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#SwellBookClub #books #BookReview #AuthorInterview 📚
Bowie Rowan
@bowie · 1:04
Hot with the Bad Things | A Conversation with Lucia LoTempio
She also coauthored the chat book Undone in Scarlet, which was published by Tammy in 2019. Currently, Lucia lives and writes in Pittsburgh, and she does a whole lot of other really amazing things, so I'm linking her website here. Definitely check it out to discover more about Lucia and her work. I'm so looking forward to talking about your book. Lucia. Let's get started
Bowie Rowan
@bowie · 0:54
Congratulations on having hot with the bad things out in the world. This book is absolutely gorgeous not only in its language, but also just as a physical artifact. It's a beautiful book. The layout, the images, the spacing, everything about it is just beautiful. I'm holding it in my hand right now and I can't stop flipping through the pages because it's just such a pleasure to hold in my hands and look through even after reading it
Bowie Rowan
@bowie · 0:26
Next, I'd love to hear about the story of how this book first came to life. When did you first understand or know on some level that you were working on a book length project and what was one of the biggest challenges you faced in writing it and one of the most interesting things that you learned in the process of creating it
Lucia LoTempio
@lucialo · 4:03
Something still lives a blasphemous love for myself and not dead or small. There is nothing triumphant about red rising like next day. I think also one of the reasons I included. I read those two palms just now. Like I said, the first one opens the book, the second one. It doesn't come at the end of the book, but it is actually the last poem I wrote for the book so in a lot of ways, it sort of feels like a full circle expression there
Lucia LoTempio
@lucialo · 3:10
One of the challenges was almost coming to terms with that being its form, especially because I'm such a sucker for the line in poetry. I love a good line break. I love a really expressive page in terms of the way a poem looks on the page. And actually letting that go is a huge challenge, because for this book, for the poems I was writing, pros books really fit the content much better than anything else I was trying with
Bowie Rowan
@bowie · 2:25
And the way it's based on the page, it just really does something for me, intellectually, emotionally viscerally. It's definitely one of my favorite sections of the poem, so it was really nice to be able to hear you read it aloud. Thank you. And it was interesting to hear that this was the last poem that you wrote for the books
Bowie Rowan
@bowie · 2:17
This was such an important moment for me as a reader of the book because I felt the voice growing and developing in a really important way and also the point of view. There's the older speaker or the more removed speaker on the page begins to talk to the younger speaker herself
Lucia LoTempio
@lucialo · 4:04
And so the first section, I really wanted to sort of get into that mindset of where I was coming from when I started this book, and I tried to have that section reflect that. And then the second, I really just wanted to bring it back to the self, bring it back to that speaking eye in the book and sort of experience that I experienced and that I wanted to express. And I think that's where if I'm remembering correctly, the status updates happen in the first section
Lucia LoTempio
@lucialo · 4:26
But I think as I worked through the book, it just wasn't doing the work I needed it to do. And it was maybe too flimsy to hold the entire books. And so just I think in that third section is where it comes through, that second person still remains. And in that second section as well. And I think that it really evolved into being more in sort of the present self as my ideas developed
Bowie Rowan
@bowie · 4:27
This is absolutely a book that you are going to want to sit down with and savor and read aloud I found it so pleasurable to read a lot of the poems and passages and prose aloud, and I'm looking forward to diving into it again in the future and also sharing it. I have a few friends where I immediately wanted to give them a copy of this book because it engages with so many of the questions that we've been talking about over the years
Lucia LoTempio
@lucialo · 0:51
If anyone in the small community has any questions, anything, I'm more than happy to respond. So yeah. Thank you once again, Bo, I really so, so appreciate it. Yeah. Thanks all