LISTEN TO EPISODE 123!

Dear Listener,

I’m so excited to share this conversation with poet, essayist and erasure artist—one of my longtime favorite poets—Mary Ruefle!

Mary Ruefle is the author of many books, including The Book (Wave Books, 2023), Dunce (Wave Books, 2019), which was a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize, longlisted for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics’ Circle Award, as well as a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize. She is also the author of My Private Property (Wave Books, 2016), Trances of the Blast (Wave Books, 2013), Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures (Wave Books, 2012), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, and Selected Poems (Wave Books, 2010), winner of the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. She has also published a comic book, Go Home and Go to Bed! (Pilot Books/Orange Table Comics, 2007), and is an erasure artist, whose treatments of nineteenth century texts have been exhibited in museums and galleries and published in A Little White Shadow (Wave Books, 2006). Ruefle is the recipient of numerous honors, including the Robert Creeley Award, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and a Whiting Award. She lives in Bennington, Vermont, where she serves as the state’s poet laureate.

I had the delight of recording this conversation with Mary on September 24, 2023 in Bennington, Vermont, where Mary lives. 

As you’ll hear me describe in the introduction to the conversation, I had an enchanted two days with Mary. We had an amazing dinner, and I got to sleep at her friend Anna’s incredible home and hold and read Mary’s 124th erasure book!

We recorded this conversation about menopause, thresholds, death, reading, museums, schools, podcasting, trees, wind, created violence, real violence, haiku, love, the erotics of reading, Yom Kippur, erasure, how to walk around the world two babysteps at a time, and more.

I’ll be talking about The Book in the next Reading with Rachel salon, which meets on March 26th. There is still time to sign up  for listener-only or listener-maker sessions here!

• The Book by Mary Ruefle (March 26)*

• Bianca by Eugenia Leigh (April 30)

• Happily by Sabrina Orah Mark (May 28) 

• SoundMachine by Rachel Zucker (June 25)

• Tanya by Brenda Shaughnessy (July 30)

• TBA (Aug 27)

*Authors will be present for the first hour in all sessions except for Mary Ruefle.

To find out more about Reading with Rachel or any of the other Commonplace School classes please visit our website or email rachel [at] commonplacepod.com.

For this episode some members of the Commonplace book club will receive a copy of one of the following books:

• The Book (Wave Books, 2023)

• Trances of the Blast (Wave Books, 2013)

• Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures (Wave Books, 2012)

• A Little White Shadow (Wave Books, 2006)

• The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame

To become a patron of Commonplace please visit our Patreon! You can also make a one-time donation on venmo: Rachel-Zucker.

For this episode Commonplace’s charitable partner will donate $250 to the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research chosen by Mary Ruefle. 

Other news: 

I will be reading, in person, at NYU on April 5th at 5pm with poets Adrienne Chung and Lisa Olstein hosted by Matthew Rohrer. Admission is free but they are asking you to register here. 

Hope to see some of you there!

With love,

Rachel (& the Commonplace team)