Tried And True: The Assay Podcast

Joanna Eleftheriou moved from New York City to her father's ancestral town in Cyprus when she was 10, and has navigated borders of many kinds in the decades since. She explores these themes in a new essay collection, This Way Back . A contributing editor at Assay, Eleftheriou is an assistant professor of English at Christopher Newport University, and a faculty member at the Writing Workshops in Greece.

It was the height of WWII when T. S. Eliot published his masterpiece, The Four Quartets (1943). England was locked in a bitter fight with the Nazis. Yet in poems like "Burnt Norton" and "Little Gidding," Eliot pays tribute to that most German composer, Beethoven. Why would he do this? This special episode features an audio essay/documentary narrated by Aakanksha Virkar Yates (University of Brighton), as well as noted Eliot scholars Sir Christopher Ricks (Boston University), John Xiros Cooper (Prof Emeritus, University of British Columbia), and Frances Dickey (University of Missouri). Special thanks to Alan Hall at Falling Tree Productions, London, which produced this documentary. Thanks to Rachel Shelley for readings of Eliot's prose/poetry. Included are archival recordings of Beethoven by the Lener Quartet. This documentary was made possible through the University of Brighton Rising Stars award. Thanks to Blue Dot Sessions for additional music. For more information about Assay: The

Episode 2 of Tried & True: The Assay Podcast features a conversation with authors Yvette Johnson ( The Song and The Silence ) and Taylor Brorby ( Coal and Oil , forthcoming). Both writers have spent a lot of time thinking and writing about the intersection of race, gender, sexuality and the #MeToo movements. The episode also features audio clips from the 2018 NonfictionNow conference, including comments by Janice Gary on #MeToo and Will Slattery on toxic masculinity. Additional music by Kai Engel ( Something Bonus Track ). Recorded live at NonfictionNow in Phoenix, AZ in November 2018.

Tried & True 's inaugural episode features a conversation between Francisco Cantú ( The Line Becomes A River ) and Reyna Grande ( The Distance Between Us ), about their experiences as a U.S. border patrol agent (Cantú) and undocumented immigrant (Grande), and how and why their writing about borders is a perennially hot topic. This interview was recorded on-site at the NonfictionNow Conference in Phoenix, AZ in Nov. 2018.