John Freeman and Tahmima Anam Visit Fiction/Non/Fiction Podcast

John Freeman and Tahmima Anam join Fiction/Non/Fiction's hosts V.V. Ganeshananthan and Whitney Terrell to talk about Freeman's new collection of poetry, The Park, and Anam's fable included in Freeman's new anthology, Tales of Two Planets: Stories of Climate Change and Inequality in a Divided World, at Literary Hub. Climate change is the thread that connects these two writers and their practices in this discussion. "I believe that parks can be a very good influence on our lives…" Freeman explains. More: 

…One of the things a park resists I think, fundamentally, is the notion that everything is usable or fungible. You can apply to a park the idea that a park is useful because it is somehow relaxing. But, in reality, we live in a world in which time is commodified. Our labor has been commodified to a level that it’s almost abstract, so a person without a home, a person without a job, is triply expelled from the notions of society. Whereas many of the people who don’t feel uncomfortable in a park, or who feel entitled to be there, have busy jobs, which have taken up most of their time and are carrying, probably in their pocket, a sort of leash to their daily work as a reminder that they should be continuing to be a functionary of whatever business world that they’re in. A park can be an enlarging wedge in that moment, in that it can bring together people who are working hard with people who have no work, to make us realize that we do share one fundamental thing, which is that no one should be entirely defined by their ability to be a functional aspect of a labor-driven society, which is then pushing that value of labor up into the hands of a few. The gainfully employed share that in common with people who are not employed. There are few places in a city where that can be as obvious as a park.

Continue at Literary Hub.