Pam Houston, Yiyun Li, showed us the different ways to be a writer. They couldn't be more different, the three of them. And, I particularly was drawn to Lucy because of her sense of art and play and how those things interact. Lito: (03:59) And here was someone that was extremely cerebral, extremely intelligent, thinking through every aspect of existence. And yet it was all done through the idea of play and experimentation, but not experimentation in that sort of like negative way that we think of experimentation, which is to say writing that doesn't work, but experimentation in the sense of innovation. And. Lucy brought out my sense of play. I got it right away, what she was going for, that there is an intellectual pleasure to the work of reading and writing that people in the world respond to, but don't often articulate. Lucy's able to articulate it, and I admire her forever for that....
