Brooke Shaffner’s Country of Under Explores the Pain and Wonder Between Identities

Podcast: Download (Duration: 40:06 — 36.8MB)

In this episode 388, we feature Brooke Shaffner and her debut novel Country of Under, which won the 1729 Book Prize, was a runner-up for the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction, and was shortlisted for Dzanc Books’ Prize for Fiction and Black Lawrence Press’s Big Moose Prize. Author Helen Benedict says this is “a novel about the pain and wonder of being between identities. Between male and female. Citizen and immigrant. Fulfilled and empty. Outsider and insider. A novel of our time, told with deep compassion and striking beauty.”

Show discussion highlights:

  • How Brooke combined personal experience and research to write about topics including drag culture, immigration activism, urban exploring, and monastic life
  • The cultural and countercultural context of the book’s setting in the 1990s and 2000s, and how fashion and music were inspirations
  • The literal and metaphorical borders that infuse the book thematically
  • Writing characters with grace and compassion to allow them to live in gray areas
  • Her in-progress memoir and the relationship between fiction and creative nonfiction
  • Approaching the marathon that is a writing career with equanimity

Brief author bio:

Country of Under is Brooke Shaffner’s debut novel. Her work has appeared in The Hudson Review, Marie Claire, BOMB, Litmosphere, Lost and Found: Stories from New York, and The Lit Pub. She’s received grants from the Arts & Science Council, United States Artists, and the Saltonstall Foundation and residencies from the MacDowell Colony, the Ucross Foundation, the Saltonstall Foundation, the Edward Albee Foundation, the Jentel Foundation, the I-Park Foundation, and VCCA. Brooke is at work on a memoir, an excerpt of which won the 2023 Lit/South Award. She grew up part Garza, part Shaffner in Texas’s Rio Grande Valley and co-founded Freedom Tunnel Press with her partner Niteesh Elias to publish artivist books that straddle borders. She teaches and edits through her company Between the Lines and is on the faculty of the North Carolina Writers’ Network and Charlotte Lit. 

Learn more about the author and her book HERE.

https://sites.google.com/view/brookeshaffner/

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