From the Archives : Elvia Wilk : Oval

David Naimon (0:00)

Today's episode is brought to you by Nicholas Triolo's The Way Around, Walking a Reimagined Path. Winner of the Reading the West Award. The Way Around models what it means to experience a true revolution of heart and home for the flourishing of all. While traveling around the world, it was in Kathmandu that Triolo first encountered Quora, a form of moving prayer in which pilgrims walk in circles around a sacred site or object, a kind of ritualized remembering birthed by place.

Unable to shake this initial encounter with circumambulation, he sets out here on three such extended walks. The Way Around chronicles several journeys of circumambulation, taking Triolo from California to Tibet to Montana. Robert MacFarlane calls this memoir, Smart, Funny, Wise of Mind and Vast of Heart. Published by Milkweed Editions and out in paperback now, The Way Around is available wherever books are sold.

Today's conversation is an archival conversation with Elvia Wilk, recorded in 2019 in the studios of Keibu Community Radio. This was a standout conversation for me, and I remember thinking back then, that even though we were talking about a debut novel, that this was a thinker and a writer we were going to be hearing about for a long time. This also feels like the perfect place in the year to place this conversation, to create a trilogy or triptych of sorts, beginning with The Creature Needs conversation in September, where Talia Field and Demarkit and myself look at questions of science and story of other than human intelligences and bringing them into our work, about the role of fantasy and the imagination in relation to acquiring knowledge, and about all that lies beyond our comprehension, but at the same time is very real and meaningful.

This, followed by China Mieville's return to the show for our epic conversation about the paranormal, the uncanny, the eerie, the spectral, the weird, about Marxism, metaphysics and theology, and all that exists beyond what language can describe. And now today's with Elvia Wilk, where we look at the dystopic world of her novel Oval, where the weather is off, the economic disparity couldn't be more grim, where artists are employed by corporations, and where a new pill has been developed to increase generosity. But also, her deep thinking about weird fiction, the new weird movement that Miavel himself was associated with, and about mysticism and the mystifying in the world and in our stories. Questions of the more than human and other than human and more.

Back when we talked, she made a generous contribution to the Bonus Audio Archive. A reading of the first half of a speech that she gave at an ecology symposium, a symposium called The Shape of a Circle in the Mind of a Fish. The symposium gathered anthropologists, artists, robotics experts, historians and scientists to address interior multitude, swarming organisms, symbiosis, plant intelligence and entanglement. Her speech was called Death by Landscape, which later, long after we talked, became the title of her essay collection of the same name. This contribution joins many others from everyone from China Meaville to NK. Jemisin, Naomi Klein to Dion Brand, Jory Graham to Alice Oswald, Adrienne Marie Brown to Ted Chiang to Natalie Diaz, among many others. It is only one of many things to choose from when you join the Between The Covers community as a listener supporter. You can find out more at patreon.com/between The Covers.

Now for today's archival conversation with Elvia Wilk.

Good morning and welcome to Between the Covers. I'm David Naiman, your host. Today's guest is the writer Elvia Wilk. Elvia Wilk was a founding editor of the Berlin-based architecture magazine Uncube, and the publications editor for Transmediale, the journal associated with the annual Berlin Festival of Art, Culture, and Technology of the same name. Based in New York and Berlin, Elvia Wilk has publisher writings in Friis, Art Forum, Metropolis, Moose, Flash Art, and Art in America, among others, and is currently a contributing editor at E-flux Journal and finishing a master's degree at the New School for Social Research. She has taught at the University of the Arts, Berlin, Eugene Lang College, and City College of New York, and she's here today to talk about her debut novel out from Soft Skull Press entitled Oval. Kirkus and its starred review calls Oval deeply weird and unsettlingly hilarious. Jeff VanderMeer calls it a fascinating near future exploration of relationships, sustainability, and power. Sasha Frere-Jones says of Oval, everything is work, morning, clubbing, reading your partner's moods, and everything is a scam. Plants that become buildings, jobs that become consultancies, apps that become jobs. With astonishing emotional accuracy, Oval records what it feels like to hover between two poles. Finally, McKenzie Wark describes Oval as J. G. Ballard meets William Gibson meets Jeff VanderMeer. Oval is an up-to-the-minute story about the twilight zones of corporate design, aesthetics, pharmacy, and bioengineering, where there's nothing consultants won't break in the quest for innovation. What could possibly go wrong? Find out in Elvia Wilk's crisp and stylish debut book. Welcome to Between The Covers, Elvia Wilk.