CBAW Loves
A new book club podcast hosted by Seema Reza (CEO, CBAW/ author, When the World Breaks Open & A Constellation of Half Lives) and produced by Amelia Bane. Each episode Seema invites a rotating cast of fellow writers and authors to discuss a book of the month. Through the podcast, we will continue virtually building community and fostering genuine connection through reading. Available on Apple & Spotify Podcasts, or YouTube Video at the icons below.
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Latest Episode
Someplace Generous – featuring discussion with the book’s editors, Elaina Ellis & Amber Flame, and author & physician, Dr. Seema Yasmin.
Show Notes
Episode 11: Someplace Generous – featuring discussion with the book’s editors, Elaina Ellis & Amber Flame, and author & physician, Dr. Seema Yasmin.
In this episode, we welcome Someplace Generous editors Elaina Ellis and Amber Flame and author/physician Seema Yasmin to discuss Someplace Generous- a vibrantly diverse and inclusive anthology of romantic short stories.
Topics include the rules of writing romance, reading as a tool for empathy, and the power of telling romantic stories that engage new and different dynamics.
Don’t forget: We want to hear from you! Read the book and send in your thoughts to cbawloves@cbaw.org or share them on social media using the #CBAWLOVES hashtag.
Reference & Notes
Purchase Someplace Generous on CBAW Bookshop, here.
Poem Referenced in Podcast: The neurologist gives us permission by Seema Reza. Read it here.
Correction from Elaina Ellis: The author of A Witch’s Guide to Fake Dating a Demon was mistakenly noted in the discussion. It should be “Sarah Hawley.” Find the book here.
About Someplace Generous (from publisher, Generous Press)
Someplace Generous–a vibrantly diverse and inclusive anthology of romantic short stories–can be described in one word: yes. Featuring stories by award-winning poets like Richard Siken, Rachel McKibbens, and Brionne Janae; acclaimed fiction writers like Temim Fruchter, Corinne Manning, and Max Delsohn; and popular thinkers like Jessica P. Pryde, Someplace Generous presents voices largely new to the genre of romance, each bringing a fresh take on what it means to tell a love story. This first book from Generous Press, a new imprint committed to changing the face of romance genre-fiction, is a collection of twenty-two never-before-published stories about joy, passion, and generous consent. In these pages, desire is centered and explored through queer, trans, Black, AAPI, Latinx, Jewish, disabled, and neurodivergent lenses, and the ages of authors and characters span generations. The brilliant authors herein have spun lush, poetic tales featuring characters and perspectives historically excluded from romance narratives. Through a variety of styles, lengths, and subgenres–ranging from flash-fiction to short stories, speculative to satire to romcom–there is something here for every kind of reader. Two Modern Orthodox Jewish women cross a magical threshold on the holiday of Shavuot. A Chinese American grandmother in a nursing home plays matchmaker, just in time for the Lunar New Year. A nonbinary sexworker with psychic abilities helps an older woman connect with her long-lost lover. Two disabled young adults find new levels of intimacy as they work to overcome shame. An enslaved couple jumps the broom and can see the future, which is freedom. The lovers in Someplace Generous–whether they are sapphic vampires or undercover super-heroes, teenagers, or middle-aged mamas–choose each other, and along the way, they choose themselves, too. Featuring twenty-two stories by twenty-two authors, Someplace Generous presents voices largely new to the genre of romance-fiction, each bringing a fresh take on what it means to tell a love story.
About Our Guests
Elaina Ellis (she/her) is publisher and cofounder at Generous Press. She owns and operates A Trusted Reader, providing literary book editing services for brilliant writers of all stripes. For ten years she worked at the Pulitzer Prize-winning publishing house Copper Canyon Press where she served as editor. She is the author of Write About an Empty Birdcage, and has received support from Artist Trust, Mineral School, Vermont Studio Center, Jack Straw, Tent, 4Culture, and Seattle Office of Arts & Culture.
Amber Flame (she/her) is deputy publisher and cofounder at Generous Press. She is a multi-genre writer, educator, and arts administrator serving as program director for Hedgebrook, a premier writing residency for women-identified writers. She has served as a copyeditor, development editor, and general “fluffer” for all manner of texts. Her mission is joy. Flame is the author of the poetry collections Ordinary Cruelty and apocrifa; her writing has earned awards from Hedgebrook, Vermont Studio Center, Jack Straw, Seattle Office of Arts & Culture, and YEFE NOF.
Seema Yasmin is a medical doctor, author, and Emmy award-winning journalist. Her books paint vivid pictures about ourselves and how we interact with the world around us and include What the Fact?!: Finding the Truth in All the Noise, Muslim Women are Everything, the poetry collection If God Is a Virus, and more. Please visit SeemaYasmin.com.
Support CBAW Through Bookshop!
Remember, there’s always time to read along! When you purchase books through our Bookshop.org affiliate storefront, 10% of each purchase is sent to CBAW and your shopping will help support our free programs for Veterans, Active Duty Military, Healthcare Providers, and Caregivers. Any book purchased from Bookshop counts toward the donation as long as you see our name at the top of your page while shopping.
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Previous Episodes
Show Notes
Episode 10: City of Laughter – featuring discussion with author, Temim Fruchter, returning guest Amber Flame, and CBAW Community Members.
In this episode City of Laughter author Temim Fruchter joins hosts Seema and Amelia, returning guest Amber Flame, and CBAW community members Amy, Jaci, Leena, & Raye, for a conversation about fiction as a portal, imagined queer lineages, and writing as a way to wrestle with the reality of mortality and time.
Don’t forget: We want to hear from you! Read the book and send in your thoughts to cbawloves@cbaw.org or share them on social media using the #CBAWLOVES hashtag.
About City of Laughter (from publisher, Grove Press)
A rich and riveting debut spanning four generations of Eastern European Jewish women bound by blood, half-hidden secrets, and the fantastical visitation of a shapeshifting stranger over the course of 100 years.
An ambitious, delirious novel that tangles with queerness, spirituality, and generational silence, City of Laughter announces Temim Fruchter as a fresh and assured new literary voice. The tale of a young queer woman stuck in a thicket of generational secrets, the novel follows her back to her family’s origins, where ancestral clues begin to reveal a lineage both haunted and shaped by desire.
Ropshitz, Poland, was once known as the City of Laughter. As this story opens, an 18th century badchan, a holy jester whose job is to make wedding guests laugh, receives a visitation from a mysterious stranger–bringing the laughter the people of Ropshitz desperately need, and triggering a sequence of events that will reverberate across the coming century.
In the present day, Shiva Margolin, recovering from the heartbreak of her first big queer love and grieving the death of her beloved father, struggles to connect with her guarded mother, who spends most of her time at the local funeral home. A student of Jewish folklore, Shiva seizes an opportunity to visit Poland, hoping her family’s mysteries will make more sense if she walks in the footsteps of her great-grandmother Mira, about whom no one speaks. What she finds will make her question not only her past and her future, but also her present.
Electric and sharply intimate, City of Laughter zigzags between our universe and a tapestry of real and invented Jewish folklore, asking how far we can travel from the stories that have raised us without leaving them behind.
Temim Fruchter is a queer nonbinary writer who was raised in a Modern Orthodox Jewish household. She holds an MFA in fiction from the University of Maryland and has received first prize in short fiction from both American Literary Review and New South; she is a 2020 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award winner. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Amber Flame is an artist and performer, whose work has garnered artistic merit residencies with Hedgebrook, Baldwin for the Arts, The Watering Hole, Wa Na Wari, Vermont Studio Center, and more. Flame’s second book of poetry, apocrifa, launched May of 2023. Amber Flame is a queer Black dandy mama who falls hard for a jumpsuit and some fresh kicks.
Find City of Laughter on CBAW Bookshop.
Show Notes
Episode 9: Women of the Post – featuring discussion with author, Joshunda Sanders
In this episode, we welcome Women of the Post author, Joshunda Sanders for a conversation with Seema, Amelia and participants from CBAW’s More Than One Story program. Our discussion includes stories about the real-life women who inspired the characters in novel, what it means to exist in a place that was not designed for you, and what has (and has not) changed in the military since WWII.
Don’t forget: We want to hear from you! Read the book and send in your thoughts to cbawloves@cbaw.org or share them on social media using the #CBAWLOVES hashtag. We will read or play your comments on a future episode!
About Women of the Post
Inspired by true events, Women of the Post brings to life the heroines who proudly served in the all-Black battalion of the Women’s Army Corps in WWII, finding purpose in their mission and lifelong friendship.
1944, New York City. Judy Washington is tired of having to work at the Bronx Slave Market, cleaning white women’s houses for next to nothing. She dreams of a bigger life, but with her husband fighting overseas, it’s up to her and her mother to earn enough for food and rent. When she’s recruited to join the Women’s Army Corps–offering a steady paycheck and the chance to see the world–Judy jumps at the opportunity.
During training, Judy becomes fast friends with the other women in her unit–Stacy, Bernadette and Mary Alyce–who all come from different cities and circumstances. Under Second Officer Charity Adams’s leadership, they receive orders to sort over one million pieces of mail in England, becoming the only unit of Black women to serve overseas during WWII.
The women work diligently, knowing that they’re reuniting soldiers with their loved ones through their letters. However, their work becomes personal when Mary Alyce discovers a backlogged letter addressed to Judy. Told through the alternating perspectives of Judy, Charity and Mary Alyce, Women of the Post is an unforgettable story of perseverance, female friendship and self-discovery.
Author Bio
Joshunda Sanders is an award-winning author, journalist and speechwriter. A former Obama Administration political appointee, her fiction, essays and poetry have appeared in dozens of anthologies. She has been awarded residencies and fellowships at Hedgebrook, Lambda Literary, The Key West Literary Seminars and the Martha’s Vineyard Institute for Creative Writing. Women of the Post is her first novel.
About More Than One Story
More Than One Story (MTOS) is a monthly online writing and creative arts workshop partially funded by the Department of Veterans Affairs’ SSG Parker Gordon Fox Suicide Prevention Grant. In these special workshops, artists and writers help participants connect across shared experiences of service as women and non-binary people by writing poems, stories, journaling, narratives, and creating visual arts such as paintings and meditative art. No experience with art making or poetry is necessary. Learn more.
Join The Book Club!
Join our Book Club and be part of the conversation! Share your thoughts and comments on the books we’re reading, or the episodes that resonated with you. We value your input and may even feature your comments in future episodes! You can contribute by emailing us your text thoughts or sending audio/video clips to cbawloves@cbaw.org. Alternatively, share your thoughts on social media using the hashtag #CBAWLOVES.