Vermont poet Michael Metivier speaks with Vermont novelist Makenna Goodman about her debut, The Shame (Milkweed, 2020). With humor and vivacity, the book charts the internal struggles of its narrator, Alma.

As an artist I’m always interested in things that are double but not binary—that is, they have a doubleness to them that includes an infernal superposition where both are true—or not true—at once.