The Long Conversation: Recent Episodes
Dan Shipper
Listen now | Returning for the new year’s first conversation, Rachel asks Dan and Nathan about how their writing collaboration mirrors their unique business partnership. Taylor wonders how people get started on a piece—and what their experiences have been working with editors after that point—and Adam finds parallels between the editor/writer relationship with his time in finance.
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Listen now | Having spent the week responding to a prompt—What does it mean to be alive?—Rachel and the Bundle writers spend their final hour of the year sharing their answers, as well as their thoughts on feeling enthusiasm and affection in and for our work and learning. Who is allowed to express these feelings? Who isn’t? When do we get in our own ways, and how might we write ourselves back on track?
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Listen now | After talking through questions of editorship and Rachel, Dan, Nathan and Adam turn their attention to the week’s reading: Helen Keller’s memoir The Story of My Life. The book doesn’t just chronicle Keller’s triumphant entry into language and her relationship with her teacher, Anne Sullivan—it offers context for her political activity and power of imagination, both of which are rooted in a crucial writer’s tool: Empathy.
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Listen now | After a writing exercise where the panelists explored different career paths they might have followed, Dan, Adam, and Taylor talk through their experiences imagining alternate realities in writing. Where does regret become possibility? What are the uses—and precarities—of doing personal writing with an audience in mind? Would Taylor have made a good furniture designer?
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Listen now | Rachel and the writers (including new panelist Fadeke Adegbuyi!) welcome the author of Writing As a Way of Being himself, Robert P. Yagelski—or Bob, as we’ve come to know him. With Bob’s seminal work on the sensory experience of writing as a foundation, the discussion ranges from the classroom to the office to the mind, in search of answers to one (massive) question:
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Taking cues from Robert Yagelski’s Writing as a Way of Being, Rachel guides the panel through pedagogy. At the end of a taxing week, how can we access writing’s meditative potential? What myths have we been taught about “productive” writing — and how do we begin to unlearn them?
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The team talks to John H. Richardson, award-winning journalist for publications including Esquire and GQ — and Rachel’s dad! — about structure, note-taking, doing friendly battle with editors, and how and why to push through blank-page fears.
If you didn’t get a chance to read it before the live show last week, you can find “My Father the Spy” here.
And check out John’s other articles mentioned in this episode — on Dr. Willie Parker; the swinging doctor; prison theater; and polyamory.
Next on TLC: Writing as a Way of Being
This week, we’re reading a chapter from scholar Robert P. Yagelski’s book Writing as a Way of Being, entitled ‘Toward an Ontological Theory of Writing.’ The team will be talking issues of pedagogy, otherwise known as a few of Rachel’s Favorite Things: how are we taught to write and how might that contribute to a trauma around self-expression? What is this anxiety we feel when it comes to that blank page? What is the role of the body in writing through our digital omnipresence? Let this TLC be a balm for the week to come.
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Listen now | Rachel talks with Dan, Nathan, Adam, and new panelist Taylor Majewski about Carmen Maria Machado’s genre-smashing memoir, In the Dream House. What are the individual bricks keeping Machado’s house of memory upright? When do metaphors end up creating reality itself? How do you announce your presence within an experience you’ve been historically denied?
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Listen now | Introducing The Long Conversation: Podcast Edition! In this edited version of Rachel’s first live chat with the Bundle writers, they discuss editing etiquette, the upside of being down on your own writing, and Alexander Chee’s The Rosary. How long does it take to write something with true layers? Do things only become real when we create metaphors for them? Whose mom beat everyone else to figuring out what this essay is
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