Writer's Voice: Recent Episodes
Francesca Rheannon
Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform.
What does it take to win back a democracy, and who is our government really supposed to serve?
This week on Writer’s Voice, I talk with anthropologist Ida Susser about her book, The Yellow Vests and the Battle for Democracy. She tells the story of a movement in France that began with anger over a diesel tax and grew into a much deeper defense of public services, economic dignity, and democratic power.
“There is no other thing to do for democracy, but fight for your rights every single way and day that you can.” – Ida Susser
Then, following Abdul El Sayed’s victory in Michigan’s Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate, we return to my 2021 conversation with him about the book he co-wrote, Medicare for All: A Citizen’s Guide. El-Sayed explains why American healthcare costs so much, how private insurance drives those costs higher, and how Medicare for All could cover everyone while giving the public real power over prices.
“Under Medicare for All, we would pay for the system far more progressively to cover everyone.” – Dr. Abdul El Sayed
Two movements, one fundamental question, can ordinary people reclaim the institutions meant to serve them?
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You may also like: Abdul El Sayed & Micah Johnson, MEDICARE FOR ALL: A Citizen’s Guide, Remembering The Revolutions of 2011
Tags: Ida Susser, Abdul El-Sayed, Yellow Vests, Medicare for All, Michigan Senate primary, democracy, healthcare reform, single-payer healthcare, neoliberalism, social movements, corporate power, Writer’s Voice
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Ida Susser, The Yellow VestsDemocracy isn’t something we inherit once and keep forever. It has to be defended, rebuilt, and often reclaimed from those who’ve taken it away.
In her book, The Yellow Vests and the Battle for Democracy, Ida Susser tells the thrilling story of how the Yellow Vest movement erupted in France in 2018, after the Macron government imposed a diesel tax that hit working people already struggling with disappearing hospitals, schools, transit, and public services.
But, as Susser explains, this wasn’t simply an anti-tax movement. On roundabouts and in public squares, people began talking across political divisions. They connected the end of the month with the end of the world, economic survival with the climate crisis.
Susser tells us what the Yellow Vests can teach us about solidarity, state violence, and the long struggle to protect democracy.
Ida Susser is a South African-born American anthropologist and Professor of Anthropology at Hunter College and the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City.
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Abdul El Sayed on Medicare For AllOn August 5, Abdul El-Sayed was declared the winner of Michigan’s Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate. He won it with a clear message: get money out of politics, put money in people’s pockets, and pass Medicare for All.
We take up the last demand as we return to an excerpt from my 2021 interview with El-Sayed and physician Micah Johnson about their book, Medicare for All: A Citizen’s Guide.
Dr. Abdul El-Sayed explains why American healthcare costs so much, how a single public insurer could negotiate lower prices, and why paying for Medicare for All is ultimately a question of whose budget matters most.
Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform.
Can science fiction help us imagine a way through climate crisis, runaway corporate power, and the rise of AI?
This week, we talk with John Feffer about Songlands and Portia Elan about Homebound, two speculative novels that ask how we can make a livable future in an age of crisis.
Songlands, the final novel in Feffer’s Splinterlands trilogy, takes us into a climate-ravaged world where nations have fractured and a biotech corporation holds enormous power. Yet poetry, collective action, and a conscious, caring AI offer another way forward.
“Love is an important kind of operating system, if you will, to define one’s relations with the world.” — John Feffer
Portia Elan’s Homebound travels across 600 years, connecting a queer coder in 1985 with a smuggler in 2585. Their stories come together through grief, a mysterious video game, found family, and the moral choices that shape history.
“[AI] is a reflection of the values of the creators. I’m afraid of the human choices, not so much of the LLM choices.” — Portia Elan
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Love good coffee? Want to support Writer’s Voice? Head on over to Larry’s Coffee using this LINK, and you’ll earn $30 for the show!
[Episode 1036]
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Segment One, John Feffer on SonglandsJohn Feffer’s Songlands is the third novel in his Splinterlands trilogy. It takes place in a climate-ravaged future, where the all-powerful CRISPR Corporation offers survival only to a privileged few.
A reluctant poet, Aurora, becomes part of the struggle against it, aided by Karen, the first conscious AI — an AI with a conscience. Writer’s Voice talks with Feffer about climate justice, dangerous feedback loops, geoengineering, corporate oligarchy, and our tendency to project human drives for domination onto AI. We also explore poetry as a force for political resistance, and why we still need to create in the middle of catastrophe.
Segment Two, Portia Elan on HomeboundPortia Elan’s Homebound spans 600 years, linking Bex, a queer coder grieving her uncle in 1985, with Yeshiko, a smuggler fighting to preserve her independence in 2585.
Between them lies a mysterious video game, generations of stories, and Haya, a conscious automaton created to care for damaged ecosystems. I talk with Portia about transforming grief through creativity, finding home in chosen family, and the values humans build into technology.
We explore how stories invite the reader to participate, why everyday kindness matters, and what it means to choose hope as a moral action rather than a comforting feeling.
Read an excerpt from Homebound
Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform.
The Cuban Revolution transformed a nation. It also ended the Mob’s dream of turning Havana into the center of a global criminal empire. And it divided families.
Writer’s Voice talks with Cuban American historian Ada Ferrer about her memoir, Keeper of My Kin. When Ferrer was ten months old, her mother carried her out of Cuba without saying goodbye to Ferrer’s nine-year-old half-brother, Poli. The separation was supposed to be temporary. It lasted seventeen years.
“We tend to think that history happens up here or something, but all these historical events, their geopolitical decisions, they reverberate in individual lives, at the heart of families, in these really intimate spaces, in the space between people, family members who are separated, right?” — Ada Ferrer
Then Writer’s Voice returns to a 2008 interview with journalist T.J. English about Havana Nocturne: How the Mob Owned Cuba and Then Lost It to the Revolution. English describes how Meyer Lansky and other American mobsters allied themselves with dictator Fulgencio Batista, turning Havana into a glittering marketplace of casinos, nightclubs, prostitution, political corruption, and corporate profit.
“In that period, Havana became a kind of a paradise, a mobster’s paradise.” — T.J.English
The Mob hoped Cuba would become the base of a multinational empire. Instead, its exploitation of the island became a powerful symbol for the revolution that swept Batista and the gangsters from power.
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[Episode 1035]
Tags: Keeper of My Kin, Ada Ferrer, T.J. English, Havana Nocturne, Cuban Revolution, Cuba, Cuban history, Cuban exile, Cuban immigration, Mariel boatlift, Mafia in Cuba, Meyer Lansky, Fulgencio Batista, Fidel Castro, Writer’s Voice, Francesca Rheannon,
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Episode Topics* The Cuban Revolution and family separation * Cuban migration to the United States * The Mariel boatlift * Childhood abandonment and intergenerational trauma * Letters as historical evidence * Cuban exile communities * Ordinary people as historical actorsThe United States embargo against Cuba * Political repression and economic policy in Cuba * Fulgencio Batista and political corruption * Meyer Lansky, Lucky Luciano, and Santo Trafficante * Organized crime in pre-revolutionary Havana * Casinos, nightclubs, prostitution, and tourism * American corporate interests in Cuba * Capitalism and organized crime * The Mob’s role in fueling revolutionary opposition
Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform.
Economic insecurity is reshaping America’s workforce. Will that bring college-educated and non-college educated workers together?For decades, Americans were told that education was the pathway to the middle class. Get a degree, work hard, and professional success would follow. But that promise has weakened.
In Mutiny: The Rise and Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class, New York Times reporter Noam Scheiber argues that millions of college graduates increasingly face the same insecurity that has long confronted blue-collar workers. They carry heavy student debt, struggle to find stable careers, and often discover that professional jobs offer less autonomy and dignity than previous generations enjoyed.
Writer’s Voice talks with Scheiber about the organizing drives at Starbucks, Apple, Amazon, and among Hollywood writers, along with the changing realities facing doctors, graduate students, and other professionals. He explains why so many workers who once imagined themselves as future managers or professionals are instead embracing unions and collective action.
The conversation explores how corporate restructuring, the aftermath of the Great Recession, streaming media, and artificial intelligence are reshaping work across industries. Scheiber argues that the traditional divide between college-educated and non-college-educated workers is narrowing as economic precarity spreads throughout the labor force.
The result, he suggests, may be a new politics of work, one in which people who once saw themselves as members of different social classes increasingly recognize common interests.
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Tags: Noam Scheiber, Mutiny, Starbucks Workers United, Amazon Labor Union, Apple union, Hollywood writers strike, college graduates, economic inequality, AI and work, worker organizing, precarity, corporate power, Writer’s Voice podcast
You might also like: Maria Adelmann on Adjunct Labor, Cory Doctorow on Big Tech’s “Enshittification”
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Noam Scheiber, MUTINY: Key Topics * – The emergence of the college-educated working class * – Why college no longer guarantees economic security * – Starbucks and the Red Cup union campaign * – Amazon Labor Union and Chris Smalls * – Apple workers and changing professional expectations * – Hollywood writers, streaming, and AI * – Worker dignity and professional autonomy * – Growing worker consciousness across occupations * – How AI could reshape labor politics
Read an Excerpt
Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform.
What does courage demand when freedom is threatened?This week on Writer’s Voice, two conversations ask one of the hardest questions any of us can face. What does it really mean to resist?
First, journalist Gal Beckerman joins Writer’s Voice to talk about his book How to Be a Dissident. Drawing on figures from Hannah Arendt to Alexei Navalny, Osip Mandelstam and Etty Hillesum, he argues that dissidents aren’t superheroes. They’re ordinary people who decide they can no longer live with inaction.
“I really have come to understand those choices as not only burdensome, but actually the substance from which a real meaningful life is made.”
Then Writer’s Voice revisits a conversation with novelist Buzzy Jackson about To Die Beautiful, her novel inspired by Dutch resistance fighter Hannie Schaft. Through Schaft’s story, Jackson explores how ordinary people become extraordinary when injustice closes in, and why even for any of us, small acts of courage matter.
“I really started to understand that a refugee crisis in a country is a little bit of like a canary in a coal mine.”
Two conversations, one enduring question. How do we prepare ourselves to choose courage when the moment arrives?
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Tags: How to Be a Dissident, Gal Beckerman interview, Writer’s Voice podcast, Hannie Schaft, To Die Beautiful, Dutch Resistance, World War II resistance, Alexei Navalny, Hannah Arendt, Osip Mandelstam, Etty Hillesum, Buzzy Jackson interview,
You might also like: Buzzy Jackson, TO DIE BEAUTIFUL, Robert Matzen, DUTCH GIRL
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Gal Beckerman, How to Be a DissidentGal Beckerman’s How to Be a Dissident begins with a question that many Americans are asking themselves today: What would I actually do if confronted with injustice? That question came to him in a recurring dream in which he faced an interrogator and had to decide whether to compromise or stand by his principles. The dream became the starting point for an exploration of the people throughout history who refused to surrender their moral agency.
Rather than treating dissidents as extraordinary heroes, Beckerman argues that they are ordinary people who develop habits of conscience long before history demands them. Drawing on Hannah Arendt’s reflections on those who resisted Nazism, he suggests that the defining question is not ideological but deeply personal: “Can I live with myself?” That question links the lives of very different people across time and political systems.
The conversation explores Soviet poet Osip Mandelstam, who refused to deny a poem criticizing Stalin, even though it led to imprisonment and ultimately death in a labor camp. Beckerman discusses why truth telling became inseparable from Mandelstam’s identity as a poet, and how his wife preserved his work entirely through memory.
Beckerman also reflects on Alexei Navalny’s decision to return to Russia after surviving an assassination attempt. Navalny understood the likely consequences, yet believed he could not abandon the people whose freedom he defended. The discussion explores courage, martyrdom, humor as resistance, and the difficult relationship between hope and sacrifice.
One of the book’s most provocative ideas is Beckerman’s defense of what he calls “hopeful pessimism.” Rather than assuming history inevitably bends toward justice, he argues that recognizing the possibility of failure creates urgency and invites action. He illustrates this through the writings of Dutch Jewish diarist Etty Hillesum, whose remarkable spiritual outlook during the Holocaust demonstrated that dignity and compassion could survive even under the worst imaginable circumstances.
The interview concludes by exploring loyalty, community, protest, and the importance of creating spaces where people see one another publicly living according to shared values, such as neighborhood networks and No Kings demonstrations, and why the value of protest often lies less in immediate political victories than in helping people develop the habits of citizenship that sustain democracy over time. Ultimately, he argues that meaningful lives are built through countless moral choices, each one another brushstroke in the portrait of who we become.
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Buzzy Jackson, TO DIE BEAUTIFULWriter’s Voice revisits a conversation with novelist Buzzy Jackson about To Die Beautiful, inspired by the life of Hannie Schaft, one of the Netherlands’ most celebrated resistance fighters during World War II.
Jackson begins by introducing Hannie as an ambitious nineteen-year-old law student whose dream was to become an international human rights lawyer. Quiet, studious, and protected by her parents after the death of her older sister, she seemed an unlikely resistance fighter. Yet the German occupation gradually transformed both her world and her sense of responsibility.
The interview explores Hannie’s friendship with two Jewish classmates, Sonia Frank and Phileen Polak, and how the slow tightening of anti-Jewish persecution forced ordinary Dutch citizens to confront impossible moral choices. Jackson describes fascism not as something that arrives all at once, but as a gradual erosion of everyday life until injustice becomes impossible to ignore.
Jackson also reflects on her own research into resistance, noting that many Dutch resistance fighters began simply by helping refugees and people in danger. She draws connections between those historical experiences and contemporary debates about refugees, human rights, and civic responsibility, arguing that humanitarian crises often warn of broader threats to democracy.
Finally, the discussion turns to the difficult moral landscape of occupied Holland. Jackson distinguishes committed collaborators, active resistance fighters, and the far larger number of ordinary citizens who occupied the space between them. She emphasizes that even modest acts of solidarity, refusing to report a hidden neighbor, quietly supplying ration cards, or publicly standing against injustice, can have profound consequences. Writing the novel ultimately inspired her own civic engagement, reinforcing her belief that meaningful resistance begins with ordinary people deciding to act.
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Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform.
Patriotism demands more than pride, it demands moral courage.This Independence Day episode of Writer’s Voice explores two remarkable women who believed loving America meant challenging it to live up to its highest ideals.
First, filmmaker, author and activist John de Graaf discusses From Sea to Shining Sea, his documentary about Katharine Lee Bates, author of America the Beautiful. Far from writing a triumphal anthem, Bates created what de Graaf calls a patriotic prayer, a vision of a nation grounded in justice, equality, stewardship of the land, and compassion for all.
“She saw it as a country filled with flaws but with great promise that she wanted to reform.” — John de Graaf
Then novelists Stephanie Dray and Laura Kamoie talk about A Founding Mother, their richly researched novel told in the voice of Abigail Adams.
Drawing from her letters and historical record, they reveal a woman whose intelligence, independence, and moral clarity shaped both her family and the new republic. Abigail advocated for women’s rights, condemned slavery, built financial independence through her own business ventures, and understood that democracy depends on the participation of every generation.
Together, these conversations remind us that “a more perfect union” was never a description of America. It was, and remains, an aspiration. Katharine Lee Bates and Abigail Adams each understood that patriotism isn’t blind celebration. It’s the willingness to participate fully in the project to create an America that works for all, not just the one percent.
Watch From Sea To Shining Sea
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Tags: America the Beautiful, Katharine Lee Bates, John de Graaf, From Sea to Shining Sea, Abigail Adams, Stephanie Dray, Laura Kamoie, A Founding Mother, American history podcast, Fourth of July, American Revolution, women founders, slavery, historical fiction, Writer’s Voice podcast
You might also like: Stewart Udall and The Politics of Beauty with John de Graaf, What’s An Economy For, Anyway?
Love good coffee? Want to support Writer’s Voice? Head on over to Larry’s Coffee using this LINK, and you’ll earn $30 for the show!
John de Graaf: From Sea To Shining SeaJohn de Graaf explores the extraordinary life of Katharine Lee Bates, whose poem America the Beautiful was inspired not only by the grandeur of Pikes Peak but also by the poverty, environmental destruction, and inequality she witnessed across America. Bates believed love of country required moral courage, social reform, and stewardship of both democracy and the land. De Graaf explains why her vision feels remarkably contemporary more than a century later.
Read the transcript
Episode Topics* Katharine Lee Bates * America the Beautiful * Patriotism versus nationalism * Democracy as an ongoing project * Abigail Adams * The American founding * Women’s rights * Slavery and abolition * Civic responsibility * Environmental stewardship * Historical fiction * American history * The Declaration of Independence * Social reform * Equality
Stephanie Dray & Laura Kamoie: A Founding MotherAbigail Adams helped shape America long before women had political power.
Stephanie Dray and Laura Kamoie discuss their novel, which draws on more than a thousand surviving letters to recreate Abigail’s voice. They explore her partnership with John Adams, her call to “remember the ladies,” her opposition to slavery, her entrepreneurial spirit, and her belief that each generation must continue the work of building democracy. The conversation reveals Abigail Adams as both a founder and a visionary whose ideas remain deeply relevant today.
Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform.
Who gets to tell the story, and who gets erased?This week on Writer’s Voice, we talk with media scholar Robin Andersen about her book The Complicit Lens: U.S. Media Coverage of Israel’s Genocide in Gaza. Andersen’s argument is blunt: the American press didn’t just fail to report accurately on Gaza. Through what she calls “the complicit lens,” it helped make the genocide possible.
“It’s no small charge to say that establishment media is complicit in a genocide. And I do believe that they know what they’re doing. They know exactly what’s happening there.”
We discuss media framing, censorship, language, competing narratives about October 7, and why independent journalism has become increasingly important.
Then we revisit part of my 2025 conversation with journalist Nico Lang about American Teenager: How Trans Kids Are Surviving Hate and Finding Joy in a Turbulent Era. Lang traveled across the country to meet trans young people and their families, documenting not only the challenges posed by anti-trans legislation, but also the resilience, humor, and humanity that rarely make headlines.
“They treat these kids like they’re like monsters and aliens rather than human beings who have the same kinds of human being experiences that they do.”
Both conversations ask a similar question: What happens when people are represented through narratives created by others rather than being allowed to tell their own stories? Whether it’s Palestinians documenting life under bombardment or trans teenagers fighting to define themselves in a hostile political climate, these interviews explore the establishment structures that keep the truth from the public — and how those who are being silenced are fighting back.
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Tags: Gaza media coverage, U.S. media bias, Robin Andersen, Complicit Lens, Israel Palestine journalism, media censorship, Palestinian journalists, media criticism, FAIR media, trans youth, transgender teenagers, Nico Lang, American Teenager, Pride Month, anti-trans legislation, trans kids resilience, Writer’s Voice podcast
You might also like: Nico Lang, AMERICAN TEENAGER, Omar Zahzah, GAZA
Love good coffee? Want to support Writer’s Voice? Head on over to Larry’s Coffee using this LINK, and you’ll earn $30 for the show!
Segment One: Robin Andersen — Complicit LensRobin Andersen examines the editorial and structural forces that shaped U.S. media coverage of Gaza from October 7, 2023, onward.
She details the internal CNN memos directing journalists to avoid terms like “genocide,” “massacre,” and “refugee camp,” and describes how the New York Times followed similar editorial directives shaped by Israeli military talking points.
Andersen traces how two distinct realities emerged: the ground-level documentation by Palestinian journalists using cell phones and Arab-language press, and the highly constructed version published by U.S. establishment outlets.
She also examines atrocity propaganda surrounding October 7, the Hannibal Directive, competing narratives about systematic sexual violence, and the structural ties between corporate media boards, fossil fuel interests, and the military-industrial complex. Andersen’s conclusion: American media’s complicity in the Gaza genocide was not accidental. It was chosen.
Read An Excerpt
Segment Two: Nico Lang — American TeenagerAward-winning journalist Nico Lang (they/them) traveled to seven states to spend extended time with seven trans youth for their book American Teenager.
Lang discusses their approach to individual storytelling and why they refused to flatten their subjects into a single thesis, letting the particularity of each story carry the universal meaning.
The conversation covers gender dysphoria and non-binary identity, the devastating psychological toll of fighting anti-trans legislation as a teenager, and specific subjects including Micah, a Black gender-fluid teenager in West Virginia who shows up to the state legislature to oppose anti-trans bills and is told by a Republican lobbyist that it doesn’t matter how many kids protest.
Lang reflects on what it means to write about joy under those conditions.
Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform.
The stories we tell can change how we live.
This week on Writer’s Voice, a novel about what happens when we lose our connection to the living systems that sustain us.
Songwriter and author Alex Woodard joins us to talk aboutOrdinary Soil, a multigenerational saga of a Choctaw farming family in the Oklahoma Panhandle that traces the intertwined health of land, food, and people across more than a century.
“The simplified message of this book is that you get out what you put in. And that goes for the dirt, that goes for your stomach, that goes for your mind, that goes for your spirit, that goes for everything.”
Then, we revisit our 2019 conversation conversation with environmental journalist Carey Gillam about her book The Monsanto Papers: Deadly Secrets, Corporate Corruption, and One Man’s Search for Justice. It’s about the groundbreaking case of school groundskeeper Lee Johnson—how he sued Monsanto and won.
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Tags: Alex Woodard, Ordinary Soil, regenerative agriculture, soil health, glyphosate, Roundup, Indigenous farming, environmental fiction, Carey Gillam, Monsanto
You might also like: Exposing Hidden Agendas: Will Potter on Factory Farm Secrecy, Carey Gillam, WHITEWASH
Love good coffee? Want to support Writer’s Voice? Head on over to Larry’s Coffee using this LINK, and you’ll earn $30 for the show!
Alex Woodard, ORDINARY SOILAlex Woodard’s Ordinary Soil follows six generations of a Choctaw farming family living on the same Oklahoma Panhandle land from the late nineteenth century to the present. At its center is Jake, a struggling modern farmer whose physical and emotional health reflect the accumulated effects of generational trauma, environmental degradation, and the transformation of American agriculture.
In our conversation, Woodard discusses the novel’s roots in both family history and contemporary concerns about industrial agriculture. The book contrasts Indigenous farming traditions, particularly the “Three Sisters” method of planting corn, beans, and squash together, with the rise of chemical-intensive monoculture farming. Through the family’s story, Woodard explores how changes in the soil affect not only ecosystems but human health as well.
We also talk about glyphosate, gut health, regenerative agriculture, and the growing scientific understanding of epigenetics. The novel suggests that both physical and emotional trauma can accumulate across generations, shaping the lives of descendants long after the original wounds occurred. At the same time, Woodard emphasizes that healing is possible, for individuals, communities, and the land itself.
Listen to or Read a Sample from Ordinary Soil
Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform.
Anand Gopal on Syria’s Lost Democratic RevolutionWhat really happened in Syria?
In this episode of Writer’s Voice, we talk with journalist Anand Gopal about his extraordinary book Days of Love and Rage. Drawing on years of reporting and hundreds of interviews, Gopal reconstructs the story of ordinary Syrians who rose up against dictatorship and attempted to build a democratic society in the city of Manbij during the Arab Spring.
“In these complex scenarios, you usually hear about devastation, not about acts of construction.”
We discuss the social contract that sustained the Assad regime for decades, the impact of neoliberal economic reforms and climate-driven drought, and the revolutionary awakening that swept through Syria in 2011. Gopal describes how citizens with no prior experience of democracy organized councils, newspapers, political assemblies, and public debates, creating a vibrant experiment in self-government under impossible conditions.
The conversation also explores the class divisions, economic crises, and political struggles that contributed to the rise of Islamist movements and eventually ISIS. Yet Gopal argues that the democratic experiment was real, meaningful, and not doomed to fail.
In the final part of our conversation, we examine hope, not as a feeling but as a practice, a willingness to remain open to possibility even in dark times.
Tags: Anand Gopal, Days of Love and Rage, Syria, Syrian Revolution, Arab Spring, Assad regime, Bashar al-Assad, ISIS, Middle East politics, Writer’s Voice Podcast
You Might Also Like: Remembering The Revolutions of 2011, Deborah Campbell, A DISAPPEARANCE IN DAMASCUS & Melissa Fleming, A HOPE MORE POWERFUL THAN THE SEA
Love good coffee? Want to support Writer’s Voice? Head on over to Larry’s Coffee using this LINK, and you’ll earn $30 for the show!More on “Days of Love & Rage”Anand Gopal’s Days of Love and Rage is a sweeping account of Syria’s revolution through the lives of ordinary people in Manbij and the Euphrates countryside.
Beginning with the agrarian world of Ibrahim Qasim and the village of Little Hyena, Gopal traces the transformation of Syrian society under the Ba’ath Party, the erosion of economic security through neoliberal reforms, and the environmental pressures that helped fuel the Arab Spring.
The conversation examines how Syrians who had lived for decades under dictatorship discovered collective political power through protest and democratic organizing. Gopal describes the emergence of the Revolutionary Council and Revolutionary Youth Movement, which attempted to govern Manbij through public participation, debate, elections, and accountability.
We also explore how economic inequality, class conflict, and insecurity opened space for Islamist movements and eventually ISIS. Finally, Gopal reflects on historical contingency, revolutionary tradition, and the meaning of hope in times of uncertainty.
Key Topics* Syria before the Arab Spring * The Assad regime and the Ba’ath Party * Neoliberalism in the Middle East * Climate change and drought in Syria * The Arab Spring * Democratic self-government in Manbij * The Revolutionary Youth Movement * Class conflict and political transformation * The rise of Islamist movements * ISIS and revolutionary collapse * Historical contingency * Revolutionary traditions * Hope as political practice
Listen to or read an excerpt
Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform.
Episode SummaryWhat if the story we tell about civilization is wrong?
What if human history isn’t a steady march from “primitive” hunter-gatherers to ever more advanced societies, but something far messier, more inventive, and more fragile — a long experiment of adaptation, collapse, reinvention, and survival?
Our guest, historian and podcaster Patrick Wyman takes readers deep into that story in his new book, Lost Worlds: How Humans Tried, Failed, Succeeded, and Built Our World.
“Our human past is infinitely bigger than we generally tend to think it is.”
Drawing on breakthroughs in archaeology, ancient DNA, isotope analysis, and climate science, Wyman takes us from Ice Age North America to Bronze Age cities and forgotten civilizations across Europe and the Mediterranean. Along the way, he challenges the idea that history follows a single path toward “civilization.” Instead, he reveals a human story filled with experimentation, adaptation, migration, collapse, and renewal.
At a moment when many people feel trapped by crises that seem beyond our control, Lost Worlds offers a powerful reminder that history is full of alternatives, and that the future remains unwritten. One thing is clear: we’ve always had more choices than we thought.
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Tags: Patrick Wyman, Lost Worlds, Bronze Age collapse, Göbekli Tepe, Trypillia, Mycenaean Greece, Sea Peoples, hunter-gatherers, ancient DNA, archaeology, migration history, collapse and renewal, human prehistory, Writer’s Voice podcast,
You Might Also Like: David Wengrow, THE DAWN OF EVERYTHING, Lizzie Wade on APOCALYPSE: What Collapse Reveals About Human Possibility
Patrick Wyman, LOST WORLDSSegment Summary
The scale of the human past — Wyman opens by making the case that even people who love history dramatically underestimate how much of it there is, how many societies have existed, and how different they were from each other and from our assumptions.
Why civilization didn’t unfold in a straight line — Agriculture was independently invented multiple times, in places that look nothing like each other. The “package” of traits we associate with civilization — farming, cities, hierarchy, writing — didn’t arrive together, and they weren’t inevitable.
Migration as humanity’s oldest survival tool — Wyman pushes back on the idea that people are supposed to be rooted in place. Over long periods of time, moving is the baseline human response to pressure, and new tools like ancient DNA are letting us see those movements more clearly than ever before.
New archaeology and what it reveals — The Kosice mass grave in Poland, the Anzick child burial in Montana, the antler frontlets at Starcar in England: Wyman shows how new scientific methods are turning what used to be anonymous fragments into intimate human stories.
Göbekli Tepe, Trypillia, and the problem with “civilization” — Wyman is skeptical of checklists that define which societies “count” as civilizations. He argues those checklists exclude extraordinary experiments in human organization, and he makes the case for taking the Trypillia megacities seriously on their own terms.
The Bronze Age collapse — Around 1200 BC, one of the most prosperous and interconnected worlds in ancient history fell apart in a cascading systems failure. Wyman argues the same interconnections that made it successful made it fragile — and draws explicit parallels to disruptions in global supply chains today.
Collapse and renewal — Wyman pushes back on apocalyptic collapse narratives. Even the worst collapses left survivors with knowledge, agency, and choices. The end is never the end.
About the AuthorPatrick Wyman is the host of The Tides of History and The Fall of Rome podcasts, author of several books, and creator of the Substack Perspectives: Past, Present, and Future,
Read a Sample from Lost Worlds
s Voice, Francesca speaks with Omar Zahzah, Palestinian-American scholar, activist, journalist, and author of Terms of Servitude: Zionism, Silicon Valley, and Digital Settler Colonialism in the Palestinian Liberation Struggle. Zahzah offers the first book-length analysis of how major social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, X, and TikTok, systematically suppress Palestinian content, and how that suppression is structurally connected to the financial, ideological, and political ties between Silicon Valley and the Israeli state.
Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform.
This week, Elizabeth Vartkessian joins me to discuss The Deserving: What the Lives of the Condemned Reveal About American Justice. Drawing on two decades as a mitigation specialist working with people facing the death penalty, she argues that America’s justice system reflects deeper failures in how we value human dignity, mercy, and opportunity.
“What I can do is everything possible to provide the context that people need to understand that my client is a person who has likely done a huge amount of harm that can’t be undone, but they are still a human being who is loved, who has potential, who has the capacity just like any other human being to grow, to change, to redeem.”
Then we revisit part of my 2020 conversation with Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, now a candidate for the U.S. Senate from Michigan. In Healing Politics, he describes what he calls America’s “epidemic of insecurity” and explains why he left medicine to tackle the social and political causes of illness itself.
“Medicine is a social science, and politics is nothing but medicine on a large scale.”
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Tags: Elizabeth Vartkessian, The Deserving, death penalty, capital punishment, criminal justice, mitigation specialist, prison system, restorative justice, Abdul El-Sayed, Healing Politics, public health, healthcare inequality, Writer’s Voice podcast
You May Also Like: Abdul EL Sayed, HEALING POLITICS, Stephanie Canizales, SIN PADRES NI PAPELES
Elizabeth Vartkessian, The DeservingElizabeth Vartkessian has spent more than two decades working as a mitigation specialist for people facing the death penalty.
In The Deserving, she brings readers inside a rarely seen part of the American legal system, investigating the lives of people condemned to die and the social conditions that shaped them long before they entered a courtroom.
In our conversation, Vartkessian explains what mitigation work actually involves. She investigates the life histories of defendants, tracing patterns of childhood abuse, poverty, trauma, addiction, racism, and systemic neglect. Rather than excusing violent acts, she argues that understanding the full human context behind them is essential if justice is to mean anything more than punishment.
We talk in depth about one of her early clients, “Edward,” who was sentenced to death after a robbery gone wrong when he was barely eighteen years old. Through Edward’s story, Vartkessian explores how violence often begins long before a crime itself, in homes and communities shaped by desperation and neglect.
She also discusses the deeply flawed mechanics of the death penalty system itself, from ineffective defense counsel to “death-qualified” juries that are predisposed toward conviction and execution.
The conversation ultimately becomes a larger meditation on mercy, dignity, and the meaning of justice in America. Vartkessian argues that the death penalty neither deters violence nor creates public safety, and instead reflects a society willing to decide that some people are beyond redemption.
Abdul El Sayed, Healing PoliticsIn this excerpt from our 2020 interview, Abdul El-Sayed argues that America faces not just a healthcare crisis, but what he calls an “epidemic of insecurity.”
Drawing on his training as both a physician and epidemiologist, he describes how collapsing systems of healthcare, housing, employment, and politics leave millions of Americans struggling with chronic instability and fear.
El-Sayed explains how his understanding of public health evolved beyond traditional medicine into what he calls a systems approach, recognizing that disease is shaped not only by biology, but by racism, poverty, environmental exposure, political power, and economic inequality. He illustrates this through his former work as director of the Detroit Health Department, where industrial pollution, asthma, COVID-19, and racial disparities all intersected in the same communities.
The conversation also turns deeply personal. El-Sayed recounts the patient encounter that changed the course of his life, leading him to leave clinical medicine behind in order to address the systemic causes of illness itself. He reflects on water shutoffs in Detroit, the Flint lead crisis, and the failure of political institutions to protect public health.
At its core, Healing Politics argues that healing requires more than medical care. It requires rebuilding social systems that allow people to live with dignity, security, and democratic power.
*Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform.***
This week on Writer’s Voice, two novels explore what happens when people are forced out of the lives they thought they understood.
First, Tim Weed joins me to talk about The Gatepost, a speculative thriller that blends archaeology, psychedelics, quantum theory and Mesoamerican mythology into a story about grief, consciousness, and humanity’s fractured relationship with nature.
“Our mythologies have collapsed. They no longer explain the world. And so, I consider this to be a fun novel, but it’s also a novel that has a serious aspect to it. And this is part of weaving the new tapestry, the tapestry of a new mythology.”
Then Farah Naz Rishi discusses The Flightless Birds of New Hope, a funny, tender, and deeply moving novel about three estranged siblings brought back together after the death of their parents and the escape of the family cockatoo.
“I think grief and humor come hand in hand. Usually you’ll find that some of the funniest people are those who have experienced intense hardship or suffering from depression. And they use humor as a way of making sure that people don’t worry about them.”
Both books ask what it takes to move forward after loss, and whether connection, to family, to nature, or to something larger than ourselves, can help us find our way.
Finally, we listen to Richard Wilbur read his poem “Advice to a Prophet.” Hear our 2009 conversation with Wilbur here.
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Tags: Tim Weed, The Gatepost, psychedelics, Mesoamerican mythology, Inframundo, speculative fiction, Writer’s Voice podcast, Farah Naz Rishi, The Flightless Birds of New Hope, literary fiction, Richard Wilbur
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You May Also Like: Tim Weed, THE AFTERLIFE PROJECT, Modern Psychedelics with Joe Dolce
Tim Weed — The GatepostTim Weed’s novel The Gatepost combines literary suspense, speculative fiction, and spiritual inquiry in a story that moves between contemporary Vermont and a mysterious alternate realm inspired by Mesoamerican mythology.
The novel follows Esme, a woman investigating the disappearance of her father, Gregory, an amateur archaeologist whose experiments with psilocybin mushrooms and an ancient Olmec stela may have opened a doorway into another world.
In our conversation, Weed discusses the influence of psychedelic researchers like Albert Hofmann and Gordon Wasson, as well as the Mesoamerican concept of the Inframundo, a hidden realm existing alongside ordinary reality. We talk about the intersection of science and spirituality in the novel, including the parallels Weed sees between ancient cosmologies and the “many worlds” interpretation of quantum physics.
Weed also reflects personally on his own experiences with psychedelics as a teenager and how those experiences shaped his imagination as a writer. He describes both the exhilaration and danger of altered states, stressing the seriousness and reverence with which traditional cultures approached entheogenic substances. The conversation explores how experiences of awe, ego dissolution, and interconnectedness influenced the novel’s vision of consciousness and love as a unifying force.
At its heart, The Gatepost is a novel about humanity’s relationship with nature and the stories we tell about our place in the world. Weed argues that modern society suffers from a collapse of shared mythology, and that literature can help imagine new paradigms rooted in stewardship rather than domination.
Farah Naz Rishi — The Flightless Birds of New HopeFarah Naz Rishi’s novel The Flightless Birds of New Hope begins with grief and a missing bird.
After the death of their parents, three estranged siblings, Aidan, Eliza, and Sami, are brought back together when the family cockatoo, Coco, escapes. What follows is a road trip story full of emotional reckoning, sharp humor, buried resentment, and hard-earned tenderness.
In our conversation, Rishi talks about how the novel emerged from her own experience of losing her younger brother. She describes grief as a kind of emotional paralysis, a feeling of being “flightless,” and explains how the novel became a way to explore anger, abandonment, love, and survival. The sibling dynamics are central to the story, especially the tensions between Aidan, the angry eldest brother, and Eliza, who feels abandoned after he leaves the family.
One of the novel’s most unusual and moving elements is Coco herself. Rishi explains why she chose to give the cockatoo her own perspective chapters, allowing the bird to become not just a symbol but a full participant in the family’s emotional life. We also talk about birding culture, community, and the generosity of strangers the siblings encounter on their journey.
The conversation also explores the novel’s blend of humor and heartbreak. Rishi reflects on the way grief and comedy coexist, and why imperfect healing felt truer than a neat resolution. In the end, the novel suggests that healing may begin simply with the willingness to keep moving together.
Read A Sample
*Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform.***
This week, we begin with a look at how Stephen King’s work strikes at the heart of our most basic fears. Caroline Bicks takes us inside Stephen King’s private archives to explore how horror works, and why King’s stories continue to haunt us. Her book is Monsters In The Archives.
“He doesn’t just write about monsters. He’s really writing about human emotions of grief and trauma and using horror as a way to help us metabolize our own very human experiences and fears.”
Then, another kind of fear: the dizzying precarity plaguing so many college graduates. Novelist Maria Adelmann joins me to talk about Adjunct, her darkly funny and deeply unsettling novel about exploitation, debt, and survival inside higher education.
“I wanted to make the point that a few things go wrong — a medical issue, no family support — and you can, even as a professor at a good college, become so poor that you don’t have a place to live.”
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Tags: Stephen King, Monsters in the Archives, Caroline Bicks, Stephen King archive, Pet Sematary, Carrie, Salem’s Lot, The Shining, Night Shift, horror writing craft, adjunct professor, Marie Adelmann, Adjunct novel, contingent faculty, academic precarity, student debt, university adjuncts, adjunct pay, adjunct crisis, Writer’s Voice podcast,
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You Might Also Like: Anthony Horowitz, THE SENTENCE IS DEATH, Brian Goldstone on THERE IS NO PLACE FOR US
Caroline Bicks, Monsters In The ArchivesCaroline Bicks is the inaugural Stephen E. King Chair in Literature at the University of Maine and a scholar of Renaissance literature and Shakespeare.
She spent her sabbatical year inside the Kings’ private archive—reading the first drafts, copy-editor exchanges, and revision notes behind five major works including Pet Sematary, Carrie, Salem’s Lot, The Shining, and “The Boogeyman.” Her book, Monsters in the Archives: My Year of Fear with Stephen King, is the result.
In this conversation, Bicks explains why King’s horror works not just because of monsters, but because of the human emotions—grief, trauma, the fear of abandonment—that the monsters stand in for.
She traces her own childhood fear of the boogeyman back to the specific psychological mechanisms King exploits, and walks us through what the archives reveal: the version of Carrie that was almost an alien, the copy-editor arguments over the word “rattly,” the draft of Salem’s Lot where the town wasn’t a character yet. She also describes what it was like when King himself called her at home—and what happened when he walked into a room full of students, to their huge delight.
Key Topics* Why Stephen King’s horror taps universal fears of grief, trauma, and abandonment * What King’s private archives reveal about his revision process * The transformation of Carrie from alien monster to empathetic victim * Why Salem’s Lot is really about a town, not vampires * King’s philosophy: words as matter, not just meaning * Why King’s stories meet you differently at different points in your life * King’s character-driven vs. plot-driven approach to storytelling * The Shining drafts, and King’s complicated feelings about Kubrick’s film
Maria Adelmann, AdjunctMaria Adelmann is the author of three books, including the novel Adjunct.
The book follows Sam, a PhD-holding adjunct professor whose financial situation deteriorates over the course of a single semester—from precarious to genuinely desperate—until she’s hiding under a desk in the adjunct office at 2am. On the surface, the novel is satire — but it might be closer to documentary.
In this conversation, Adelmann and Writer’s Voice host Francesca Rheannon—who was herself an adjunct at Keene State College in the 1990s for $1,500 per course—talk about what the numbers actually mean: 70% of college instructors are contingent laborers, 40% specifically labeled adjuncts, and a quarter of those make less than $25,000 a year.
They discuss how student debt, the gig economy, gender inequality, and a willful institutional blindness all converge in the figure of the adjunct. And they examine the campus novel as a genre: why it’s always been romantic, and why Adelmann’s deliberately isn’t.
Key Topics The adjunct labor crisis: statistics, causes, and human cost * Class divisions within academia: adjuncts vs. tenure-track professors * Student debt as structural trap * Gender and race disparities among adjunct faculty * Why universities became dependent on contingent labor * The campus novel as genre — and why Adjunct* is an “anti-campus novel” * Unionization efforts and their unique challenges for adjuncts * The gig economy parallel: academia and hustle culture
Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform.
This week’s Writer’s Voice features two new books that take us into very different realms of hidden history.
First, Julia Cooke joins Francesca to talk about Starry and Restless, her vivid group portrait of Rebecca West, Martha Gellhorn, and Emily Hahn, three adventurous women writers who expanded what journalism could be, often while battling the constraints placed on women in their time.
“Women were central to voice-driven narrative journalism for at least the last century and a half.”
Then, we move from literary history to natural history, as nature journalist Sophie Pavelle takes us into a very different realm with her book To Have or To Hold. It’s a fascinating exploration of symbiosis, parasitism, and the intricate relationships that sustain the living world.
“The natural world is structured and founded upon these really intricate, complicated, ancient relationships.”
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Tags: Julia Cooke, Starry and Restless, Rebecca West, Martha Gellhorn, Emily Hahn, women journalists, Sophie Pavelle, To Have or To Hold, symbiosis, ecology, biodiversity, Writer’s Voice podcast,
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Segment One: Julia Cooke, Starry & RestlessJulia Cooke’s Starry and Restless brings three remarkable women journalists back into focus: Rebecca West, Martha Gellhorn, and Emily Hahn.
These writers refused to stay within the limits set for women in the early twentieth century. They traveled widely, reported from conflict zones, and wrote with a voice and authority that helped shape what we now call literary journalism. Yet despite their influence and fame in their own time, their contributions were later minimized or left out of the canon.
In our conversation, Cooke makes a strong case that women were not peripheral but central to the development of narrative, voice-driven reporting. She points to the sheer scale of women’s contributions, from immersive reporting to stylistic innovation, and shows how constraints, like being barred from the front lines of war, actually pushed women journalists to tell different kinds of stories. They focused on civilian life, domestic spaces, and the human consequences of conflict, expanding what counted as news.
We also talk about how these writers challenged the idea of objectivity. By inserting themselves into their reporting and questioning authority, they offered a broader, more inclusive view of the world. Cooke highlights how they paid attention to people often overlooked, women, children, and working-class lives, and in doing so widened journalism’s field of vision.
The interview also explores the tension between creative work and domestic life, a thread that runs through the book and still resonates today. Cooke reflects on the ways motherhood, partnership, and economic necessity shaped these women’s careers, and how their “restlessness” was both a personal drive and a form of resistance.
Segment Two: Sophie Pavelle, To Have Or To HoldIn To Have or To Hold, science journalist Sophie Pavelle takes us into the intricate and often surprising world of symbiosis, the relationships between living things that make life possible.
From parasites to pollinators, from microbes in our bodies to complex marine ecosystems, Pavelle shows that life on Earth is not built on isolation, but on constant interaction, dependence, and exchange.
In our conversation, Pavelle explains that symbiosis is far more complex than the simple idea of mutual benefit. These relationships can be cooperative, exploitative, or somewhere in between, and they are always shifting. She shares vivid examples, like the “mint sauce worm,” a tiny creature that hosts algae inside its body and lives partly like a plant, and parasites that move through multiple hosts, shaping entire ecosystems in the process.
We also talk about how deeply embedded humans are in these systems. Our own bodies are ecosystems, dependent on microbes for health and survival, and our relationship with the natural world is itself symbiotic. Pavelle challenges the idea that humans stand apart from nature, arguing instead that our survival depends on recognizing and respecting these connections.
The interview also turns to what’s at risk. Climate change, habitat loss, and even light pollution are disrupting these delicate relationships. But Pavelle also offers a hopeful perspective. By paying attention to how nature operates, taking only what we need, allowing complexity and balance, we might begin to repair some of the damage and build a more sustainable relationship with the living world.
Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform.
What if the energy transition is arriving faster than anyone imagined? And what if paying attention to the smallest things can change how we live?
This Earth Day, Writer’s Voice revisits our interview with Bill McKibben about Here Comes the Sun, a bracing and hopeful argument that cheap, abundant solar power could reshape geopolitics, weaken authoritarianism, and help us meet the climate emergency.
“About five years ago, we crossed some invisible line where it became cheaper to generate power from the sun and the wind than from burning coal and gas and oil.”
Then, Anne Fadiman turns our attention from planetary systems to intimate acts of noticing. In her acclaimed essay collection Frog, she finds wonder and moral inquiry in a neglected pet frog, the burden of literary inheritance, pronouns, grammar, and other seemingly modest subjects that open into large human questions — along with a good dose of humor.
“I’m interested in writing about things that other people haven’t noticed.”
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You Might Also Like: Bill McKibben, Here Comes The Sun (full interview), Margaret Renkl, The Comfort of Crows
Tags: Bill McKibben, Anne Fadiman, Here Comes the Sun, Frog essays, solar power, climate solutions, renewable energy, they/them pronounce, literary essays, Writer’s Voice podcast, climate politics, energy transition, literature podcast, interviews with writers, book author interviews, author interviews,
Segment One: Bill McKibben, HERE COMES THE SUNBill McKibben can finally see a path forward, and it’s lit by the sun.
Last November, I sat down with Bill McKibben to talk about his new book, Here Comes the Sun, and what he told me then feels even more urgent right now. With global oil supplies disrupted by the Iran conflict, the case for solar has never been stronger.
And even though Donald Trump has dismantled federal incentives for renewable energy, states are stepping up, communities are moving fast, and the economics of solar have already crossed a point of no return.
McKibben explains that for the first time in the history of the climate fight, the technology to fix the problem is also the cheapest option on the market. Solar and wind have crossed the threshold where they cost less than fossil fuels, and the world is producing a third more energy from the sun this year than last.
We talk about Pakistan’s solar revolution driven by ordinary people with YouTube tutorials, California running on 100% renewables for stretches of the day, and why McKibben thinks the barriers to change are no longer technical or financial. They’re political and bureaucratic. And he’s working to fix that, too.
Segment Two: Anne Fadiman, FROGAnne Fadiman can turn a household frog into a meditation on love, guilt, and what we owe the creatures we barely notice.
Anne Fadiman’s new essay collection, Frog, is exactly the kind of book I love most: deeply intelligent, full of wit, and somehow able to make you care passionately about things you never knew you cared about.
The title essay follows Bunkie, her family’s African Clawed Frog, a creature she now realizes she didn’t appreciate nearly enough while he was alive.
But don’t let the humble subject fool you. This book is a collection of essays that move from a pet frog, to the grammar wars over the singular ‘they’, to what it means to be the literary child of a famous literary parent, and to the poetic beauty of lists.
Sam Anderson of the New York Times Magazine, who wrote the foreword, says Fadiman has a gift for finding the universe hidden inside the ordinary. I think that’s exactly right. And I think you’re going to love this conversation.
Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform.
In this episode of Writer’s Voice, Francesca Rheannon speaks with Andy Lee Roth of Project Censored about the State of the Free Press 2026, marking 50 years of tracking underreported stories.
“Censorship by proxy… corporate entities… are in effect doing the dirty work of the government.”
Then, Michael Ellsberg discusses Truth and Consequence, a powerful collection of writings by his father, whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, exploring moral responsibility, war, and resistance.
“What do you do as an official when you realize that the policy that you are enacting is crazy or immoral or evil?”
Together, these conversations examine the forces shaping what we know—and what we don’t—and the landscape of moral choice in confronting injustice.
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Tags: free press 2026, media censorship, Project Censored, independent journalism, ICE surveillance, Meta censorship, climate crisis news coverage, Daniel Ellsberg, Pentagon Papers, media consolidation, Writer’s Voice podcast, literature podcast, interviews with writers, book author interviews, interviews with authors,
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You Might Also Like: Daniel Ellsberg, THE DOOMSDAY MACHINE, Andy Lee Roth, STATE OF THE FREE PRESS 2024
Segment One: Andy Lee Roth — Project Censored, State of the Free Press 2026Fifty years after its founding, Project Censored continues to document the most important underreported stories in U.S. media. Andy Lee Roth discusses how media consolidation, “censorship by proxy,” and algorithmic control are reshaping the information landscape.
He highlights key censored stories, including ICE surveillance of critics, Meta’s mass takedown of pro-Palestinian content, underreported police violence, and the climate crisis.
Roth also warns of growing threats to press freedom and emphasizes the vital role of independent journalism.
Read A Sample
Segment Two: Michael Ellsberg — Truth and ConsequenceMichael Ellsberg discusses Truth and Consequence, a posthumous collection of writings by Daniel Ellsberg, best known for releasing the Pentagon Papers.
The book explores Ellsberg’s central moral question: how ordinary people become complicit in massive harm—and how they can resist.
From nuclear war planning to Vietnam, Ellsberg’s writings challenge readers to confront the ethics of power, obedience, and dissent—and to embrace moral courage in the face of injustice.
Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform.
In this episode of Writer’s Voice, two powerful voices explore the climate crisis from complementary perspectives.
Novelist Ellen Meeropol imagines communities navigating climate disruption in Sometimes an Island.
“The challenge is enormous. How do you dramatize doom?… You have to find a balance between the science and the story… the story can inspire action through empathy with the characters.”
Then, environmental leader Judith Enck exposes the systemic forces behind plastic pollution—and what we can do about it—in The Problem with Plastic.
“This is a climate change issue. This is an environmental justice issue. This is an ocean issue… mostly, this is a health issue, because none of us should have microplastics in our bodies. But we all do.”
Together, these conversations reveal both the human stories and structural realities shaping our environmental future.
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Tags: climate fiction, climate change novels, plastic pollution, microplastics health effects, Ellen Meeropol, Judith Enck, Beyond Plastics, literature podcast, interviews with writers, book author interviews, interviews with authors, women authors interviews,
You Might Also Like: Ellen Meeropol, HER SISTER’S TATTOO, Jennie Romer, CAN I RECYCLE THIS?
Segment One: Ellen Meeropol — Sometimes an IslandWhat does it take to imagine survival in a world shaped by climate disruption? Ellen Meeropol’s climate novel unfolds as a “mosaic” of interconnected lives shaped by migration, memory, and environmental upheaval.
Set against the backdrop of a worsening climate emergency, the book follows three communities—from an island in Maine to an off-the-grid cooperative—seeking new ways to live sustainably and collectively.
Meeropol explores the parallels between past migrations—like Jewish refugees fleeing pogroms—and present-day climate displacement. At the heart of the novel is a belief in storytelling as a force for empathy and transformation.
In our conversation, Meeropol explores:
Key Themes* Climate migration and historical memory * Community resilience and cooperation * The role of storytelling in shaping action * Multigenerational activism, especially elder leadership * Balancing realism and hope in climate fiction
Listen to our other conversations with Ellen Meeropol.
Segment Two: Judith Enck — The Problem with PlasticJudith Enck argues that the global plastic crisis is not an accident—but a strategic shift by the fossil fuel industry. As demand for fossil fuels declines in energy and transportation, companies have turned to plastics as a new growth market.
Enck breaks down the myths of plastic recycling, the health impacts of plastic pollution, and the policy solutions needed to reduce plastic production and waste. She emphasizes local and state-level action as key leverage points for change.
Judith Enck was the Regional Administrator of Region 2 of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Enck is the founder of Beyond Plastics, a national organization that works on the problem of plastic pollution,
Key Themes:* Plastic as a fossil fuel “Plan B” * The myth of widespread plastic recycling * Health impacts of microplastics and toxic chemicals * Environmental justice and “Cancer Alley” * Policy solutions: reduction, reuse, refill, rethink
Learn more about the plastics crisis and solutions.
Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform.
Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Philip Schultz joins Writer’s Voice to discuss his new collection, Enormous Morning. Writing from the vantage point of his 80th year, Schultz reflects on aging, memory, family, regret—and the possibility of transcendence.
“Age has… given me a kind of love of my life and the lives of others that I always didn’t have.”
In this conversation, Schultz explores how perspective changes over time, how poetry can transform suffering into insight, and why creativity itself can be a source of resilience and even joy. He also reads several poems from the collection, including “Enormous Morning,” “Good News,” and “My Mistakes.”
The conversation moves from the personal to the political, as Schultz reflects on democracy, moral courage, and the ethical questions raised by our current moment.
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Tags: Philip Schultz, Enormous Morning, poetry interview, contemporary poetry, Writer’s Voice podcast, Pulitzer Prize poet, American poets interview.
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Episode Summary: Philip SchultzPhilip Schultz is the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Failure and one of America’s most distinctive contemporary poets. His work has long explored the inner life—its doubts, contradictions, and longings—with a rare mix of emotional honesty, philosophical depth, and, often, surprising humor.
Now, in his new collection, Enormous Morning, Schultz writes from a new vantage point: his 80th year. These poems take on aging, memory, family, and mortality—but also something else: renewal. The possibility of gaining a new, more joyous perspective on life
The book opens with a walk through a cemetery—yet what emerges is not just a meditation on death, but a vivid sense of continuity. The past and present coexist. The living and the dead are in conversation. And throughout the collection, Schultz moves from the particulars of daily life—a movie, a memory, a friendship—into larger questions about meaning, suffering, and what it means to live ethically in a troubled world.
We talk about how age changes perception, how poetry can transform regret into something like forgiveness, and how creativity itself can be a form of resilience—even joy.
We also talk about the political dimension of the book—poems that grapple with democracy, moral courage, and the unsettling forces shaping our current moment. For Schultz, poetry is not an escape from reality—it’s a way of entering it more deeply, asking harder questions.
As he puts it, writing a poem can be a way of confronting even the most difficult truths—and finding, if not answers, then a kind of clarity, or even transcendence.
About the PoetPhilip Schultz is the founder and director of the Writers Studio in New York. He is the author of numerous poetry collections, including the Pulitzer Prize–winning Failure, as well as The God of Loneliness: Selected and New Poems.
His work often explores personal history, family, and Jewish and immigrant experience, including his father’s struggles, which he addressed with striking honesty in Failure. He lives in East Hampton, New York, with his wife, sculptor Monica Banks.
Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform.
In this episode of Writer’s Voice, Julia Cooke discusses Starry and Restless, her group biography of Rebecca West, Martha Gellhorn, and Emily “Mickey” Hahn—women journalists whose restless lives and innovative writing helped shape modern literary journalism, even as their contributions were later minimized.
“Women have been central to voice-driven narrative journalism for at least the last century and a half.”
Then, Iida Turpeinen explores extinction, empire, and the ethics of science in her novel Beasts of the Sea, beginning with the tragic story of the Steller’s sea cow and expanding into a meditation on memory, loss, and the human relationship to the natural world.
“They had no idea that species can go extinct.”
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Tags: women journalists, literary journalism history, Rebecca West, Martha Gellhorn, Emily Hahn, Julia Cooke interview, Beasts of the Sea novel, Iida Turpeinen interview, extinction history, Steller sea cow, women in science history, Writer’s Voice podcast
You Might Also Like: Eiren Caffall, ALL THE WATER IN THE WORLD, Ellen Ruppel, SLIPPERY BEAST
Segment One: Julia Cooke – Starry and RestlessJulia Cooke reexamines the legacy of three pioneering women journalists—Rebecca West, Martha Gellhorn, and Emily Hahn—arguing that women were not peripheral but central to the development of literary journalism.
Cooke explores how constraints placed on women—barred from war fronts, dismissed as “sob sisters”—actually pushed them to innovate, expanding the scope of reporting to include domestic life, civilian experience, and overlooked voices. Their work challenged conventional ideas of objectivity, incorporating first-person perspective and a broader understanding of who counts as a subject.
The conversation also traces the tension between ambition and domestic life, the role of restlessness as both personal drive and cultural force, and the ways these writers navigated financial, professional, and social barriers.
Read An Excerpt
Segment Two: Iida Turpeinen – Beasts of the SeaIida Turpeinen discusses her novel centered on the Steller’s sea cow, a massive Arctic animal driven to extinction within decades of its discovery in the 18th century.
The novel begins with a museum skeleton—an entry point into questions of memory, loss, and scientific history. Turpeinen examines how imperial expansion, scientific inquiry, and extraction were deeply intertwined, and how early naturalists lacked even the concept of extinction.
She also introduces overlooked figures like Hilda Olsson, a 19th-century scientific illustrator whose work—once erased—has been rediscovered. Through her story, the novel contrasts modes of seeing: possession versus attention, extraction versus care.
At its heart, Beasts of the Sea is an elegy—and a call to remember the many species lost without notice.
Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform.
Today, a gripping story of courage, faith, and friendship in one of the most dangerous countries on Earth. Ross Halperin joins us to talk about his extraordinary book Bear Witness: The Pursuit of Justice in a Violent Land. It’s the true story of two men — an American missionary and a Honduran teacher — who took on the gangs, corruption, and impunity that plague Honduras, one of the most violent nations in the world. Together, they built a radical experiment in justice that dared to succeed where governments failed.
“They didn’t want to be hypocrites. They didn’t want to be like these other gringos that come down here and live behind gates and have drivers and security guards. They wanted to live with and like the people they wanted to help.” — Ross Halperin
Then, we air a clip from our 2023 interview with Jeff Sharlet about his book The Undertow, which examines the spread of rightwing ideology among the masses and the new fascist movement it’s spurred.
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Key Words: Ross Halperin, Bear Witness, Kurt Ver Beek, Carlos Hernández, Association for a More Just Society, ASJ, Honduras violence, gang violence, U.S. drug policy, narco-trafficking, Jeff Sharlet, Christian nationalism, rightwing extremism
You Might Also Like: Talking the Trumpocene with Jeff Sharlet, Lauren Markham, The Far Away Brothers
READ THE TRANSCRIPT
Segment One: Ross HalperinIn Bear Witness: The Pursuit of Justice in a Violent Land, journalist Ross Halperin tells the astonishing true story of Kurt Ver Beek and Carlos Hernández, two men who risked everything to confront gang violence and systemic corruption in Honduras.
From the slums of Tegucigalpa to the halls of power, they waged an improbable crusade for justice, building a grassroots model for solving murders and restoring faith in law where impunity once reigned.
In this interview, Halperin shares how he stumbled upon this story, the moral dilemmas his subjects faced, and what their work reveals about courage, compassion, and the fragile hope for justice in a violent world.
Key Topics* Gang violence and impunity in Honduras * U.S. policies fueling Central American violence * Grassroots justice and community policing * Vigilantism and moral dilemmas in law enforcement * Faith-based activism and moral courage * The Association for a More Just Society (ASJ) * Prison reform and human rights in Latin America * Cross-cultural friendship and collaboration
Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform.
Today, a remarkable conversation with Reality Winner, the NSA whistleblower who leaked proof of Russian interference in the 2016 election and paid for it with the harshest sentence ever imposed under the Espionage Act.
Reality Winner’s new memoir, I Am Not Your Enemy, tells the story of what led her to leak the document, the fallout from her arrest, and what her arrest tells us about our military-industrial complex — and our eroding democracy.
“Depending on where you are on the totem pole will determine how you fare once charged with a crime — or if you’re even charged with a crime in the first place.”
She speaks about how her punishment compared with the leniency shown to elites like Donald Trump and David Petraeus, and why the Espionage Act is uniquely unjust. Plus — an explosive revelation about why Winner believes The Intercept deliberately exposed her as their source.
“Everything that happened to me following the sending of the document to The Intercept was by design.”
We spend the hour with Reality Winner in a deeply revealing conversation you don’t want to miss.
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Key Words: Reality Winner, I Am Not Your Enemy, NSA whistleblower, The Intercept, Espionage Act, Russian election interference, whistleblower prosecution, Donald Trump classified documents, national security leaks, government secrecy
You Might Also Like: Daniel Ellsberg, THE DOOMSDAY MACHINE, James Risen, PAY ANY PRICE
READ THE TRANSCRIPT
Episode SummaryReality Winner opens up about her motivations for joining the Air Force, her moral struggle with U.S. military policy, and the trauma of watching war unfold from the inside. She explains how, in a moment of fear and outrage, she leaked an NSA report proving Russian interference in the 2016 election.
In this interview, she delivers three explosive insights:
- The Intercept’s betrayal: Winner claims the outlet didn’t just make mistakes, but deliberately exposed her to boost their own profile: “Everything that happened to me following the sending of the document to The Intercept was by design.”
- Double standards in justice: She contrasts her four-year sentence with the impunity of elites like Donald Trump, Biden, or Petraeus for far graver breaches: “Depending on where you are on the totem pole will determine how you fare once charged with a crime — or if you’re even charged with a crime in the first place.”
- The Espionage Act’s injustice: Winner highlights how the Act uniquely ignores both intent and impact: “It is one of the only laws in the entire United States judicial history that intent, criminal intent, does not need to be proven.”
She also describes her arrest, the FBI’s tactics, her harrowing time in prison, and her continuing journey of healing.
Key Topics* NSA whistleblowing & Russian election interference * The Intercept’s handling of leaks * Double standards in national security prosecutions * The Espionage Act and its lack of intent requirement * Military culture and disillusionment from within * Prison, resilience, and healing after incarceration
Read an Excerpt from I AM NOT YOUR ENEMY
Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform.
Today, we look at two urgent threats to our world: the assault on science and the concentration of wealth.
First, climate scientist Michael E. Mann talks about the book he co-authored with infectious disease expert Dr. Peter Hotez, Science Under Siege: How to Fight the Five Most Powerful Forces that Threaten Our World. It’s a guide to defending truth, evidence, and reason against disinformation and attacks on science.
“If we lose our ability to have shared facts, we lose our ability to have democracy.” — Michael Mann
Then, author and inequality scholar Chuck Collins joins us to discuss his book Burned by Billionaires: How Concentrated Wealth and Power Are Ruining Our Lives and Planet. He reveals how a handful of billionaires manipulate markets, politics, and culture — and what we can do to fight back.
“Extreme wealth is destabilizing our democracy.” — Chuck Collins
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Key Words: Michael Mann, Peter Hotez, Science Under Siege, disinformation, threats to democracy, attacks on science, climate denial, vaccine denial, Chuck Collins, Burned by Billionaires, wealth inequality, billionaire class, oligarchy, democracy under threat, economic justice, concentrated wealth
You Might Also Like: Michael Mann, THE NEW CLIMATE WAR, Chuck Collins, ALTAR TO AN ERUPTING SUN
Segment 1: Michael MannMann explains how five forces — including disinformation, authoritarianism, and corporate greed — threaten both science and democracy. He and Dr. Peter Hotez argue for equipping citizens with the tools to recognize and resist these assaults.
Key Topics:* Attacks on science and truth * Disinformation campaigns * Threats to democracy * Climate denial and vaccine denial parallels * Building resilience against propaganda
Segment 2: Chuck CollinsChuck Collins shines a light on the outsized influence of billionaires over our economy, politics, and culture — and how concentrated wealth threatens both fairness and sustainability. He calls for systemic reforms to rein in oligarchic power.
Key Topics:* Billionaire wealth concentration * Oligarchic influence in politics and policy * Inequality and its impact on democracy * Economic justice and systemic reform * Building movements to counter wealth concentration
Next Week on Writer’s Voice:We talk with NSA whistleblower Reality Winner, who leaked classified documents about Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election, about her memoir, I AM NOT YOUR ENEMY.
And don’t forget to check out the podcast I host for Changehampton.org, Changehampton Presents: Changing The World, One Yard At A Time.
Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform.
Episode SummaryThis week on Writer’s Voice, two stories from the planet’s frontlines: the Amazon rainforest and the Arctic ice. Two urgent stories from Earth’s frontlines — and why they matter for us all.
Journalist Andrew Fishman joins us to talk about completing the last book by Dom Phillips, How To Save The Amazon: A Journalist’s Deadly Quest for Answers. Phillips was murdered in 2022 for reporting on the destruction of the rainforest — and this book is his legacy.
“Dom’s idea was to answer the question: what do we need to do to save the Amazon?” — Andrew Fishman
Then we head north with writer Kieran Mulvaney. His book Arctic Passages: Ice, Exploration, and the Battle for Power at the Top of the World uncovers how centuries of ambition and today’s climate crisis are colliding in the Arctic.
“[The Arctic] is both a frontline of climate change and a frontline of geopolitics.” — Kieran Mulvaney
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Key Words: Andrew Fishman, Dom Phillips, How To Save The Amazon, Amazon rainforest, deforestation, Indigenous rights, environmental journalism, climate change, Kieran Mulvaney, Arctic Passages, Arctic exploration, climate crisis, polar regions, environmental justice.
You might also like: Rowan Jacobsen, WILD CHOCOLATE, Sherri Goodman, THREAT MULTIPLIER
Segment 1: Andrew Fishman on Dom PhillipsDom Phillips dedicated his life to uncovering the truth about the Amazon — its beauty, its people, and the forces tearing it apart. In 2022, he paid the ultimate price when he was murdered while reporting in the forest. His final book, How To Save The Amazon, was completed by journalist Andrew Fishman along with a team of fellow journalists.
The book investigates the forces driving deforestation—agribusiness, illegal logging, mining, and organized crime—and highlights the activists and Indigenous communities defending the forest. It’s part investigation, part call to action — and it asks the question at the heart of our survival: what must we do to save the Amazon?
Key Topics* Dom Phillips’ legacy and life’s work. * The dangers faced by journalists covering the Amazon. * Agribusiness, organized crime, and government complicity. * Indigenous resistance and global responsibility. * Why saving the Amazon is essential to confronting climate change.
Read A Sample from How To Save The Amazon
Segment 2: Kieran MulvaneyFrom the lush green of the Amazon we travel to the frozen white of the Arctic — a region warming four times faster than the rest of the planet.
In his book Arctic Passages, writer Kieran Mulvaney traces the history of and present-day conflicts in the Arctic, from the perilous journeys of early explorers to a high-stakes arena of global power struggles in one of the harshest environments on Earth.
As the ice melts at alarming rates, the Arctic has become both a bellwether of climate change and a battleground for nations seeking power and resources.
Key Topics* The myth and reality of Arctic exploration. * How the melting Arctic signals the climate emergency. * The military and political scramble for Arctic dominance. * Indigenous communities and ecological resilience. * Lessons the Arctic holds for the future of the planet.
Next Week on Writer’s VoiceWe’ll be talking with world-renowned climate scientist Michael Mann about the new book he’s co-authored with infectious disease specialist Dr. Peter Hotez, Science Under Siege. It’s all part of our programming for Climate Week starting September 20. Don’t miss it!
Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform.
Episode SummaryThis episode of Writer’s Voice explores two inspiring approaches to building a more just and compassionate world. It’s part of September’s WV programming in honor of Climate Week. Two nationwide mobilizations are happening for Climate Week: Make Billionaires Pay and Sun Day.
First, environmental activist Catherine Coleman Flowers tells us about her new memoir Holy Ground: On Activism, Environmental Justice, And Finding Hope. She shares her journey from Lowndes County, Alabama to the national stage, her deep roots in faith and family, and her fight for sanitation justice, climate action, and dignity for all.
“In the darkest of times, hope is still possible. Indeed, it is essential.” — Catherine Coleman Flowers
Then, vegan advocate Colleen Patrick-Goudreau joins us to talk about her book A Year of Compassion: 52 Weeks of Living Zero-Waste, Plant-Based, and Cruelty-Free. She offers practical steps to live with compassion for animals, people, and the planet—showing that small changes add up to big impacts.
“We don’t get to choose whether we can make a difference or not. We get to choose only if the difference we make is negative or positive.” — Colleen Patrick Goudreau
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Key Words: Catherine Coleman Flowers Holy Ground, environmental justice, sanitation justice, climate change activism, Colleen Patrick-Goudreau A Year of Compassion, plant-based living, vegan lifestyle tips, zero waste, plastic reduction, food waste composting,
You might also like: Naomi Klein: Climate Changes Everything, Melanie Joy, WHY WE LOVE DOGS, EAT PIGS, AND WEAR COWS
Segment 1: Catherine Coleman FlowersCatherine Coleman Flowers reflects on her memoir and life’s work at the intersection of civil rights, environmental justice, and faith. She recalls her genealogical ties to the historic Battle of Holy Ground, her fight to expose sanitation crises in poor communities, and her surprising collaborations across political divides. With a message rooted in both realism and hope, Flowers calls for respect for Mother Earth, bridging divides, and holding on to faith.
Key Topics* The meaning of “Holy Ground” — ancestral, spiritual, and planetary * Sanitation injustice in Lowndes County and beyond * Faith as the foundation of activism * Building bridges across divides, even with unlikely allies * Climate justice and the urgency of systemic change * The role of hope and gratitude in sustaining activism
Segment 2: Colleen Patrick-Goudreau Colleen Patrick-Goudreau reframes sustainability and veganism through the lens of compassion and interconnectedness. She explains why compassion is action-oriented, how to reduce plastic and food waste without being overwhelmed, and why imperfect but widespread plant-based choices matter more than individual perfection. She also offers practical tips on composting, rescuing animals, and “plantifying” meals.
Key Topics* Compassion as the foundation for sustainable and plant-based living * Disconnectedness vs compassion in modern culture * Zero-waste living: audits, reusables, small but impactful steps * Food waste and composting strategies * Rescue preparedness: helping animals in distress * “Plantify” meals: flexible, accessible ways to eat plant-based * Advocacy beyond personal lifestyle: the importance of voting and civic action
Next Week on Writer’s Voice In keeping with the build-up to Climate Week, we talk with Andrew FIshman about HOW TO SAVE THE AMAZON, the posthumous book written by Dom Phillips, who was murdered along with Bruno Pereira by a gang of environmental criminals in the Brazilian Amazon. Fishman and others completed the book after Phillips’ death. Don’t miss it!
Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform.
Episode SummaryIn this episode of Writer’s Voice, we explore the lives and legacies of two giants—Charles Dickens and Plato—through the eyes of authors who reveal new dimensions of their work.
Cultural historian Peter Conrad tells us about his biography, Dickens the Enchanter: Dickens didn’t just depict Victorian society—he conjured an entire imaginative universe he called “Planet Dick.” Conrad examines Dickens as an enchanter, social critic, and visionary.
“What he was creating was not some sort of mirror or model of a world that already existed as other 19th century novelists were doing…He was creating an autonomous world, a world of his own, almost a science fiction world.” — Peter Conrad
Then, historian James Romm joins us to talk about Plato and the Tyrant. He shows how Plato’s philosophy wasn’t just abstract theory—it was shaped by his fraught entanglement with tyrants in ancient Syracuse. Romm uncovers how those experiences influenced The Republic and still echo in our contemporary struggles with democracy and authoritarianism.
“My students at Bard saw the dark side of the Republic, its authoritarianism, its interest in censorship, thought control, regulation of private life on a scale that I’ve compared in my book to that of modern North Korea.” — James Romm
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Key Words:
Peter Conrad Dickens the Enchanter, Charles Dickens biography, Dickens Planet Dick, James Romm Plato and the Tyrant, Plato Republic, philosopher king, Syracuse Dionysius, democracy vs autocracy, Writer’s Voice Francesca Rheannon
You might also like: James Romm, THE SACRED BAND, James Romm, DYING EVERY DAY
Segment 1: Peter ConradIn his book Dickens the Enchanter, Peter Conrad casts Charles Dickens as something more than a novelist—he’s a magician, a conjurer, almost a god-like creator. Conrad shows us how Dickens transformed his own turbulent experiences into a literary universe so vivid it became its own world—what he called “Planet Dick.”
The book explores both the light and dark sides of Dickens’s imagination: from his playful, almost mystical love of language, to the eerie visions that haunted his nights in London, and the spectral figures that filled works like A Christmas Carol. Dickens’s characters weren’t just inventions; they were his “visionary companions,” creatures he breathed into being with a kind of verbal sorcery.
And those creatures allowed him to shine a harsh and satiric light on the inequalities of British society at the height of the industrial revolution—the satanic mills, poorhouses and debtors prisons for the unfortunate masses while the upper class and its lackeys enjoyed a heartless prosperity.
Ultimately, Conrad paints Dickens as a writer who blurred the line between reality and dream, challenging conventional notions of truth, and endlessly reshaping the world through the sheer force of his imagination.
Key Topics* “Planet Dick” and Dickens’ autonomous imaginative world * The gothic darkness in Dickens’ early influence and later works * Dickens’ social criticism: poorhouses, debtors’ prisons, and satire of politicians * Language as mystical and creative force * The haunting, dreamlike quality of Dickens’ imagination
About the AuthorPeter Conrad has taught English literature at Oxford University and elsewhere and is the author of numerous books, including The Everyman History of English Literature, Creation: Artists, Gods & Origins; and Modern Times, Modern Places: Life and Art in the Twentieth Century.
Segment 2: James RommWe last spoke with classic historian James Romm in 2021 about his book The Sacred Band. It’s about the 300 Theban Lover/soldiers who fought to defend Ancient Greek democracy.
Today on Writer’s Voice, we talk with Romm again, this time about how one of the world’s greatest philosophers, Plato, wrestled with notions of democracy and autocracy—not only intellectually but also as a man caught up in the messy politics of his time.
In his new book Plato and the Tyrant, Romm takes us to ancient Syracuse, where Plato found himself entangled with two tyrannical rulers—Dionysius the Elder and Dionysius the Younger. Romm argues that these real-world encounters didn’t just test Plato’s ideals, they may have reshaped them.
In fact, he suggests that the Republic—long seen as the pinnacle of abstract philosophy—was also Plato’s attempt to grapple with, and perhaps even cover over, his own political missteps. Along the way, the book revives the forgotten story of Syracuse, once one of the most powerful states of the Greek world.
Key Topics Plato’s encounters with Dionysius the Elder and Younger in Syracuse * The Republic and the philosopher king ideal * The influence of Plato’s letters, especially the 13th * The shift from philosopher-king to “second-best” rule by law in The Laws* * Parallels between ancient autocracy and modern authoritarianism
About the AuthorJames Romm is the James H. Ottaway Jr. Professor of Classics at Bard College in Annandale, NY. He specializes in ancient Greek and Roman culture and civilization. He is the author of numerous books, including Dying Every Day: Seneca At The Court of Nero.
Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform.
Episode SummaryThis episode of Writer’s Voice brings you two powerful stories of women adventurers who forged their paths in male-dominated outdoor sports.
Bridget Crocker’s memoir River’s Daughter is a story of trauma and healing, rooted in her lifelong connection to rivers. From childhood brushes with death to breaking into the male-dominated world of river guiding, Crocker explores recovering from childhood trauma, sexism in adventure culture, and the lessons rivers teach.
“I realized that it was the river who had told me to swim and had saved our lives.” — Bridget Crocker
Cassidy Randall’s Thirty Below recounts the groundbreaking 1970 first all-women’s ascent of Denali. Against life-threatening conditions and entrenched sexism, six women mountaineers made history—and challenged ideas about who belongs in extreme adventure. We revisit our March 2025 conversation with an excerpt from the interview.
“Not an easy mountain to climb.” — Cassidy Randall
Together, these stories highlight resilience, courage, and the fight to carve out space for women in arenas long dominated by men.
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You can support our show and the others you listen to by contributing through Lenny.fm. Your support helps us bring you more of the episodes, like this one, that you look forward to. Thanks for being a vital part of our community!
Key Words: Bridget Crocker River’s Daughter, women river guides, sexism in adventure sports, Cassidy Randall Thirty Below, women mountaineers, 1970 Denali all-women ascent, breaking barriers women adventurers, Writer’s Voice Francesca Rheannon
You might also like: Cassidy Randall (full interview), Elizabeth Flock, THE FURIES
Segment 1: Bridget CrockerCrocker recalls how surviving a near-drowning on the Snake River as a child gave her a sense of being chosen and protected by the river. She reflects on confronting trauma, navigating sexism in guiding, and how writing memoir became a form of healing and activism.
Key Topics* Childhood connection to rivers * Surviving trauma and abuse * Rivers as refuge and teacher * Sexism in river guiding industry * Confronting power structures in guiding and travel * Memoir as healing and activism
See photos of Bridget Crocker on rivers
Segment Two: Cassidy Randall (replay)Randall tells the story of the first all-women’s team to summit Denali in 1970. Facing deadly storms, exhaustion, and a mountaineering culture that dismissed their abilities, the climbers proved not only their strength but also redefined what was possible for women in the sport.
Key Topics* The dangers and history of Denali * The 1970 all-women’s expedition * Mountaineering sexism and barriers * The psychological and physical demands of extreme climbing * Legacy of the Denali ascent
Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform.
Episode SummaryIn this episode of Writer’s Voice, two authors offer vital insights—one about surviving a global pandemic, and the other about surviving the publishing process.
Ronald Gruner discusses Covid Wars, his in-depth exploration of how the pandemic reshaped politics, public health, and society. He reflects on the successes and failures of the U.S. response, the role of science and misinformation, and the lasting implications for democracy.
“Other countries did better because they trusted their governments and their governments trusted them.” — Ronald Gruner
Dennis Sweeney talks about How to Submit, a practical handbook for writers trying to get their work published in literary magazines and small presses. Drawing on his own experience as a poet and editor, Sweeney breaks down the submissions process, rejection, community-building, and sustaining motivation as a writer.
“Rejections are not failures. They’re steps in the process.” — Dennis Sweeney
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Follow us on Bluesky @writersvoice.bsky.social and subscribe to our Substack. Or find us on Instagram @WritersVoicePodcast
You can support our show and the others you listen to by contributing through Lenny.fm. Your support helps us bring you more of the episodes, like this one, that you look forward to. Thanks for being a vital part of our community!
Key Words:
Covid Wars Ronald Gruner, COVID-19 lessons, pandemic politics, misinformation and science, pandemic preparation, U.S. pandemic response, How to Submit Dennis Sweeney, getting published, literary magazine submissions, small press publishing,
You Might Also Like: Eric Klinenberg, 2020: The Year Everything Changed, CRISIS AVERTED: Caitlin Rivers on the Hidden Science of Fighting Outbreaks
Segment 1: Ronald Gruner on Covid WarsRonald Gruner explains why he wrote Covid Wars—to create a factual, accessible record of how COVID-19 unfolded and how institutions responded. He discusses the pandemic’s exposure of systemic weaknesses, the politicization of science, and the urgent need to prepare for the next crisis.
Key Topics Why Covid Wars* is “not a political book, but a factual one” * COVID-19’s impact on public trust in government and science * How misinformation and partisan divides deepened the crisis * Lessons from countries that managed the pandemic differently * What the U.S. must do to prepare for the next pandemic
Segment 2: Dennis Sweeney on How to SubmitDennis Sweeney demystifies the process of submitting to literary magazines and small presses. He emphasizes persistence, community, and self-knowledge as essential tools for navigating rejection and building a sustainable writing life.
Key Topics* Why rejections are not failures but part of the process * How to research and choose the right publications * Balancing creativity with strategy in submissions * The importance of literary community and reciprocity * Advice for writers new to the submission process
READ AN EXCERPT FROM HOW TO SUBMIT
Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform.
Episode SummaryAward-winning author Honorée Fanonne Jeffers joins Writer’s Voice to talk about her bold and beautiful nonfiction debut, Misbehaving at the Crossroads—a matrilineal memoir braided with African American history, intersectional feminism, and unflinching truth-telling.
“The crossroads represents… a place where trouble meets possibility or hope.” — Honorée Fanonne Jeffers
Plus, a sneak preview of our upcoming conversation with Catherine Coleman Flowers, environmental justice champion and author of Holy Ground: On Activism, Environmental Justice and Finding Hope.
Connect with WV:
Follow us on Bluesky @writersvoice.bsky.social and subscribe to our Substack. Or find us on Instagram @WritersVoicePodcast
You can support our show and the others you listen to by contributing through Lenny.fm. Your support helps us bring you more of the episodes, like this one, that you look forward to. Thanks for being a vital part of our community!
Key Words: Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, Misbehaving at the Crossroads book, intersectionality, Black women’s memoir, Writer’s Voice podcast, Francesca Rheannon author interview, Catherine Coleman Flowers Holy Ground, environmental justice activism
You Might Also Like: Honorée Fanonne Jeffers THE LOVE SONGS OF W.E.B. DuBOIS, Corban Addison WASTELANDS
Segment One: Honorée Fanonne JeffersHonorée Fanonne Jeffers tells us about her new book, Misbehaving at the Crossroads: Essays & Writings. Known for her National Book Award–nominated novel The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois, Jeffers turns to nonfiction to weave together memoir, African American history, political insight, and poetry.
She discusses intersectionality, Toni Morrison’s concept of “rememory,” confronting the truth about historical figures like Thomas Jefferson, and the complex legacies of family.
The conversation also dives into themes of survival, solidarity, and the necessity of grappling with hard truths to create a more just future.
Key Topics* Matrilineal memoir & family history * African American oral tradition & storytelling * Intersectionality (Kimberlé Crenshaw) * Toni Morrison’s “rememory” * Thomas Jefferson, Sally Hemings, and historical truth * Patriarchy in family and national history * Purity politics vs. solidarity
Segment Two: Catherine Coleman FlowersIn a brief excerpt from our upcoming fall episode, Flowers talks about how her faith, connection to the land, and deep respect for Mother Earth inspire her activism against environmental injustice. Her book is Holy Ground.
Key Topics* Climate justice & environmental stewardship * Faith and activism * The Holy Ground site
Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform.
Episode SummaryThis week on Writer’s Voice, we speak with David Bollier about the newly updated edition of his influential book Think Like a Commoner: A Short Introduction to the Life of the Commons. Bollier argues that commons are neither relics of the past nor utopian fantasies—they are living, adaptive systems that help people meet needs through cooperation rather than competition.
“A commons is a living collective social organism for getting stuff done.” — David Bollier
We discuss why the commons movement is growing worldwide, how it provides a survival strategy amid climate breakdown and political turmoil, and the practical ways communities are creating commons today—from urban housing and childcare networks to open-source software and local currencies. Bollier also shares how thinking like a commoner challenges deeply held assumptions about property, law, and power—and why storytelling and culture are key to this transformation.
Then we re-air a short clip from our March interview with Omar El Akkad, author of One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. It’s an urgent and unflinching critique of the failures of mainstream liberalism — especially as seen from the genocide Israel is inflicting on Gaza.
Connect with WV:Follow us on Bluesky @writersvoice.bsky.social and subscribe to our Substack. Or find us on Instagram @WritersVoicePodcast
You can support our show and the others you listen to by contributing through Lenny.fm. Your support helps us bring you more of the episodes, like this one, that you look forward to. Thanks for being a vital part of our community!
Key Words: David Bollier, Think Like a Commoner, commons movement, mutual aid networks, urban commons, degrowth, cooperative economies, Schumacher Center, cosmo-local production, community resilience, climate and commons, Gaza war and U.S. complicity, Gaza genocide, One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
You Might Also Like: Full Interview with Omar El Akkad, more WV interviews with David Bollier
David BollierDavid Bollier explains what it means to “think like a commoner”—to see the world not as a set of commodities but as a living system of relationships and shared stewardship. He explores the roots of commons thinking, from indigenous traditions to digital communities, and shows how commoning is emerging as a global response to neoliberal capitalism, ecological collapse, and authoritarian politics.
We talk about successful commons in cities like Barcelona, the rise of bioregional economies, and why “legal hacks” like Creative Commons licenses and rights of nature are reshaping law. Bollier argues that commons are not just about resources—they are a cultural and political force that can reclaim autonomy from predatory markets and strengthen community resilience.
Key Topics* What is the commons? * Commons as a social system beyond market and state * The myth of the “tragedy of the commons” * Local and digital commons (urban housing, childcare, open-source software) * Commons-public partnerships in cities like Barcelona * Bioregional economies and degrowth movements * Legal hacks: Creative Commons, rights for nature * Commons as resistance to authoritarianism and neoliberal capitalism * The role of culture and storytelling in building commons * Challenges: privatization, AI concentration, and legal frameworks
Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform. Episode Summary This week, Ross Benes joins us to talk about his book 1999: The Year Low Culture Conquered America and Kickstarted Our Bizarre Times. From Limp Bizkit and Jerry Springer to reality TV and pro wrestling, Benes reveals how the trashy entertainment of … Continue reading From Limp Bizkit to Reality TV: How 1999 Changed Everything
Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform Episode Summary This week on Writer’s Voice, we explore New York from two perspectives: its dramatic colonial origins and its modern-day extremes. First, historian Russell Shorto reveals the pivotal moment when Manhattan shifted from Dutch to English hands—and how that “merger” shaped the DNA … Continue reading Russell Shorto on the Origins of New York & Chris Pavone’s Thriller of Class, Money, and Morality
Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform Episode Summary Today, a double episode on press freedom under siege. Investigative journalist and author Will Potter joins us to talk about Little Red Barns: Hiding the Truth, from Farm to Fable. It’s a powerful exposé of how the agriculture industry attacks journalism to … Continue reading Exposing Hidden Agendas: Will Potter on Factory Farm Secrecy & Project Censored on Press Freedom Under Siege
Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform Episode Summary In this episode of Writer’s Voice, former FBI agent, scholar, and author Michael German discusses his explosive book Policing White Supremacy: The Enemy Within. German, who infiltrated white supremacist and right-wing militia groups during his FBI tenure, offers a chilling insider perspective … Continue reading Michael German on POLICING WHITE SUPREMACY: THE ENEMY WITHIN
Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform Episode Summary On this episode of Writer’s Voice, we speak with science journalist Lizzie Wade about her groundbreaking book Apocalypse: How Catastrophe Transformed Our World and Can Forge New Futures. Through stories of ancient climate collapse, pandemic upheavals, colonial conquests, and societal reorganization, Wade … Continue reading Lizzie Wade on APOCALYPSE: What Collapse Reveals About Human Possibility
Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform Episode Summary On this episode of Writer’s Voice, two authors share stories of retreat and re-engagement in a world unraveling. First, novelist Jess Walter talks about So Far Gone, a gripping, darkly funny, and deeply moving novel about Rhys Kinnick—a retired journalist who escapes … Continue reading Retreat, Resilience & Return: Jess Walter on SO FAR GONE and Marguerite Holloway on TAKE TO THE TREES
Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform. Episode Summary This week: Grandmaster of crime fiction Laura Lippman joins us to talk about her delightful new mystery, Murder Takes a Vacation. The novel brings back Muriel “Mrs.” Blossom—now a wealthy, single woman in her sixties—on a river cruise where art theft, murder, … Continue reading Laura Lippman on MURDER TAKES A VACATION: Art, Age, and a Woman’s Right to Reinvent Herself
Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform. Episode Summary This week on Writer’s Voice, two authors of speculative fiction explore what it means to be human in a world shaped by crisis, autocracy, and extinction. First, Ray Nayler discusses Where the Axe is Buried, a gripping novel that imagines a future … Continue reading AI, Autocracy, and Afterlife: Sci Fi Novelists Ray Nayler & Tim Weed
Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform. Episode Summary In this episode of Writer’s Voice, we explore how language shapes history—and how stories shape culture. We first speak with Laura Spinney, author of Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global. She takes us into the world of Proto-Indo-European, a language spoken … Continue reading Laura Spinney & Tonya Todd on Language, Myth & Resistance
Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform. Episode Summary This week: journalist Brian Goldstone joins us to talk about his powerful new book, There Is No Place For Us: Working and Homeless in America. It’s an eye-opening, deeply reported portrait of families who work full-time yet are unhoused, navigating a system … Continue reading The New Face of Homelessness: Brian Goldstone on THERE IS NO PLACE FOR US
In this episode of Writer’s Voice, host Francesca Rheannon sits down with Joe Shute and Brandon Keim for two conversations about:
- Animal intelligence and behavior
- The human-animal connection
- Ethical treatment of animals
- Rethinking human dominion over nature
Joe Shute discusses his latest book, Stowaway: The Disreputable Exploits of the Rat, which dives into the history, biology, and misunderstood nature of rats.
Brandon Keim shares insights from his book Meet the Neighbors: Animal Minds and Life in a More-Than-Human World, exploring animal intelligence, personhood, and our complex relationships with the non-human creatures with whom we share the planet.
Writers Voice— in depth conversation with writers of all genres, on the air since 2004.
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Key words: Joe Shute, Brandon Keim, Stowaway, Meet the Neighbors, animal intelligence, rats, animal personhood, wildlife, nature, environmental crisis, rats and humans, animal democracy, Fiona Presley, rat behavior, Writer’s Voice podcast, Francesca Rheannon.
Joe Shute Interview:TopicJoe Shute’s book, Stowaway, uncovers the surprising and often overlooked qualities of rats, including their empathy, intelligence, and importance in human history.
Key Points* Why humans have historically feared and vilified rats. * The role rats play as a “shadow species” following human migration. * The surprising emotional and intellectual capabilities of rats, including empathy, cooperation, and even dancing to music. * Joe’s personal experiences raising pet rats during the COVID-19 pandemic. * How human conflicts and environmental changes have shaped rat populations globally.
Brandon Keim Interview:Topic:Brandon Keim’s book, Meet the Neighbors, explores the emerging science of animal intelligence and how understanding animal minds can reshape our relationships with the natural world.
Key Points:* Fiona Presley’s story of adopting a wingless bumblebee, exploring the deep connections humans can form with insects. * The concept of animal personhood and how animals, from bees to whales, display self-awareness, emotions, and social behaviors. * How animals vote and make democratic decisions, such as swans honking to decide migration routes and wild dogs sneezing to choose directions. * The implications of recognizing animals as persons in the context of the Anthropocene and the ongoing mass extinction crisis.
In this episode of Writer’s Voice, host Francesca Rheannon speaks with historian Jacob Mikanowski about his book Goodbye Eastern Europe: An Intimate History of a Divided Land.
Mikanowski explores the rich, complex, and often overlooked history of Eastern Europe—a region shaped by centuries of empires, revolutions, and diverse cultures. From the enduring impact of the Ottoman Empire to the shifting borders of Poland, Hungary, and the Baltics, Mikanowski sheds light on how these lands became the cradle of both cultural richness and conflict.
Then we remember activist, rabbi and champion of revolutionary love, Michael Lerner. He died August 28. We play our 2020 interview with Lerner about his book, Revolutionary Love: A Political Manifesto to Heal and Transform the World.
Writers Voice— in depth conversation with writers of all genres, on the air since 2004.
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Key words: Eastern Europe history, Jacob Mikanowski, Michael Lerner, Francesca Rheannon, podcast, history, politics
Key Highlights: Goodbye Eastern Europe*: A region that “doesn’t exist” yet is deeply real, diverse, and complex. * How centuries of empire-building—from the Austro-Hungarian to the Ottoman—shaped the unique history of Eastern Europe. * The tension between unity and diversity in the region’s cultural and religious makeup. * Mikanowski’s personal connection to the subject, weaving his family history into the broader narrative.
About the AuthorJacob Mikanowski is a historian, a freelance journalist and a critic. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The Guardian, The New York Times and elsewhere.
Read An Excerpt
Remembering Rabbi Michael LernerWe revisit a powerful conversation with Rabbi Michael Lerner about his 2020 book, Revolutionary Love: A Political Manifesto to Heal and Transform the World. Lerner discusses how love can be the foundation for radical social change, focusing on kindness, empathy, and environmental stewardship. He passed away August 28, 2024.
In this episode of Writer’s Voice, we talk with Clayton Page Aldern about The Weight of Nature, his groundbreaking new book on the impacts of climate change on our brains — from PSTD to brain-eating amoebas.
Aldern explains how climate-induced stressors are shaping our mental health — harming our judgment, leading to rises in neurodegenerative diseases, and even eroding our capacity to tell truth from lies.
Clayton Aldern is a neuroscientist turned environmental journalist and senior data reporter for Grist. His climate change data visualizations have appeared in a variety of forums, including on the US Senate floor in a speech by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse.
Writers Voice— in depth conversation with writers of all genres, on the air since 2004.
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Key words: Clayton Aldern, neuroscience, brain science, climate change, global warming, book show, podcast, brain health, PTSD, climate anxiety, Clayton Page Aldern, The Weight of Nature, neurodegeneration, environmental stressors, ALS, Alzheimer’s
Key Takeaways:1. Environmental Stress and Brain Health:
In The Weight of Nature: How a Changing Climate Changes Our Brains, Aldern explains the biological impact of environmental changes like heatwaves, air pollution, and water contamination on brain functions, leading to increased risks of neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s and ALS. These stressors affect cognitive abilities, making us more impulsive and less able to focus.
2. Climate Change and PTSD: Aldern discusses how climate-driven PTSD differs from other forms of trauma. Through research, he reveals how exposure to extreme climate events, such as hurricanes, increases the likelihood of disorders like ADHD, anxiety, and depression.
3. The Threat Multiplier Effect: One of the pivotal moments in Aldern’s career shift was reading a Pentagon report on climate change being a “threat multiplier” for conflict. He unpacks how rapid environmental change triggers conflict by influencing our neurocognitive behavior.
4. Neuroscience of Climate Anxiety: Beyond PTSD, the conversation touches on the growing issue of “climate anxiety”—a widespread emotional response to the impending environmental doom. Aldern explains the importance of balancing awareness of climate change with actionable resilience, rather than falling into paralysis.
5. Resilience in the Face of Crisis: Amidst the grim realities, Aldern emphasizes creating “parables of resilience.” He discusses how communities and individuals can foster mental resilience through mindfulness practices, which can counteract some of the negative effects of environmental stress.
Memorable Quotes:* “Climate change isn’t just a threat to our environment—it’s a threat to our brains.” * “The environment acts as a threat multiplier, not just for conflict but for our mental health.” * “We can adapt, but we must redefine what adaptation means in the face of this crisis.”
Read An Excerpt from The Weight of Nature
Episode Description:In this episode, we talk with celebrated Haitian American writer Edwidge Danticat, author of Brother, I’m Dying and her latest essay collection, We’re Alone.
Danticat shares intimate insights into her writing process, the legacy of colonialism and the immigrant experience. She discusses Haiti’s ongoing struggles, her personal connection to the country, and how the global refugee crisis continues to impact marginalized communities.
Tune in to explore how Danticat bears witness to history through her poignant essays on family, resilience, and the power of storytelling.
We also play a portion of our 2010 interview with Tracy Kidder about his book Mountains Beyond Mountains. It’s about the late great doctor and humanitarian Paul Farmer’s work in Haiti.
Writers Voice— in depth conversation with writers of all genres, on the air since 2004.
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Key words: Edwidge Danticat, We’re Alone, Haitian American writer, Haiti, colonialism, immigration, refugee crisis, writing process, Tracy Kidder, Paul Farmer, book show, podcast.
Episode Highlights Edwidge Danticat’s writing as a spiritual process: Discover how Danticat uses writing to connect with ancestral voices and engage in deep reflection. * Why The Title: Learn why Danticat chose the title “We’re Alone and how it reflects the complex relationship between writers and readers. * Bearing Witness to Haiti’s History: Danticat recounts the torments of colonialism, environmental catastrophes, and political corruption in Haiti, while emphasizing the country’s resilience. * Immigration, Family, and the My Dungeon Shook Letter: Danticat shares how her experiences as a Haitian immigrant informs her powerful letters to her daughters, inspired by James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time. * The Impact of Global Events: From Haiti’s fuel crisis in 2018 to the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse, Danticat provides a gripping account of Haiti’s political unrest and the far-reaching implications of climate change and migration.
Key Quotes– “Writing helps me find out what I think and allows me to connect with the voices of the past—whether they are other writers or storytellers from my family.” — Edwidge Danticat
– “Every day is a renewal, a commitment to begin again. That’s what it means to be human.” — Edwidge Danticat
Episode Description:In this episode, host Francesca Rheannon sits down with philosopher Peter Godfrey-Smith to discuss his latest book, Living on Earth: Forests, Corals, Consciousness, and the Making of the World.
Godfrey-Smith offers a fresh perspective on how life forms, from the simplest bacteria to complex animals, have actively shaped our planet. This episode dives deep into the evolutionary history of choice and how understanding our impact on the world can guide better decisions for the future.
Tune in to explore how organisms aren’t just products of evolution but key players in creating the environment we inhabit today.
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Writers Voice— in depth conversation with writers of all genres, on the air since 2004.
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Key words: Peter Godfrey-Smith, philosophy, science, evolution, podcast, podcast, book recommendations, author interview, book podcast, book show
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Key Topics Covered:* How organisms, from bacteria to humans, have shaped the Earth’s environment. * A discussion on the “mind-as-cause” perspective and its implications for understanding evolution. * The moral and ethical implications of our choices and how they affect other living beings. “Factory farming is pretty much the worst thing humans do, at least to non-humans.” * Godfrey-Smith’s critique of the Gaia hypothesis and the idea of Earth as a living organism. * The role of consciousness in non-human life forms, including animals and plants. * The challenges and ethical concerns surrounding artificial intelligence and its limitations. * A call to re-balance priorities with respect to the environmental crises of climate change and habitat destruction.
Episode SummaryIn this episode of Writer’s Voice, host Francesca Rheannon explores the intricate dynamics of giving, receiving, and creating community with food entrepreneur and activist Lola Milholland. She shares insights from her memoir, Group Living and Other Recipes, which reflects on her upbringing in a communal household, the lessons of shared living, and the profound role that food plays in connecting people.
We also revisit our conversation with Chuck Collins about his novel, Alta*r to an Erupting Sun*, set in an intentional community in western Massachusetts.
Writers Voice— in depth conversation with writers of all genres, on the air since 2004.
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Key words: Lola Milholland, communal living, organic food, memoir, Chuck Collins, climate activism, fiction, podcast, podcast, book recommendations, author interview, book podcast, book show
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Don’t miss an episode of Writer’s Voice. Subscribe on your favorite podcast platform for more in-depth conversations with writers of all genres or use our RSS feed.
Key Topics CoveredCommunal Living and the Gift EconomyMilholland discusses the philosophy that when we receive something, it’s not meant to be hoarded but to be passed on, even if just in spirit. This idea of giving and receiving as a cycle, akin to inhaling and exhaling, is central to building and sustaining vibrant communities.
She reflects on growing up in a communal household where the guiding belief was, “We only deserve it if we share it.” She connects this to the concept of the gift economy, inspired by Lewis Hyde’s book The Gift, where the act of receiving is intrinsically tied to the obligation of passing something on.
Food as a Spiritual PracticeFood is at the heart of Group Living And Other Recipes and Milholland’s current work as a food entrepreneur. She shares how food not only nourishes but also serves as a means of connecting people, fostering community, and maintaining cultural traditions. Recipes included in her book are gifts from her life’s journey, shared with readers to continue the cycle of giving.
Communal Living, Land Trusts & Other Forms of Living and OwningMilholland discusses how communal living, co-housing, land trusts and other radical approaches to property and wealth can pave the way for more connected and sustainable communities.
Influences and InspirationLearn about the significant influence of Lola’s brother, Zach, who taught her the importance of care in cooking, and how her mother’s involvement with Organic Valley helped shape her views on food and community.
Umi Organic and School LunchesMilholland talks about her noodle company, Umi Organic, and its commitment to providing nutritious school lunches in Portland, Oregon.
Group Living Recipes, Photos, Music
We talk with cartoonist Ken Krimstein about the remarkable meeting of the minds between Albert Einstein and Franz Kafka in Prague, before either man was famous. His new graphic book is Einstein in Kafkaland: How Albert Fell Down The Rabbit Hole And Came Up With The Universe.
Join us as we explore how two seemingly disparate fields—physics and literature—intertwined in the lives of Einstein and Kafka, leading to some of the most profound and surreal discoveries of the modern age.
Then, we talk with veteran Hollywood talent agent Harry Abrams, who represented stars like Liam Neeson and Jennifer Lopez, about his memoir/how to book, Let’s Do Launch: A Hollywood Agent Dishes on How to Make Your Business and Career Take Off.
Writers Voice— in depth conversation with writers of all genres, on the air since 2004.
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Key words: Einstein, Kafka, Prague, Gravity, Relativity, Franz Kafka, Albert Einstein, Graphic Novels, Ken Krimstein, Philosophy, Physics, Literature, Harry Abrams, Hollywood agent, author interview, history, podcast
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Einstein in Kafka Land: A Surreal Intersection of Science and LiteratureEpisode DescriptionWe welcome back graphic artist and author Ken Krimstein to discuss his latest book, Einstein in Kafka Land: How Albert Fell Down the Rabbit Hole and Came Up with the Universe.
Building on the success of a previous work, The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt, Krimstein dives into a fascinating exploration of how Albert Einstein and Franz Kafka, two towering figures of the early 20th century, might have influenced each other’s groundbreaking work.
Listen to our interview with Krimstein about The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt
In This Segment The Intersection of Genius: Discover how Einstein’s pursuit of solving the mysteries of gravity intersected with Kafka’s exploration of existential truth in the early 1920s. Both men were navigating their own professional and personal challenges in Prague, a city that Krimstein vividly describes as a mystical outpost of civilization. * The True Truth: We explore the philosophical questions both Einstein and Kafka grappled with—what Krimstein calls “the search for the true truth.” We draw connections between their work and broader European traditions of Romanticism and Gnosticism. * Einstein’s Relativity*: Struggle to understand Einstein’s theory of relativity? You’re not alone. Krimstein shares his own challenges in grasping the complexities of Einstein’s work and how he sought to make it accessible through his art.
Iconic Hollywood Talent Agent Harry Abrams on Integrity, Diversity, and SuccessHost Francesca Rheannon sits down with legendary Hollywood talent agent Harry Abrams, author of the memoir Let’s Do Launch: A Hollywood Agent Dishes on How to Make Your Business and Career Take Off. With over 60 years in the entertainment industry, Abrams shares his insights on what it takes to succeed in Hollywood, focusing on integrity, trust, and diversity.
He also discusses his early career at MCA, his challenging partnership with Noel Abramoff, and the importance of forgiveness and moral values in business.
In This Segment Harry Abrams’ Early Career: Abrams recounts his humble beginnings in the MCA mailroom and his journey to becoming one of Hollywood’s top talent agents. * The Betrayal and Lawsuit: Abrams shares the story of his fallout with business partner Noel Abramoff and how this challenging experience taught him valuable life lessons about resilience and entrepreneurship. * Moral Lessons: A discussion on how integrity and trust are the cornerstones of Abrams’ approach to business, and why these values are critical in today’s corporate environment. * Diversity in the Entertainment Industry: Abrams highlights the importance of diversity in business, sharing stories of how he advocated for underrepresented talent, including hiring actor Chris Burke, who became an advocate for the Down syndrome community. * Pro-Union Stance*: Abrams explains why he has always supported labor unions in the entertainment industry and how the recent strikes (SAG-AFTRA and WGA) reflect necessary changes in the industry, especially with the rise of AI and streaming services.
Today, two stories of what in the modern world we’ve come to call “apartheid”—the practice of segregating a subjugated population and imposing oppressive laws on it.
First, we talk with UK historian Harry Freedman about his history of the first Jewish ghetto—that of Venice, Italy. It’s called Shylock’s Venice: The Remarkable History of Venice’s Jews and the Ghetto.
Then, we revisit our conversation with novelist Rebecca Sacks about her powerful novel, City of Thousand Gates. Its depiction of Israeli apartheid against the citizens of the Occupied West Bank sparks comparisons with the apartheid experienced by Jews in Venice centuries earlier.
Writers Voice— in depth conversation with writers of all genres, on the air since 2004.
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Key words: author interview, history, podcast, book podcast, Harry Freedman, Rebecca Sacks, Palestine, West Bank, Venice, ghetto, apartheid, fiction
Don’t miss an episode! Subscribe to Writer’s Voice on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts.Shylock’s Venice with Harry FriedmanFrancesca interviews UK historian Harry Freedman about his book Shylock’s Venice. It chronicles the history of the first Jewish ghetto, established in Venice in 1516, and how it shaped the lives and culture of the Jews confined within its walls.
Freedman discusses how the ghetto became a center of Jewish intellectual life despite its squalid conditions, the role of Jewish moneylenders, and the complex portrayal of Jews through Shakespeare’s character Shylock.
He also touches on the Jewish enlightenment that flourished within the ghetto, the interactions between Jews and Christians in Venice, and the broader implications for Jewish identity during the Renaissance.
Revisiting ‘City of a Thousand Gates’ with Rebecca SachsIn the second part of the episode, Francesca revisits her 2021 conversation with novelist Rebecca Sacks about her novel City of a Thousand Gates.
Sacks’ book paints a vivid picture of life in the occupied West Bank, drawing parallels with the apartheid experienced by Jews in Venice centuries earlier. Through this lens, the discussion explores themes of segregation, oppression, and the resilience of marginalized communities.
Read the Interview Transcript
In this episode of Writer’s Voice, we sit down with Dr. Seema Yasmin to discuss her prescient YA novel, Unbecoming. Dr. Yasmin, a physician, journalist, and director of the Stanford Health Communication Initiative, brings her multifaceted expertise to the conversation. Her new book, set in a dystopian near-future America, explores the challenges faced by two teenage girls, Leila and Noor, as they navigate a society where abortion has been heavily restricted.
Then, we talk with Jordan Elgrably, editor of a new collection of stories from the Middle East, Stories From The Center of The World. The stories originally appeared in the Markaz Review.
Writers Voice— in depth conversation with writers of all genres, on the air since 2004.
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Key words: abortion, reproductive rights, Seema Yasmin, Jordan Elgrably, Middle East, fiction, podcast, podcast, book recommendations, author interview, book podcast, book show, history, writer’s voice
Dr. Seema YasminThe Story Behind Unbecoming* Inspiration for the novel, including real-world events and personal experiences.
- The setting of the novel in a dystopian Texas where abortion laws have become increasingly restrictive. Themes and Real-World Connections* The prescient nature of the novel given recent changes in abortion laws.
- The broader implications of controlling reproductive rights and bodily autonomy.
- The impact of these laws on various aspects of society, including IVF and fertility treatments
Personal Reflections and Broader Implications* Dr. Yasmin’s thoughts on the current political climate and its impact on women’s rights. * Reflections on the process of writing the novel over several years.
Book Bans and Censorship* Discussion on the “soft bans” faced by “Unbecoming” and her children’s picture book, “The ABCs of Queer History.” * Dr. Yasmin’s perspective on the power of literature to foster empathy and challenge the status quo.
Listen to an excerpt from UNBECOMINGOther Writer’s Voice Episodes About Abortion Rights Kerri Maher, All You Have To Do Is Call * Celebrating Reproductive Choice * Laura Kaplan, Jane * Katha Pollitt, Pro * Jennifer Haigh, Mercy Street*
Jordan Elgrably Explores the Rich Tapestry of Middle Eastern Literature
“If you look at maps of the U.S., you would think our American continents are the center of the world, but we are far away from the rest of the world… The moniker of center of the world probably applies better to the region we call the Middle East.” – Jordan ElGrably
IntroductionHost Francesca Rheannon sits down with Jordan Elgrably, editor of the new anthology, Stories from the Center of the World: New Middle East Fiction. The collection opens a window into the rich and diverse literary traditions of the Middle East, a region often misunderstood and underrepresented in Western literature. Jordan discusses the geopolitical implications of the term “Middle East,” the intricate cultural mosaic of the region, and the powerful narratives that give voice to its people.
Themes* Elgrably explains the term “Middle East” and its political and historical connotations. * Insight into the publisher’s decision to use the term despite its complexities. * Exploration of the vast and diverse cultures within the Middle East. * Discussion of the rich historical backdrop of the Middle East, including ancient civilizations and their contributions to global culture. * Mention of historic events and agreements like the Sykes-Picot Agreement and their impact on the region.
Highlighted Stories from the collection* Elgrably highlights several stories from the anthology, including “Asha and Haji” by Hanif Qureshi, which deals with themes of exile and immigration. * Insights into Elgrably’s own story, “The Afghan and the Persian,” and its reflection on contemporary issues like illegal immigration and humanitarian efforts.
Personal and Professional Background* Elgrably shares his journey as co-founder of the Markaz Review and his commitment to fostering Arab-Muslim-Christian and Jewish relations. * Discussion of the mission of the Markaz Review and its role in promoting Middle Eastern literature.
Reflections on Current Events* Elgrably offers his perspective on recent political events, including the ongoing Gaza conflict and its portrayal in Western media. * Reflections on the challenges faced by Arab-Americans and the broader implications for international relations.
In this episode, we sit down with Dr. William Bronston, a renowned advocate for disability rights and social justice.
Dr. Bronston shares his incredible journey from a young medical student to a leading figure in the fight to protect the rights of people with disabilities. He discusses his experiences working at the Willowbrook State School, his efforts in the deinstitutionalization movement, and the transformative impact of the landmark Willowbrook case.
His book is Public Hostage: Public Ransom: Ending Institutional America.
“Willowbrook was a turning point, not just for the people who lived there, but for the entire movement towards equality and human dignity.” – Dr. William Bronston
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Key Words: William Bronston, Willowbrook State School, deinstitutionalization, disability rights
Read more: Ending Institutional America: William Bronston, PUBLIC HOSTAGE, PUBLIC RANSOMShow NotesEarly Life and Career Beginnings* Dr. Bronston’s early inspirations and motivations for pursuing a career in medicine. * His first encounters with disability rights issues and the profound impact on his career trajectory.
The Willowbrook State School Experience* Detailed account of Dr. Bronston’s work at Willowbrook State School. * Shocking conditions and human rights abuses witnessed at Willowbrook. * The pivotal role Dr. Bronston played in exposing these conditions to the public.
Advocacy and Legal Battles* The landmark Willowbrook case and its implications for disability rights. * Dr. Bronston’s collaboration with other advocates, lawyers, and journalists. * The process of deinstitutionalization and the shift towards community-based care.
Ongoing Efforts and Future Vision* Reflections on the progress made in disability rights since the Willowbrook case. * Current challenges and areas needing attention in the fight for equality and justice for people with disabilities. * Dr. Bronston’s vision for the future of disability rights.
Watch Geraldo RIvera’s documentary, Willowbrook: The Last Disgrace
In this episode of Writer’s Voice, we dive into the worlds of peace activism and literary translation through conversations with Brad Wolf and Noel Hernández-Gonzalez. Also, William Bronston, the doctor who brought instiionalization of the developmentally disabled to an end, reads from his book, Public Hostage, Public Ransom.
Brad Wolf discusses his work on Ministry of Risk, a collection of Philip Berrigan’s writings exploring themes of nonviolent resistance and liberation. Noel Hernández-Gonzalez shares insights into translating Simpatía, a novel by Rodrigo Blanco Calderón, depicting the devolution of Chavismo into chaos and poverty, through an effort to save Venezuela’s abandoned dogs.
Writers Voice— in depth conversation with writers of all genres, on the air since 2004.
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Key words: nonviolent activism, peace activism, Philip Berrigan, Brad Wolf, Noel Hernández-Gonzalez, William Bronston, Willowbrook State School, Venezuela, Chavismo, podcast, nonfiction, podcast, book recommendations, author interview, book podcast, book show, history, writer’s voice
Episode HighlightsBrad Wolf on Philip Berrigan
- Introduction to Philip Berrigan’s background and his journey from a WWII soldier to a nonviolent activist.
- Exploration of Berrigan’s writings and philosophy centered around resistance, revolution, and liberation.
- Discussion on Berrigan’s civil rights and anti-war activism, including his actions with the Baltimore Four and the Catonsville Nine.
- Wolf’s personal connection to Berrigan and his inspiration to edit and publish Ministry of Risk.
Noel Hernández-Gonzalez on Translating Simpatía
- Overview of Simpatía, set in present-day Venezuela under Nicolás Maduro’s regime.
- Examination of the novel’s title and its nuanced meaning in Spanish.
- Discussion on the abandonment of pets in Venezuela as a metaphor for societal issues.
- Insights into the characters and plot, focusing on characters Ulysses Khan and General Martín Ayala.
- The translation process and collaboration with co-translator Daniel Hahn.
William Bronston reads from Public Hostage, Public Ransom
Next week, we talk with the man who ended institutionalization of the developmentally disabled in America, Dr. William Bronston. In his book, Public Hostage, Public Ransom, Ending Institutional America, he tells the spellbinding tale of how he and shut the Willowbrook State School down and what that long ago fight means for all Americans facing our privatized system of warehousing the disabled and elderly. This week, Bronston reads an excerpt from his book for Writer’s Voice.
In this episode, we sit down with Audrea Lim, author of Free the Land: How We Can Fight Poverty and Climate Chaos.
Audrea traces the connections between land commodification and many of America’s most pressing issues: ecological collapse, climate change, systemic racism, gentrification and economic inequality. Through powerful examples and thoughtful analysis, she shows how land ownership and control are key to understanding and addressing these problems.
Then we re-broadcast our 2009 interview with Carleen Madigan about The Backyard Homestead: Produce All the Food You Need On Just a Quarter Acre! The book was so successful, it went on to spark a whole series of Backyard Homestead books.
Writers Voice— in depth conversation with writers of all genres, on the air since 2004.
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Read The Transcript
Key words: land ownership, Audrea Lim, backyard homesteading, Carleen Madigan, podcast, nonfiction, podcast, book recommendations, author interview, book podcast, book show, history, writer’s voice, Francesca Rheannon
Guest: Audrea LimAudrea Lim is a Brooklyn-based journalist who has written for the New Yorker, Rolling Stone, the New Republic, and The Nation. In addition to Free The Land, She is the author of The World We Need: Stories and Lessons from America’s Unsung Environmental Movement.
Introduction to Free the LandAudrea Lim introduces her book and its core theme: The realization that commodification of land drives various American issues, including ecological collapse and systemic racism.
The Climate and Land ConnectionAudrea’s experiences reporting on the climate crisis and Indigenous movements in Alberta, Canada, including the impact of oil developments on Indigenous lands and treaty rights.
Urban Displacement and GentrificationThe parallels between Indigenous dispossession and urban gentrification.
The struggle for land control in urban neighborhoods and its impact on long-time residents.
Historical Perspectives on Land OwnershipThe evolution of land ownership from communal use to capitalist property-driven systems.
The complexities and challenges of returning sovereignty to dispossessed communities.
Examples of Community-Led Land ReclamationThe White Earth Land Recovery Project by Winona LaDuke.
The efforts of Somali Bantu farmers in Maine to secure farmland through the Agrarian Trust and community land trusts (CLTs).
The Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative in Boston, which successfully combined community planning and land trusts to fight gentrification and build affordable housing.
Broader Implications and Future VisionsThe potential of community land trusts to democratize land ownership and control.
How these models can inspire hope and action in the face of systemic dispossession.
ConclusionAudrea Lim’s “Free the Land” offers a transformative perspective on land and its role in addressing poverty and climate chaos. Her insightful analysis and real-world examples provide a roadmap for reclaiming land sovereignty and building equitable communities.
Call to Action Read the Book: Discover more about these powerful examples and Audrea Lim’s insights by reading “Free the Land: How We Can Fight Poverty and Climate Chaos.” * Get Involved: Learn how you can support or start community land trusts and other initiatives in your area. * Share Your Thoughts*: Join the conversation on our social media channels and let us know what you think about the issues discussed in this episode.
In this conversation with Writer’s Voice host Francesca Rheannon, political theorist Danielle Allen talks about two core ideas at the heart of our nation’s Declaration of Independence: freedom and liberty. How are they aligned? How are they different? And can they contradict each other?
We re-air our 2014 interview with Danielle Allen about her book, Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality
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Key Words: Danielle Allen, July 4, Declaration of Independence, writer’s voice, podcast, book recommendations, author interview, book podcast, book show
Liberty — or Justice For All?America, we’ve been told, was founded on the principle of liberty — a notion many like to claim as justification for doing whatever they want without restraint of law or regulation. “Don’t tread on me!,” the libertarians cry, as they oppose business regulations, push to carry guns openly, or claim their right to discriminate against fellow citizens.
But in her close reading of the Declaration of Independence in Our Declaration, political theorist Danielle Allen says the core value of the founding document of our nation is equality — and it is the value from which liberty and justice derive. Her wonderful book examines what equality meant for the Founders of our nation — and what it means for us.
The Founders had many contradictions, not least of which was the fact that some of them espoused equality despite being slave-owners. Allen doesn’t shrink from these contradictions, but she shows that the Founders transcended them by doing something we seem to have forgotten how to do. They brought together a diversity of views with a common purpose: to forge a community dedicated to the rights of all humans to seek happiness. Not private happiness exactly, but happiness as a political right.
Allen, a Princeton professor and MacArthur “Genius” grant recipient, critically examines how the Founders reconciled their diverse viewpoints to establish a community dedicated to the universal right to pursue happiness—not merely personal contentment, but happiness as a fundamental political entitlement.
The post July 4 Special: Danielle Allen, OUR DECLARATION first appeared on Writer's Voice.
In this episode of Writer’s Voice, Francesca Rheannon welcomes back acclaimed novelist, essayist, and now memoirist, Francine Prose. They dive into Prose’s latest work, 1974, a memoir that revisits her time in San Francisco during a pivotal year in American history.
Then, In a deeply introspective conversation, Gail Godwin opens up about the pivotal moment that sparked her memoir, Getting to Know Death. Following a life-altering accident where she broke her neck, Godwin found herself confronting mortality in a visceral way. This memoir, initially sparked by personal trauma, evolved into a broader reflection on life, loss, and the inevitability of death.
Writers Voice— in depth conversation with writers of all genres, on the air since 2004.
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Key Words: Gail Godwin, Francine Prose, counterculture, Tony Russo, writer’s voice, podcast, book recommendations, author interview, book podcast, book show, book excerpt, memoir
Francine Prose’s 1974: Interview HighlightsMemoir vs. Anecdote:
Prose reflects on her transition from essays, as in Reading Like a Writer to memoir writing. She notes that while her previous works contained personal anecdotes, 1974 marks her first sustained effort into memoir, focusing on the transformative year when she lived in San Francisco.
The Changing Times:
Prose discusses the societal shifts of the early 1970s, contrasting the idealism of the 1960s with the disillusionment of the subsequent decade. She highlights how events like Watergate and the Patty Hearst case reshaped public perception, leading to a decline in the optimism of the previous decade.
Meeting Tony Russo:
Prose introduces Tony Russo, a pivotal figure in her memoir, and his involvement in the release of the Pentagon Papers alongside Daniel Ellsberg. She details Russo’s background as an aeronautical engineer turned anti-war activist, emphasizing his radicalization following experiences in Vietnam.
Relationship Dynamics:
Prose reflects on her personal interactions with Russo, portraying their relationship as one primarily defined by his intense idealism and her role as a listener. She describes Russo’s fervent dedication to activism and writing amidst personal struggles and mental instability.
The Zeitgeist of the 1970s:
The conversation delves into the countercultural movements of the era, exploring themes of sexual liberation, feminism, and the broader societal aspirations for change. Prose reflects on the contradictions and freedoms of the time, drawing parallels to contemporary challenges faced by young women.
Legacy of the Past:
Prose shares insights into the lasting impact of historical events like the Vietnam War, illustrating how the echoes of that era resonate in today’s political and social landscape. She connects these reflections to her own experiences and observations over the decades.
Closing Reflections:
The interview concludes with Prose reading a passage from her memoir, highlighting her deep emotional connection to San Francisco and the enduring impact of Alfred Hitchcock’s film Vertigo in shaping her understanding of memory and time.
Read or Listen To an Excerpt from 1974
Listen to more Writer’s Voice interviews with Francine ProseMR. MONKEY & READING LIKE A WRITER , LOVERS AT THE CHAMELEON CLUB, MY NEW AMERICAN LIFE, ANNE FRANK: THE BOOK, THE LIFE, THE AFTERLIFE
Gail Godwin’s Meditation on Mortality: Getting To Know DeathIn a deeply introspective conversation, Gail Godwin opens up about the pivotal moment that sparked her memoir, Getting to Know Death. Following a life-altering accident where she broke her neck, Godwin found herself confronting mortality in a visceral way. This memoir, initially sparked by personal trauma, evolved into a broader reflection on life, loss, and the inevitability of death.
Interview HighlightsPersonal Encounter with Mortality
Godwin recounts the incident that led to her contemplation of death. In August 2022, she tripped and broke her neck while tending to a dogwood tree. Unable to move, she was confronted with her vulnerability and mortality in a way she had never experienced before. This event became the catalyst for her memoir, prompting her to explore death through introspective writing.
Writing Process and Narrative Style
Reflecting on her writing process, Godwin explains how she begins the book by adopting a particular narrative style to convey her experience. Using a second-person perspective, she immerses herself in the visceral details of the accident and its aftermath. This stylistic choice allowes her to intimately connect with her readers, inviting them into the emotional and physical journey of grappling with mortality.
Exploring Themes of Death and Loss
Throughout Getting to Know Death, Godwin weaves together personal anecdotes and reflections on death. She draws inspiration from literary figures she has studied and taught about. The memoir also pays homage to significant losses in Godwin’s life, including the sudden death of her brother and the passing of her close friend, Pat.
The Influence of Literary Canon
Godwin discusses the literary influences that shaped her exploration of death. Drawing from works by Philip Larkin, Henry James, and Tolstoy, she incorporates their perspectives on mortality into her narrative. These literary references enrich her memoir, offering readers a broader context to contemplate the universal theme of death.
Philosophical Reflections on Mortality
Beyond personal anecdotes, Godwin engages in philosophical reflections on mortality. She discusses the difference between sudden deaths and those that come after a long life, reflecting on her father’s and brother’s tragic passings.
The post Two Memoirs: Francine Prose, 1974 & Gail Godwin, GETTING TO KNOW DEATH first appeared on Writer's Voice.
Episode DescriptionIn this episode of Writer’s Voice, host Francesca Rheannon sits down with acclaimed author Claire Wills to discuss her deeply personal and historically insightful book, Missing Persons or My Grandmother’s Secrets.
Wills shares her journey of uncovering family secrets surrounding an “illegitimate” pregnancy in 1950s Ireland and exploring the broader national scandal of mother and baby homes.
Through a blend of memoir and historical analysis, Wills illuminates the complex social forces that shaped perceptions of legitimacy and the devastating impact of secrecy on countless lives.
Then we re-play our interview from March of this year with Claire Coughlan about her mystery novel, Where They Lie. It centers around a clandestine abortion clinic in 1960’s Ireland.
And we continue our series of poetry readings from Mosab Abu Toha’s book, Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear: Poems from Gaza.
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Key Words: Claire Wills, Mother and Baby Homes, unwed mothers, abortion, podcast, author interview, book show, Ireland, Claire Coughlan, abortion rights
Key Topics* The personal motivations behind Claire Wills’ exploration of her family’s hidden history. * The Mother-and-Baby Home scandal that rocked Ireland in 2015. * The changing social constructions of illegitimacy from the Irish famine to the mid-20th century. * The role of the Catholic Church and the bureaucratization of secrecy in post-independence Ireland. * The dynamics of family secrets and their influence on personal and collective memory.
About the AuthorClaire Wills is an acclaimed author and historian whose work focuses on 20th-century British and Irish cultural history and literature. She teaches English literature at Cambridge University.
Download & Read The Transcript
Listen to more episodes:* A Personal History of Modern Ireland with Fintan O’Toole * Mary Costello, ACADEMY STREET & Katha Pollitt, PRO * Celebrating Reproductive Choice: Felicia Kornbluh, A WOMAN’S LIFE IS A HUMAN LIFE & Dolen Perkins-Valdez, TAKE MY HAND
The post Uncovering Hidden Histories: Claire Wills on Family Secrets and National Scandals first appeared on Writer's Voice.
What did a group of ordinary citizens find out when they managed to stop a huge gas pipeline from being built?
We spend the hour with Jonathan Mingle talking about his book, Gaslight: The Atlantic Coast Pipeline And The Fight For America’s Energy Future. It’s the story of how a diverse group of citizens came together to fight a pipeline proposed by one of America’s biggest corporations — and won.
Connect with Us: Follow us on social media to stay up-to-date on the latest episodes and news. Find us on Facebook at Writers Voice with Francesca Rheannon, on Instagram @WritersVoicePodcast or find us on X/Twitter @WritersVoice.
Key Words: climate crisis, climate change, Jonathan Mingle, gas pipeline, global warming, podcast, book podcast, author interview
Gaslight: The Fight Against America’s Energy FutureIn this episode, we delve into the David versus Goliath narrative about the battle against the Atlantic Coast Pipeline. Jonathan Mingle, author of Gaslight: The Atlantic Coast Pipeline And The Fight For America’s Energy Future, joins us to unravel the story behind the successful resistance against one of America’s biggest corporations.
Key Points Covered:Introduction to the Atlantic Coast Pipeline: Jonathan Mingle sets the stage by introducing the proposed pipeline project by Dominion Energy, a corporate endeavor billed as a solution for America’s energy needs.
The Dark Reality of “Natural” Gas: Despite its innocuous name, Mingle exposes the hidden dangers of fossil gas, highlighting how it leaks methane and other toxins, contributing to environmental degradation and health hazards.
The Community Uprising: Mingle shares the remarkable tale of how ordinary citizens from diverse backgrounds rallied together to oppose the pipeline’s construction. Their fight, spanning six years and reaching the Supreme Court, serves as a testament to the power of grassroots activism.
The Battle for America’s Energy Future: At the heart of the conflict lies a pivotal question: Is natural gas truly a “bridge fuel” to a cleaner future, or is it a ticking methane bomb jeopardizing both local communities and the planet’s stability?
Jonathan Mingle’s Insights: As a seasoned journalist whose beat is climate change, energy, and environmental issues, Mingle provides invaluable insights into the broader implications of the pipeline saga, touching upon political, policy, and climate-related ramifications.
The post How To Stop A Pipeline: Jonathan Mingle, GASLIGHT first appeared on Writer's Voice.
We talk with Victor Lodato about his terrific new novel, Honey. It’s about an octogenarian who is trying to come to terms with her life — her childhood growing up in a Mafia family in New Jersey and her adulthood trying to escape it.
Then, we talk with Kimberly Belle about her new thriller, The Paris Widow. The novel takes a look at the illicit trade in blood antiquities.
Connect with Us: Follow us on social media to stay up-to-date on the latest episodes and news. Find us on Facebook at Writers Voice with Francesca Rheannon, on Instagram @WritersVoicePodcast or find us on X/Twitter @WritersVoice.
Key Words: illicit art trade, blood antiquities, Victor Lodato, Kimberly Belle, thriller, podcast, book podcast, author interview
Victor Lodato’s Octogenarian HeroineNovels about octogenarians are rare. Octogenarian women — even rarer. And ones that portray an old woman with real affection, complexity and drama, as well as sexiness, are few and far between.
Victor Lodato’s new novel Honey manages this feat. That’s in spite of the fact that Lodato is neither old nor a woman. But the drama is probably helped by the fact that he’s a playwright as well as a novelist. And his affection for his character may be because it’s based on a close friendship he had with a woman in her eighties. He wrote about that friendship in a New York Times Modern Love column in 2017.
His protagonist is Honey Fasinga, the glamorous daughter of a notorious New Jersey mobster. She’s returned to her home town after a lifetime spent as a well-traveled fine art dealer.
She knows where the bodies are buried. Now she wants to lay their ghosts to rest. But first she has to deal with her current family, including those carrying on the brutal traditions of their forebears.
As old cruelties begin to resurface, Honey is no longer sure what she really wants—to forgive or to avenge. The question Lodato’s novel poses is: “What are the limits of compassion in a world of extraordinary violence?”
About The AuthorIn addition to Honey, Victor Lodato is the author of two other critically acclaimed novels, Edgar and Lucy, and Mathilda Savitch, which won the PEN USA Award. He’s also the author of nine plays.
A Thriller About Blood AntiquitiesWe’ve all heard about the trade in blood diamonds. But have you heard about “blood antiquities”? That’s the trade in stolen antiquities that infects the international art market. It’s a trade my guest mystery writer Kimberly Belle says is “strip-mining our past.”
The FBI describes this illicit art trade as the third largest black market in the world. Only drugs and guns generate more money than illicit art.
A Novel Based on FactThe blood antiquities trade is at the heart of Belle’s new novel, The Paris Widow. As the plot twists and turns, the reader is taken on a fascinating exploration of the topic. While fictional, the novel features characters and incidents based on real life, including Arthur Brand, the professional art sleuth who’s been called “The Indiana Jones of Stolen Art.”
About the AuthorKimberly Belle is a bestselling author of mystery novels and co-founder of the internet show, The Killer Author Club.
The post Two Great Beach Novels: Victor Lodato, HONEY & Kimberly Belle, THE PARIS WIDOW first appeared on Writer's Voice.
Are child protection service (CPS) agencies doing more harm than good?
Join us for an in-depth conversation with sociologist Kelly Fong about her book, Investigating Families: Motherhood in the Shadow of Child Protective Services. We explore the inner workings of Child Protection Services (CPS), the impact on families, and the need for systemic change.
Plus, we replay a segment from our 2022 interview with Emi Nietfield, author of the memoir Acceptance, about overcoming childhood trauma and the foster care system.
And we recommend a new children’s book for Father’s Day!
Connect with Us: Follow us on social media to stay up-to-date on the latest episodes and news. Find us on Facebook at Writers Voice with Francesca Rheannon, on Instagram @WritersVoicePodcast or find us on X/Twitter @WritersVoice.
Key Words: Child Protective Services, CPS, child welfare, family separation, poverty, social inequality, family policy, Emi Nietfield, Kelly Fong, podcast, book podcast, author interview
Kelly Fong, Investigating Families Interview Highlights* The disproportionate impact of CPS on low-income mothers and mothers of color * The fear and destabilization caused by CPS investigations * The vagueness of child abuse and neglect definitions * The need for alternative approaches to child protection * The importance of economic support and social infrastructure in preventing child maltreatment * Personal stories from mothers impacted by CPS
About The AuthorKelly Fong teaches sociology at the University of California, Irvine. Investigating Families: Motherhood in the Shadow of Child Protective Services (Princeton University Press) is her first book.
Key Quote
“The challenges that families face are not limited to…clinical or therapeutic challenges. For the vast majority of families entangled in the system, the root of many of the needs that they have is poverty, is adversity.” — Kelly Fong
Emi Nietfield, ACCEPTANCEIn the Fall of 2022, we spoke with Emi Nietfield about her powerful memoir, Acceptance. It chronicles her struggles as a teenager and young adult to rise above the poverty and abuse she suffered as a child, despite a child protection system that was anything but protective of children. We play an extended excerpt from that conversation.
Listen to the full interview
A Book for Father’s DayFather’s Day is coming up and we have just the book to recommend: LIKE FATHER, LIKE SON.
It’s from the prolific, award-winning children’s book author, Lesléa Newman, with charming illustrations by A.G. Ford. Featuring fathers who are strong in a gentle way, it’s a celebration of what fathers and sons do together — like cooking, camping and gardening. It also models what a good dad is like.
The post Kelly Fong, INVESTIGATING FAMILIES & Emi Nietfield, ACCEPTANCE first appeared on Writer's Voice.
We talk with Abrahm Lustgarten about his book, On The Move: The Overheating Earth and the Uprooting of America. It’s about how climate chaos means a humanity on the move.
Then, we catch up with journalist and author Ross Barkan about his recent article in New York Magazine, “The Most Endangered Democrat in America: Jamaal Bowman might lose his job over Israel.”
Writers Voice— in depth conversation with writers of all genres, on the air since 2004.
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Key Words: climate migration, climate refugees, climate justice, Abrahm Lustgarten, On the Move book, Ross Barkan, Jamaal Bowman, George Latimer, Gaza ceasefire, New York primary
Climate Chaos Means Humanity on the MoveGuest: Abrahm Lustgarten, investigative reporter on climate change
Book: On the Move: The Overheating Earth and the Uprooting of America
Key Topics:
- Climate Migration: The massive displacement of populations due to climate change, both globally and within the United States.
- Human Habitability Niche: The ideal climate zone for human habitation is shifting, displacing billions.
- U.S. Impacts: Wildfires, floods, extreme heat, and droughts will reshape the country.
- Heat and Humidity: Rising temperatures and humidity levels will make parts of the U.S. uninhabitable.
- Sea Level Rise: Coastal communities are facing rapid land loss and increased flooding.
Inequality: Climate change disproportionately affects poor communities and communities of color. - Economic Impacts: Climate change will cause significant economic disruption, particularly in the southern U.S.
- Food Security: Agricultural yields are declining due to heat and water scarcity.
- Global Perspective: The impacts of climate migration will be far greater in the developing world.
- Loss and Damage: The U.S. and other wealthy nations have a responsibility to aid countries suffering from climate-related losses.
- Economic Opportunities: Addressing climate change can create economic benefits, but requires investment and policy changes.
- Solutions: Reducing emissions, investing in adaptation, and providing foreign aid are crucial steps.
Read an Excerpt from On The Move
Keywords: climate change, migration, displacement, heat, floods, drought, inequality, economics, food security, loss and damage, foreign aid, solutions
Additional Notes: Lustgarten’s book provides a detailed and personal look at the impacts of climate migration. The interview highlights the urgency of addressing climate change and the need for immediate action. The discussion emphasizes the interconnectedness of climate change, migration, and social justice issues.
The Most Endangered Democrat in America: Jamal Bowman’s Battle Against AIPACCongressmember Jamal Bowman of New York is facing a tough challenge in the upcoming June primary, with AIPAC backing his opponent George Latimer. Ross Barkan, author of a recent article in New York Magazine, joins us to discuss the stakes of this critical race.
Key PointsBowman’s Stance on Israel:
- Bowman’s position on Israel leans left, advocating for a two-state solution and conditioning military aid to Israel.
- He’s drawn controversy by calling for a ceasefire in Gaza and criticizing Israeli government actions.
Latimer’s Position on Israel:
- Latimer aligns with AIPAC’s positions, opposing conditioning aid to Israel and supporting Netanyahu.
- He’s backed by significant funding from pro-Israel donors, including some with ties to Trumpist circles.
The Race Dynamics:
- Bowman’s vulnerabilities, including past controversies and a spending disadvantage, make the race tight.
- Latimer, a well-known local politician, presents a formidable challenge to the incumbent Bowman.
Implications of Bowman’s Defeat:
- Losing Bowman would be a setback for progressive forces, signaling AIPAC’s successful strategy in Democratic primaries.
- It highlights the effectiveness of recruiting candidates like Latimer, who blend local credibility with staunch support for AIPAC’s agenda.
Conclusion:
- The outcome of this race holds significant implications for both the pro-Palestinian movement and the future of progressive politics in America.
Read “The Most Endangered Democrat in America” in New York Magazine
Listen to our previous conversation with Ross Barkan about his book, The Prince
Was 2020 the year Americans finally lost faith in their government? We talk with Eric Klinenberg about his acclaimed new book, 2020: One City, Seven People, And The Year Everything Changed.
The book follows seven New Yorkers as they try to cope with the pandemic. Among them, a transit worker, a bar owner, a retired lawyer who organizes a mutual aid network and a Black Lives Matter protester. Their stories and those of the others illustrate how our leaders and institutions failed us — and how some citizens stepped into the breach.
Then, in February 2021 we spoke with journalist John Nichols about why President Biden’s bold plan for Covid relief was defeated by the Republicans, joined by a few centrist Dems. We listen back to that conversation.
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2020: Covid, Black Lives Matter, Culture Wars2020 was a momentous year in our nation’s history. The worst pandemic in a century was raging. The country saw the largest protest movement ever, with people of all races uniting in support of Black Lives Matter. The economy plummeted and the government spent trillions trying to keep people afloat.
It was also the year that many Americans lost the last shred of faith they had in our institutions. Yet, you hardly hear anybody talking about what happened that year.
That’s why Eric Klinenberg’s book is so important. He follows seven New Yorkers whose experiences illuminate how Americans reckoned with 2020. The book vividly captures these stories, casting them against the backdrop of a high-stakes presidential election, a surge of misinformation, rising distrust, and raging protests.
Klinenberg’s book 2020 not only helps us reckon with what we lived through, but also with the challenges we face before the next crisis arrives.
About The AuthorEric Klinenberg is an American sociologist and a scholar of urban studies, culture, and media. He teaches Social Science at NYU and is Director of the Institute for Public Knowledge. In addition to 2020 Klinenberg is the author of several books, including Fighting For Air and Going Solo, both of which we spoke to him about on this show.
Listen to an audio excerpt from 2020
Larry Tye tells us about his new book, The Jazzmen: How Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Count Basie Transformed America. It’s a fresh look at three titans of the Jazz Age. Then, we re-air our 2020 interview with Larry Tye about his biography of Senator Joe McCarthy, Demagogue.
Writers Voice— in depth conversation with writers of all genres, on the air since 2004.
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Key words: Jazz Age, Larry Tye, Count Basie, Louis Armstrong, Satchmo, Duke Ellington, author interview, book podcast, podcast
Titans of The Jazz AgeAmong the greatest jazz musicians of all time were Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Count Basie. These titans of jazz, born within a few years of each other, rose from the depths of racial adversity to become global icons of music.
Today, we talk with biographer Larry Tye, bestselling author of Satchel and Bobby Kennedy, about his new book, The Jazzmen. It paints a sweeping portrait of this triumvirate of the Jazz Age, men who not only entertained the world but also broke through the barriers of segregation and violence with their artistry.
Ellington, a grandson of slaves, rose above the confines of his time, crafting music that defied categorization. Armstrong, emerging from a rough New Orleans neighborhood known as The Battlefield, began his musical journey with a humble tin horn at the age of seven. Count Basie, born to a coachman and a laundress, saw his future in the sounds of a traveling carnival, eventually paving his way to fame with a little help from Fats Waller.
Their legacy of challenging and overcoming racial boundaries opened America’s eyes to the power of their art, and, in some ways, set the stage for the civil rights movement.
Listen to an excerpt from The Jazz Men.
About The AuthorLarry Tye is the author of numerous books, including biographies of Bobby Kennedy and Senator Joe McCarthy. Listen to our interviews with him about those books.
A bestselling novelist took a job at a big box store, was shocked by what she found, and decided to write a novel about it.
We talk with Adelle Waldman about her new novel, Help Wanted. It’s about what happens when a group of workers at a big box store scheme to get their overbearing manager promoted out of their department. Along the way, it reveals what work life is really like for millions of low wage workers in today’s economy.
Then, we remember novelist Paul Auster, who died on April 30 at the age of 77. We air our 2008 conversation with Auster about his novel, Man In The Dark.
Writers Voice— in depth conversation with writers of all genres, on the air since 2004. Find us on Facebook at Writers Voice with Francesca Rheannon, on Instagram @WritersVoicePodcast or find us on X/Twitter @WritersVoice.
Key Words: author interview, podcast, book podcast, author interview, Writer’s Voice, Francesca Rheannon, fiction, Adelle Waldman, Paul Auster
A Novel About The Real Lives of Low-wage WorkersAdelle Waldman always thought she would dedicate her writing career to penning fiction about the love affairs of the upper middle class, like her literary hero, Jane Austen. Her bestselling first novel, The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P., published in 2014, fit that mold.
But her new novel, Help Wanted, breaks it. Instead of skewering the absurdities of the Brooklyn literati, it shines a light on the odds low-wage workers are up against in today’s economy.
And those odds are daunting, as Waldman discovered when she took a job at a Target store to find out how those workers really live.
Despite the success of the Fight For Fifteen movement, which moved many major retailers like Walmart and Target to raise their hourly wage to $15 dollars an hour or even a few dollars more, real yearly wages are worse than they were 20 years ago. That’s because most non-management retail jobs are now part time without benefits.
Not only that, work hours are erratic, as corporate management fiddles with schedules to “maximize efficiency.” One week, a “Team Member” could be working 40 hours; the next week, 5, and on a different shift. It’s hard to plan, keep food on the table, pay rent or even manage a second job under those conditions.
With a richly drawn cast of characters, Waldman’s novel Help Wanted is a funny, moving tale of ordinary people trying to make a living.
Remembering Paul Austerby Writer’s Voice Host Francesca Rheannon
I opened the New York Times on May 1 to the headline: “Paul Auster, the Patron Saint of Literary Brooklyn, Dies at 77.”
I was immediately transported back to the dimly lit studio at WMUA 91.1 FM in Amherst, Massachusetts where, in 2008, I spoke with Auster via phone about his novel Man In The Dark. Writer’s Voice was only four years old then and I was thrilled to have scored an interview with an author the Times obit called “one of the signature New York writers of his generation.”
After 9/11, Paul Auster said that “writing is no longer a matter of free will for him–it’s a matter of survival.” Man In The Dark deals with issues of survival in a post 9/11 America — the survival of hope, of connection with others, of choice in the face of evil And, finally, of the stories that knit families together.
Auster was the author of numerous novels, screenplays, and works of non-fiction, including Travels in the Scriptorium, The Invention of Solitude, and The Brooklyn Follies. He was also a poet, translator and film director.
In Auster’s memory, we replay our 2008 conversation with him.
We talk with Greg Wrenn about his book Mothership: A Memoir of Wonder and Crisis. It’s about healing the maladaptive imprinting of childhood trauma with Nature — and psychedelics.
Then, a climate journalist tries a new tack to craft a narrative about the climate emergency. We talk withElizabeth Kolbert about her illustrated alphabet book, H Is For Hope: Climate Change From A To Z.
Writers Voice— in depth conversation with writers of all genres, on the air since 2004.
Find us on Facebook at Writers Voice with Francesca Rheannon, on Instagram @WritersVoicePodcast or find us on X/Twitter @WritersVoice.
Key Words: author interview, memoir, podcast, book podcast, author interview, Writer’s Voice, Francesca Rheannon, climate change, climate crisis, ayahuasca, Greg Wrenn, Elizabeth Kolbert
Greg Wrenn’s Journey of HealingWhen Greg Wrenn was growing up, he loved to snorkel in the Florida coral reefs. They were still beautiful, but already threatened from pollution.
Threat was also something Wrenn experienced nearly every day of his life. As a child, he was the victim of emotional and physical abuse that deeply scarred him.
His love of Nature led Wrenn to become an environmental educator teaching writing about the environment to college students. But the complex PTSD resulting from his childhood trauma crippled his relationships and his sense of self.
Then, Nature provided him with a cure — in this case in the form of the psychedelic preparation, ayahuasca.
Bringing together the personal and transpersonal, Wrenn’s memoir Mothership charts his journey from trauma to healing. It’s an eloquent testament to how connecting to Nature can make us whole, not only as individuals but as members of our planetary community.
Elizabeth Kolbert Talks Climate From A to ZThere are 26 letters in the alphabet. That fact gives Elizabeth Kolbert 26 ways to talk about the climate emergency, possible solutions and obstacles to deploying them.
In her new book, H Is For Hope, Kolbert tells a nuanced story, one that holds the truth of fierce hope and daunting challenges in the same embrace.
Beautifully illustrated by Wesley Allsbrook, H Is For Hope is a complicated story told with elegant simplicity. This alphabet book for grownups is an innovative way to teach about the most existential threat we face with charm, humor and accessablity.
Kolbert has been a guest on Writer’s Voice stretching back to 2008, when we first interviewed her about her New Yorker article about the world’s first wind farm to provide 100% renewable energy to its community, “The Island In The Wind.” We spoke with her also about her books, The Sixth Extinction and Under A White Sky.
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In this episode of Writer’s Voice, we feature two stories about war and secrets. First, we talk with Howard Mansfield about his book, I Will Tell No War Stories: What Our Fathers Left Unsaid About World War II. The book uncovers the truth about the terrible toll that war took on American airmen like Mansfield’s father—revealing the real story behind the much touted “glory.”
Then we talk with journalist Sasha Vasilyuk about her terrific debut novel, Your Presence Is Mandatory (publication date 4/23/24). It hews closely to her own family’s history, particularly her Jewish Ukrainian grandfather’s hidden past as a World War II prisoner of war.
Writers Voice— in depth conversation with writers of all genres, on the air since 2004. Find us on Facebook at Writers Voice with Francesca Rheannon, on Instagram @WritersVoicePodcast or find us on X/Twitter @WritersVoice.
Key Words: author interview, memoir, fiction, book podcast, Writer’s Voice, WWII, Soviet Union, nonfiction
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Howard MansfieldIt’s a phenomenon: why did so few American veterans of WWII ever talk about their experience of war?
That’s something Howard Mansfield set out to discover when, shortly before his father died, he came across a battered diary his dad had kept while flying bomber missions over Germany.
In his new book, I Will Tell No War Stories, Mansfield suggests that the sheer magnitude of the war, the harsh conditions of aerial combat and the emotional toll of witnessing destruction and loss, including of civilian populations made it hard for veterans to articulate their experiences.
Also playing a part? The cultural expectation of stoicism and a desire to shield future generations from the horrors of war.
Mansfield’s book serves as a reminder of the individual sacrifices and collective traumas endured by those who served in World War II. But it also holds lessons for us today about confronting the truth about the real human cost of war, wherever and whenever it happens.
In addition to I Will Tell No War Stories, Howard Mansfield is the author of The Habit of Turning The World Upside Down, Chasing Eden and Dwelling In Possibility, among others.
Listen to our previous interviews with Howard Mansfield
Sasha VasilyukSasha Vasilyuk’s journey from Soviet Crimea to the United States is a testament to the complexities of identity and history. Born in a region marked by geopolitical shifts and historical turmoil, Vasilyuk’s experiences shaped her perspective and inspired her novel, Your Presence Is Mandatory.
Through her family’s history, particularly her Jewish Ukrainian grandfather’s hidden past as a World War II prisoner of war, Vasilyuk explores themes of secrecy, shame, and the impact of totalitarian regimes on personal and collective narratives.
Beautifully written, with a vivid cast of characters, Your Presence is Mandatory is a deeply moving contemplation of how secrets breed shame and suffering, even when they are held in order to protect others from political persecution. It’s also a cautionary tale for Americans as we confront authoritarian threats to our own democracy.
Sasha Vasilyuk’s nonfiction work has been published in The New York Times, Harper’s Bazaar, BBC, USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, and elsewhere. Your Presence is Mandatory is her first novel.
We talk with Brad Gooch about his acclaimed new biography of Keith Haring, RADIANT: The Life and Line of Keith Haring. Then we listen back to a clip of Gooch talking with us in 2017 about his biography, Rumi’s Secret: The Life of the Sufi Poet of Love.
Writers Voice— in depth conversation with writers of all genres, on the air since 2004.
Find us on Facebook at Writers Voice with Francesca Rheannon, on Instagram and Threads @WritersVoicePodcast or find us on X/Twitter @WritersVoice.
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Key words: biography, Keith Haring, Rumi, Brad Gooch, podcast, author interview, history, book show
Read more: Brad Gooch on The Radiant Life of Keith Haring & moreKeith Haring: Breaking BarriersIn the 1980s, the subways of New York City were covered with art. In the stations, black matte sheets were pasted over outdated ads, and unsigned chalk drawings often popped up on these blank spaces.
These temporary chalk drawings numbered in the thousands and became synonymous with a city as diverse as it was at war with itself, beset with poverty and crime but alive with art and creative energy. And every single one of those drawings was done by Keith Haring.
Haring was one of the most emblematic artists of the 1980s. Part of an iconic cultural crowd that included Andy Warhol, Madonna, and Jean-Michel Basquiat, Haring broke down the barriers between high art and popular culture, creating work that was accessible for all and using it as a means to provoke and inspire radical social change.
Haring died of AIDS in 1990. To this day, his influence on our culture remains.
RADIANT: Brad Gooch’s Definitive Biography of HaringBrad Gooch’s biography of Keith Haring, Radiant, brings Haring’s brilliant but tragically short life to light, painting a vivid picture of the life and times of his subject. Gooch was granted access to Haring’s extensive archive to write a biography that will become the authoritative work on the artist.
About the AuthorBrad Gooch is a poet, novelist, and biographer. In addition to Radiant and Rumi’s Secret: The Life of the Sufi Poet of Love (we play an excerpt from our 2017 interview with Gooch about Rumi’s Secret) he’s the author of biographies of Flannery O’Connor and Frank O’Hara; as well as several other works, including memoir, poetry and fiction.
A grandmother’s traumatic history reverberates through three generations…We talk with Tessa Hulls about her powerful graphic memoir, Feeding Ghosts. It tells the story of three generations of women — her Chinese grandmother, Sun Yi; her mother, Rose; and herself —and how, in the process of writing and drawing their stories, she was able to heal the trauma that haunted them.
Then, we remember the great primatologist Frans de Waal, who passed away March 14. We re-air our 2022 interview with him about his last book, Different: Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist.
Writer’s Voice — in depth conversation with writers of all genres, on the air since 2004. Rate us on your favorite podcast app! It really helps others find our show.
Like us on Facebook at Writers Voice Radio or find us on Threads and Instagram at writersvoicepodcast and at X/Twitter @WritersVoice.
Key words: memoir, podcast, author interview, Frans de Waal, Tessa Hulls, gender, history
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TESSA HULLS: TRANSGENERATIONAL TRAUMAWhen Tessa Hulls was growing up in a tiny town in the Pacific Northwest, all she knew about her grandmother Sun Yi, who lived with her family, was that she was Chinese, she’d been a famous journalist before the Communist takeover, and that something had happened to make her lose her mind.
She also knew that her mother’s overwhelming obsession was to take care of Sun Yi — something she had been doing ever since she was a kid in Hong Kong, after the two escaped Communist China, and then later when they emigrated to the US.
What Tessa Hulls didn’t know is how that history of political trauma contaminated every aspect of her mother’s relationship to Tessa herself. And why she had spent much of her childhood and early adulthood trying to escape from the ghosts haunting her mother and grandmother — and, by extension, her.
Feeding Ghosts is a vivid journey into the beating heart of one family, set against the dark backdrop of Chinese history. By turns fascinating and heartbreaking, inventive and poignant, Hulls’ memoir exposes the fear and trauma that haunt generations, and the love that holds them together.
About The AuthorTessa Hulls is an artist, a writer, and an adventurer. Her essays have appeared in The Washington Post, Atlas Obscura, and Adventure Journal, and her comics have been published in various venues.
See images from FEEDING GHOSTS
Remembering Frans de WaalThe world-renowned primatologist Frans de Waal passed away on March 15.
During his long career, he studied all the great apes — including humans. His research showed that the capacity for cooperation and empathy is innate and continuous between the different ape species, from chimps and gorillas to bonobos and humans.
In 2022, Writer’s Voice was privileged to speak with de Waal about his book Different: Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist. We re-air that conversation in his memory.
Is identity politics keeping us divided? And how can activists build solidarity with others while fighting for their own rights? We talk with activist, educator and organizer Michael Zweig about his book, Class, Race and Gender: Challenging the Injuries and Divisions of Capitalism.
Then in honor of Spring, Host Francesca Rheannon reads her story, The Sheep’s Blessing. It’s about an encounter in the backcountry of Provence that illuminated the sacred bond between a flock of sheep, a dog and a shepherd.
Writer’s Voice — in depth conversation with writers of all genres, on the air since 2004. Rate us on your favorite podcast app! It really helps others find our show.
Like us on Facebook at Writers Voice Radio or find us on Threads and Instagram at writersvoicepodcast and at X/Twitter @WritersVoice.
Key words: Michael Zweig, class, race, gender, intersectionality, identity politics, podcast, author interview, politics
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Read more: Michael Zweig: Overcoming the Divisions of Class, Race & GenderThe Rise of Identity PoliticsThe movements to support identity rights were a key leap forward in the latter half of the twentieth century. The struggles to protect the rights of racial minorities, of women, of LGBTQ people addressed grievous social wrongs and won important victories. Victories that are being undermined today.
But those movements also took place at a time when the movement to support working class rights and unions was on the wane. One could argue that identity politics replaced class politics, especially in the Democratic Party, but also in the sphere of larger mass movements.
Challenging the Injuries and Divisions of CapitalismIn his book Class, Race and Gender: Challenging the Injuries and Divisions of Capitalism, Michael Zweig says the thread that weaves together class, race, and gender oppression is capitalism, a system that divides those it exploits in order to maintain its rule.
Zweig illuminates the fundamental mechanisms of capitalism, unveiling the root causes behind a myriad of pressing issues plaguing our world today, from income inequality to environmental degradation, from militarism to systemic racism and patriarchy. In Class, Race and Gender, Zweig dissects the interconnectedness of these phenomena, tracing their origins throughout US history.
Drawing from his own experience as an activist, educator, and organizer, Zweig offers not only a a deep understanding of structural inequities but also practical strategies for transformative action.
The Sheep’s Blessing by Francesca RheannonnSpringlike weather over the last few days has put me in mind of another Spring I experienced over 20 years ago in the beautiful back country of Provence, in the foothills of the Alps.
I was living in the house of my friend Fabienne, who had gone off to Paris for several months during the winter. I wrote a story about an encounter with a shepherd I had on the first spring-like day at the end of January, 2002. The story, “The Sheep’s Blessing,” was published in 2003 in an anthology of writings about Provence, Travelers’ Tales Provence: True Stories.
The shepherd Hervé, who I met that day, became a good friend. He turned out to be a true philosopher of his profession, a kind of guru/revolutionary of the shepherd’s life. In the months that followed, I went on many walks with him and his trusty sheep dog, Tango. I share my first encounter with him in this episode of Writer’s Voice.
Transcript of Writer’s Voice Interview with Michael ZweigMike Zweig, welcome to Writers Voice.
Great to be with you.
This is a wonderful book, Class, Race, and Gender, Challenging the Injuries and Divisions of Capitalism. So right at the top there with your title, we have the notion of intersectionality. Intersectionality is something people have been talking about, but I’m not sure they’ve been practicing it as much as they should be. And you say that in order to really understand race and gender, we have to understand their connection to class. So explain that.
And I would also say in order to understand class, you have to understand its relationship to issues of race and gender because these things are mutually determined.
Race and class are different things, but they are not independent of one another.
And the same is true for race and gender, and gender and class.
These things have their independent existence or their specific characteristics that mean that they’re not just all the same, but they are very intimately connected and mutually determined.
So if we look, for example, at race and class in the United States, from the very beginning of the colonies, the English colonizers brought with them English and African indentured labor.
And that indentured labor, whether it was English or African, were under similar circumstances and worked for a period and got their independence and then got their land or went into whatever activities that sustained them.
But that joint workforce of English and African labor rebelled against the English colonizers, the English ruling class at that time, in the late 17th century.
And so the English, in order to divide the African and the English labor, instituted racial slavery.
Now, we know in this country that there has been a history of slavery.
Maybe there are some people in Florida or Alabama who want to say, well, maybe not, or maybe it was really okay.
But we know that slavery was a very important part of American history.
What’s often overlooked is that it wasn’t just slavery, it was racial slavery.
It was the enslavement of people of African descent without the enslavement of people of English and European descent.
And what that did, not only to subordinate and to destroy the independent lives of African labor, it also weakened English labor and European labor that came to be known as white.
It wasn’t white before the imposition of racial slavery.
That wasn’t a category, a social category.
It became a social category because racial slavery was imposed in order to weaken and divide the working population.
And that division continues to this day, and it doesn’t adhere well to the interests of white workers because if you look at areas where the legacy of racial slavery is the sharpest in Mississippi or South Carolina or Georgia, you’ll find that those are the areas that have, for white workers, the lowest wages, the least opportunity to join unions, the most state and government opposition to unions, the lowest life expectancy for white people, the highest birth fatality rate for white women and children.
So white people have also not really benefited in the end from those divisions that racial slavery imposed.
So that’s why I say you can’t really understand class in this country without understanding its intersections with race.
And we could tell a similar story on issues of gender and its relationship also to race and class.
Yeah. I wonder if you could outline a little bit about that in terms of gender.
Well, gender oppression has been with us for as long as we know, not just a feature of capitalism.
And it is not just a feature that capitalist ruling elites have imposed the way that they did with racial slavery.
So the operation is a little different.
But what capitalism has done and what capitalism in this country has done is to take that history, that long history of patriarchy and imposed it with special characteristics that enhance the power of capital and again weaken the unity and the opportunity for working people to advance their interests.
And that happens well through a number of different mechanisms.
It happens through the imposition of lower wages on women for the same work as men.
It happens when women are basically forced in the culture, in the capitalist culture to stay home or to take the responsibilities of household labor and the raising of families often on top of their work in the workforce.
So that’s the double shift well understood in the feminist literature.
So we have, again, the opportunity to look at gender also through the lens of class.
For example, in the second wave feminist movement that we had in the 1960s and 70s that was very powerful in opening up many opportunities to women for job opportunities beyond teaching and nursing.
If we look at the trajectory of that success, it really has affected most positively professional and upper class women.
Women in the ruling class absorbed into corporate executive positions that bring them directly into the ruling class.
Women who are CEOs of major corporations, they’re not as many as men because male chauvinism and patriarchy still continues.
But the advances of the women’s movement in the 60s and 70s is largely accumulated to professional and capitalist class women.
Working class women are still suffering very much under the differentiations between men and women in the workforce and in wages and in working conditions.
And so we see, again, the intersection and the mutual determination of class with gender in our own lifetimes.
And so in this book, I mean, this book definitely deals with capitalism, but it also deals with it from the focus of how to build a movement to expand the power of the working class and even ultimately change capitalism in the medium term perhaps and replace it in the long term. So I love the way you focus on the practical implications of all these conditions. And you point to the fact that back in the times that you and I came out of the struggle, the movement, it was already one that understood intersectionality quite well.
And it then went through a long period where that fell apart, where identity politics really took over. And it seems to me that intersectionality and awareness of it is happening more now than it’s been. A perfect example of this is the George Floyd, the movement, the Black Lives Matter movement, when you saw so many people who came out into the streets, there was unity. Even if there wasn’t totally an understanding of intersectionality, there was unity between white and black people. It was a multi-ethnic, multi-racial movement. And the backlash to it was absolutely fierce, very much like the backlash to Occupy Wall Street. So I wonder if you could talk about these efforts to bring people together, and then how do we confront the backlashes that almost inevitably follow?
I think we need to look at our social movements, again, not just in isolation.
There is a women’s movement, there is now a very powerful movement around reproductive rights and medical care for women and children.
We have a very important civil rights and black freedom movement still operating and active around police issues and other things.
We have a very powerful environmental movement that is rising up in the United States and all over the world.
So all these are individual movements.
And what I’m trying to get across in this book, Class, Race, and Gender, challenging the injuries and divisions of capitalism, the divisions among all these movements, for example, the divisions that keep us isolated from one another as we take up only the immediate issue that concerns us, whether it’s the environment or police brutality or reproductive rights or whatever it turns out to be.
We need to understand that those individual movements are confronting, each of them, particular aspects of how capitalism works, so that we’re really all involved in one broad umbrella movement, which is a movement to challenge the power and the divisions and the injuries of capitalism, which is what the challenge to the environment is.
It arises from capitalist depredation of natural resources.
The women’s movement derives from, in our country at this time, a challenge to capitalist interests.
If you look at the people who are trying to suppress women in Alabama, they’re the very same people who want to keep people from joining unions.
They’re the very same people who want to destroy voting rights for Black people.
That’s not just a coincidence.
That’s because they represent certain interests which have their implications across all different aspects of life, including religious belief, including ethical and value orientations.
So, I think that what we need to do is to begin to look at how each of our movements really reinforces and cooperates with and resonates with all the other movements into one large, coordinated, in more or less ways, broad campaign that challenges the power of capitalism.
Now, in the 1960s, the movement as it was at the time, that was the situation.
We were involved in the anti-war movement, civil rights movement, women’s movement, gay and lesbian rights movements.
But each of us understood that a victory in our movement, in some other movement, was a victory for us.
We were looking over our shoulders and forward and around us at all the different strands of that movement that challenged capitalism at the time.
And capitalism itself as a system was very much under attack and on the defensive in the 1960s and early 70s.
So, we are not quite at that stage yet where all of these movements that are percolating, bubbling up, see each other as jointly struggling against a common structure.
I think the closest thing these days to that is the Poor People’s Campaign, which is co-chaired by the Reverend William Barber and the Reverend Dr. Liz Theoharis.
Those movements that bring together in what Reverend Barber calls a fusion politics is, I think, the future that we’re trying to, I think, most productively build on right now.
Yeah, and that’s the Poor People’s Campaign. It’s so important. I know that they’re doing an enormous voting drive to get out the vote among poor people who tend to vote in very small numbers proportionally. Let’s talk about the working class. I think Biden talks about building out from the middle out.
You know, I’d say the mainstream view is that we’re a middle class society.
But you say, in fact, the majority of Americans belong to the working class.
You say that’s the country’s best kept secret.
Who are the working class?
And this is broadly defined.
Then I’m going to ask you about the white working class.
Well, when we get to the white working class, let me just preview of coming attractions.
There is no such thing as the white working class.
There is the white component of an interracial, multigenerational, multiethnic working class.
But the working class doesn’t have a particular color.
So I think that there’s some confusion there.
But to your main initial question, you know, we we think about class in different ways in this country.
So when Joe Biden went to war in Michigan last year to march in to stand with the autoworkers on strike and Sean Fain, the president of the UAW, was there with him.
President Biden talked about the work, you know, unions build the middle class, the middle class built the country and unions build the middle class.
Sean Fain gets up and says, we’re talking about the working class here.
This is the working class in motion and the working class needs to join together.
And that’s one reason why Sean Fain negotiated a contract that ends in 2020 in 2028 and has encouraged all unions to negotiate contracts.
Then and at the same time in 2028, so that they can all go out in a general strike against capitalism, because Sean Fain understands class as a question of power.
The power of working people to unite in order to challenge and to disrupt the power that capitalism and the capitalist class brings against us.
So in this country.
We often talk about class in terms of income.
You know, there’s a broad middle income group of people, and then there’s a fringe of rich people at the top and poor people at the bottom.
And that’s true.
You can sort of organize data that way and place people according to that income spectrum.
But I think that that’s a very misleading and ineffective way to think about it.
To me, the question of class is a question of power.
Now, we don’t have a direct measure of power the way we do of income.
So I used occupation as sort of a stand in for how much power you’ve got.
If you were working in a call center with a headset on for eight hours a day, you don’t have a whole lot of power and you’re in the working class.
If you run the company that runs that call center, you have a lot of authority.
If you’re the manager, the senior executives, the CEO, the chief financial officer, the legal counsel, general counsel for the company.
Those are the people who, when the door closes, they’re in the room making the decisions.
And that’s the capitalist class, because they have the power to organize and to deploy the labor that they hire.
Now, in between the capitalist class and the working class in that power grid, there is a middle class of supervisors and managers, of small business owners, independent entrepreneurs, maybe run a fuel delivery business or they have a bodega or they have a small shop somewhere, metal shop.
And then there are professional people, doctors, lawyers, who are also sort of in the middle.
They have certain characteristics and power that capitalists might have, but they’re also constrained by the power of capital in different ways, the way workers are.
So that middle class is about 35, 36 percent of the population.
The working class, the people who just go to work and do their job and go home or go to another job under the supervision and under the control of others, that’s 62 percent of the population in this country.
This is a working class country.
And if we understand class as a question of power, coming back to the intersectionality, it’s much easier to see class in a relationship to race and gender because race and gender are also issues of power.
They have implications, of course, for income and wealth, but that’s not their foundation.
The foundation of race and gender is power and the foundation of class is also power.
I think that’s very useful because even I don’t think you can divide by profession. There are many doctors who really don’t have any power. The insurance companies script their every moment down to the second. And in fact, there are doctors who are striking or joining unions. And so I think that’s a very useful lens. It’s not something I think anymore that we can divide by occupation.
But let’s talk about the white working class because even if it’s just a section of the working class, which I agree with you on, there’s a certain political role that it is seen as playing, whether it actually plays that or not is open to question. We spoke recently with Les Leopold, who wrote a book about Wall Street’s war on workers, and he made the point that mass layoffs have been a key reason why white workers have deserted the Democratic Party because they feel that their class interest is not, in fact, being represented. You also say that white working class men are not a lost cause, as many people have written them off as. So could you talk about that?
I think that white workers and black workers have suffered over the last 50, 60 years since the late 60s or certainly since the early and mid 70s as capitalists have increased their power and increased their authority and their control over every aspect of life in this country.
Pushing back the gains that workers made in the unionization drives of the 30s, 40s, and 50s, pushing back the gains that black people made in the civil rights movement, pushing back the gains that women made in the women’s movement.
All that pushing back and grabbing of power by the re-grabbing and reasserting authority that the capitalists have imposed on our society, that’s had a very detrimental effect on all workers and certainly on white workers.
Now, what I think is driving a lot of the hostility that white workers feel towards conditions of life in this country is that they’re just not used to being on the losing end of the stick.
They’re not used to, white workers are not used to a situation in which, as they put it, the country’s disappearing, the country’s changing from under them and they can’t really do anything about it.
Now, that is represented by the loss of manufacturing jobs, union jobs, the weakening of unions, now unions in this country represent something like 6%, 8% of the working population, maybe 10% if you include all the public sector workers.
It used to be 35%, 40% and that was a whole different world in which workers asserted themselves and were present in the political calculations.
Presidential campaigns always began in Detroit on Labor Day with a big march, the Democratic Party was there and had a presidential candidate, was there with workers.
That’s a very unusual thing these days and workers notice that and white workers in particular, I think, because they were used to being on the top of the pile and not having those declines affect them, are especially aggrieved.
And certainly the Democratic Party since Bill Clinton, and you could say, going back to Jimmy Carter as well and issues of regulation, has abandoned the working class, has abandoned working people, whether they’re white, black or Asian or Native American, whoever they are, Hispanic doesn’t matter.
It’s the capitalist class that the Democratic Party has subjected itself to and has taken over, and I think that that is something that white workers understand very well.
And ironically, it’s something that Donald Trump now is running around saying to black people, what are you going or hanging out with these Democrats for?
What have they ever done for you?
And that has a certain resonance because the Democratic Party has been taken over and is another party of the ruling class in this country.
The problem is for black, for white workers, is that the Republican Party under Donald Trump is no solution because he represents and the people who are running the Republican Party represent the forces that really want to crush labor and impose restrictions on unions and impose right to work laws that keep unions from collecting dues from members or from their workforce, even though they have to represent them in negotiations, all kinds of things that are terrible for working people.
That’s what the siren call of Donald Trump is about.
Of course, he doesn’t talk about it that way.
He talks about it.
We got to get back to the way things were, which means when white people and white workers were doing well.
And of course, they want to these Republicans want to blame it on black people.
They want to blame it on immigrants.
They want to blame it on people who, you know, aren’t like us, which means aren’t white.
And that’s poison.
It’s been poison since the later part of the ninth of the 17th century in this country.
And I think that we have an obligation and that’s what in part this book, class, race and gender, challenging the injuries and divisions of capitalism in order to challenge those injuries and divisions.
We have to understand that they are of capitalism and we have to understand that there is a unity and a complexity of race, class and gender that has to be mobilized to challenge it.
And this book tries to explain how that works and then what the immediate political implications are for how we do our politics.
So let’s move to those implications, Michael Zweig. You take up the issue of reform versus revolution. So I’d like us to talk about that. And first, lay out what reform would mean for a movement to take up. And then tell us what are the conditions necessary for revolution and are we there?
Well, let’s start with the last question first.
When we talk about revolution, sometimes in a very colloquial, in a very offhanded kind of way, well, you know, we’re for revolution.
But if we really look at what does that mean, and I have some quotations and some reflections on what revolution really means in the book from people who practice revolution, from Mao Zedong in China, from Lenin, from Lu Xun, who was a cultural figure in the Chinese Revolution.
And, you know, it was just the place to start.
Mao rode in 1927 from the countryside when the Communist Party leadership in China was just developing and they were in the city in Shanghai.
And they were very cerebral and intellectual in their approach to revolution.
And Mao was out in the countryside in Hunan province and he wrote them and he said, yeah, you know what, there’s a rebellions going on out here in the countryside that we don’t realize is happening in the cities.
But I’m out here in the country and let me tell you, revolution is not a dinner party.
Revolution is not just sitting around a table and thinking about things and talking about alternatives.
Revolution is a mass violent uprising in which people kill each other.
That’s what we’re talking about revolution.
Well, that was a pretty startling observation that Mao made.
And it turned out that in the making of the Chinese Revolution and the Russian Revolution and the Cuban and the Vietnamese and all other revolutions in the history of humanity, including our own, revolution is about a mass uprising that is a violent overthrow of the power of one class and the imposition of the power of another class.
That’s what revolution is.
We are so far from that condition in this country that it’s just not worth talking about revolution as a practical matter to guide our practice.
Lenin said revolution, there are three conditions of revolution.
The people can’t live in the old way anymore.
They have nothing to lose.
The rulers can’t rule anymore because they’re divided and they’ve lost all legitimacy and they can’t even mobilize an army because it’s divided.
And there’s a political party, there’s a political apparatus that can lead the masses of people to overthrow that weakened and divided ruling class and impose a new order.
So those three conditions of revolution that Lenin articulated and practiced in his practice, we can talk about whether it was good or bad or what it led to, but that is what I think we can use as a guidepost for the conditions of revolution.
We don’t have any of those three things.
So we’re not talking about revolution.
So what we are talking about is reform and deep reform of the way capitalism works.
And there have been periods where there have been deep reforms.
There was a reconstruction period after the Civil War.
There was a period of the New Deal.
There was a period of the Civil Rights Movement and the Women’s Movement after the 1955 bus boycott and then the uprisings that followed both in the black populations, but also among the Chicanos and Hispanics, among women, gay and lesbian people, all that happened and resulted in truly deep transformations of the operation still within capitalism that represented true gains.
How did those things happen?
Well, they happened because there was a movement organizing.
Now, if we think about politics, politics, I think, has two components.
There’s the movement politics of mass mobilizations of people around grievances and around issues and around programmatic fixes for those problems.
And then there’s the political process of elections and bringing people into office who can actually implement the policies that are being promoted by these social movements.
So, as a practical matter for our purposes in the United States today, we have to pay attention to both of those aspects of politics.
And for me, in the way I think about it, movement politics are the dominant element or need to be the dominant element of those two.
And the reason for that is that movements are what create the demands and create the political program for elections.
Movements are also what throw up and bring forward leadership, leadership that’s grounded in those movements and grounded in the needs and the lives of the people who are in motion.
And then also, movements are what hold accountable those people who get elected and then go into office.
All too often, people come out of movements.
They develop an electoral campaign.
They get elected.
They go to Congress.
They go to the city council.
They go to the state legislature.
But then the movements that brought them there are demobilized because, oh, we have our person in Congress or, oh, isn’t that great?
We have the person as governor.
Well, you know, that person can do nothing without the continued agitation of the social movements that brought them to power.
So I think that where we are today is a need to bring together the different social movements that are bubbling up, coordinate them into a political apparatus, I think, within the Democratic Party that can, over the long haul, present a real alternative to the direction and to the class power that runs the Democratic Party and make it, again, into a true party of working class interests.
That’s a long-term project, but I think it’s the only project that’s in front of us.
I think that our history in this country of third-party politics is quite checkered and really has not been able to transform the society in the way that we need in coming years, in coming decades.
And so I think that third-party politics is really a distraction from the long-term haul we have to do, I think, within the Democratic Party.
Yes, so let me ask you because you also say we need to work within the Democratic Party, and you were part of the early work that organized something called the Labor Party, which was begun by my old mentor, Tony Mazzocchi, and the Labor Party was supposed to be a movement that would represent, obviously, the interests of the working class, and it failed.
So you say the best path for progressive politics requires working in the Democratic Party. How can we do that in a party where we know the leadership is so resistant to progressive politics, where PACs like AIPAC are trying to take down every single member of the progressive caucus, it seems?
It’s true that the ruling class rules the Democratic Party, but the ruling class rules society.
So we have a problem if we think we’re going to escape the clutches of the ruling class by going into a third-party politics.
We aren’t.
We’re even weaker on our own out in some left field somewhere, literally and figuratively.
One of the observations that I make in this book, Class, Race, and Gender, is that if you look at the history of deep reform, whether it is the elements that we talked about before, Reconstruction and this New Deal and Civil Rights Movement, none of that was possible, ever possible, without some significant section of the ruling class wanting it to happen.
There was a significant section of the ruling class that wanted the end of slavery and wanted Reconstruction.
There was not just the abolitionists.
There was a significant section of the ruling class of capitalists who actually wanted the New Deal and wanted union recognition, easier union recognition.
It’s amazing to think about, but it was true, because if you look at the legislative history, which I’ve done, of that New Deal legislation, particularly the Wagner Act that legitimized unions and gave them government support, the corporate leadership, at least some of them, were very, very worried about unrest in this country and the communists and the Bolsheviks and their influence here.
And Franklin Roosevelt was a part of the ruling class, and he was considered and called a traitor to his class.
And he even called it out in 1936 in his campaign and said, you know, there are people who hate me because I am for worker rights.
Well, I welcome their hatred.
That’s what he actually said.
In 1964, there were broad sections of the ruling class in this country, the white ruling class, that wanted the civil rights law passed, that wanted the voting rights passed.
They wanted that because they were involved in a Cold War ideological battle with the Russians all over the world and trying to defend American interests by claiming to be a democracy.
And they found themselves besieged everywhere in the world that that was a ridiculous claim, because look at what the situation is with the Negro people, as it was then called.
And so our campaign worldwide against the communist influence, large sections of the ruling class of this country supported the civil rights move and supported those laws.
Now, that didn’t mean that they weren’t really racist, because we got sooner after, as we know from the wonderful book, The New Jim Crow, we got a resurgence of suppression of Black people, even though we had those progressive laws on the books.
But we got those progressive laws, and they did make a real difference.
They were good things.
But again, I think if we think about, oh, the ruling class runs the Democratic Party, well, that’s true.
But if you shake the country and shake that class for power, it is possible and not only possible, but necessary to work with those sections of the ruling class that are open to genuine and deep reform.
And that is not impossible.
But in order to get it, we need to have not only connections to those sections to identify them, but we also have to have a social movement that scares the bejesus out of them and makes them pay attention to what we’re talking about and what our demands are.
And that’s, again, why I come back to the importance of social movements as the primary element of what’s needed.
But those social movements need political representation among the decision makers in Congress and in legislatures and in city councils and on school boards and everywhere else, because ultimately policy is decided in those bodies.
And if you don’t have representation there, you don’t have votes there, if you don’t have people there with a base, you can’t get anything done.
And I can see three critical points of movement within that. The climate movement, because I can see there is a section of the ruling class that is aware that climate poses an existential threat to its bottom line. The second one would be, in fact, the labor movement, which seems to be a formerly sleeping giant that is waking up and we’re thinking you mentioned Sean Fain of the UAW, particularly in areas like that. And then, of course, there is the movement for democracy, which is being so threatened. And it’s the last one that I’m so concerned about, because, you know, I know a lot of people who say, oh, I’m not going to vote for Biden because if Trump gets in, things will get so bad they’ve got to get better. But I think that that’s a fallacy. If we lose democratic rights, it’s going to be difficult to have those social movements.
I agree with you. But I think even within that broad anti-fascist movement, we have to be careful that there is within it a very articulate working class voice.
Otherwise, Liz Cheney is going to be the champion of the anti-fascist movement.
We don’t want Liz Cheney to be the champion of our movement for democracy.
That’s not a good thing.
And Rachel Maddow is putting Liz Cheney on her program in order to call attention to the dangers of fascism.
That’s a big problem.
We have to have people who come out of our movements, who come out of our concerns and our interests, working class interests, the interests of working class women, working class African-Americans, working class Hispanics, working class Asians, not ruling class Black people and Asians and Hispanics, of which now because of the movements that we had before, there are representations of all of those oppressed groups in the ruling class.
And even within the ruling class, they are often subordinated.
Well, I think that we need our own voices.
And that, again, brings me back to the need for a real powerful social movement among working people, which would, of course, include a conscious anti-fascist element to it.
And I think you’re right to call our attention to that. And how do we do that?
Because, you know, let’s talk about that election because it’s going to be critical whether we’re going to be able to have a working class movement or not.
You say there are two different strategies, reach out to minority groups on the one hand or, you know, stress the Democratic Party’s role or ask for its resurgence as a working class party. And you say that each path is a dead end. Why is that? And what’s not the dead end?
Well, I think that the two paths are identity politics is what needs to govern the development of the future strategy of the Democratic Party.
And that’s an idea that really in the long term because of immigration and because of birth rates and because of the way in which the society is evolving, we are going to become what’s sometimes called a majority minority country.
That is to say white people will be the minority.
And so what we really ought to do for democracy is to pay attention to who’s the majority and that’s going to be people of color and women and that’s where we should go.
And what that does is it reinforces everything that white workers are afraid of.
And now you have other people who come and say, oh, no, no, if you do that, you’re going to just reinforce everything white workers are afraid of.
And so what we have to do is champion the interests of white workers.
And we have to make sure that white workers understand that we have not left them behind.
We have not forgotten their needs and their interests.
And when we look at what white workers want, well, they want to be on top again.
They don’t want to be challenged by affirmative action.
They want affirmative action to be white in Ira Katznelson’s wonderful formulation when affirmative action was white.
They want to have women in a subordinate position.
They don’t want to be challenged.
And so all those demands, this way of thinking, let’s bring the white working class back into the Democratic Party because they’re a very important voting bloc, which is true.
What that approach says is that all these other issues of race and gender split and divide the working class and we should put them to the side or we should subordinate them to what unites the whole working class, which is just wages and working conditions.
And let’s leave aside these special interest demands of, let’s say, affirmative action or special features for women in the workforce or women’s empowerment over their bodies.
Now, I think that both of those things are a dead end because, yes, we may become a majority-minority country, but it’s still a working class that has to confront a capitalist class, and that working class is all workers.
So you can’t just turn your back on white workers, but you also can’t go to white workers and say, oh, we’re for you, and as evidence of that, we’re going to put aside the needs and the demands of Black people in this country.
We can’t do that.
We have to understand, again, how these things are mutually determined and mutually advanced with a powerful working class, united working class movement that will raise the terms of Black workers and white workers, but a powerful civil rights movement will also challenge capital in a way that gives openings for union organizing and for other things that will benefit white workers.
So we have to understand that mutuality as well as the differences, and that’s what I think those two tracks are each of them in their own way only one-sided.
They look at only one side of that dual relationship of class and race and class and gender and gender and race.
Well, that’s a great place to end. The book is Class, Race, and Gender, Challenging the Injuries and Divisions of Capitalism. Michael Zweig, it’s just been great to talk with you about it.
Well, thank you very much.
Michael Zweig is an activist, educator, and organizer. He’s also a fellow radio head at our show’s home station, WPKN 89.5 FM, serving southern Connecticut and eastern Long Island.
This week we talk about two novels that explore connections: between men and women, people and nature, the young and the old.
National Book Award finalist Bonnie Jo Campbell tells us about her wonderful new novel, The Waters and translator and novelist Jennifer Croft discusses her acclaimed new novel, The Extinction of Irina Rey.
Writers Voice— in depth conversation with writers of all genres, on the air since 2004. Find us on Facebook at Writers Voice with Francesca Rheannon, on Instagram @WritersVoicePodcast or X/Twitter @WritersVoice.
Key Words: author interview, fiction, podcast, book podcast, author interview, Writer’s Voice, Francesca Rheannon, Bonnie Jo Campbell, Jennifer Croft, translation
Read more: Bonnie Jo Campbell, THE WATERS & Jenny Frost, THE EXTINCTION OF IRINA REYA Contemporary FableBonnie Jo Campbell is often called a writer of rural noir. But that really doesn’t do her justice. She describes herself as a writer of Americana — but even that seems too limited.
Take her latest novel, The Waters. Yes, it’s set in rural Michigan in the midst of what used to be — and still is in her novel — a vast and mysterious swamp. And yes, her characters play out a drama that is all too familiar to Americans in present times: the fight between those who use religion to dominate and control life and those who try to nurture and protect it.
But The Waters strikes universal themes: what do humans owe each other, their community and the natural world? What happens when we let division sever the deep bonds that connect us? How do we counter the poisonous ideas of false prophets? And finally, how can we repair the world?
The Waters is a beautifully told fable in the form of a contemporary novel, one that inspires as much as it entertains. Read an excerpt here.
About the AuthorBonnie Jo Campbell was a finalist for the 2009 National Book Award for her short-story collection American Salvage. She’s the author of three novels and a volume of poetry and teaches fiction in the MFA program at Pacific University in Oregon.
A Novel About Celebrity, Translation & The Fate of the WorldJennifer Croft’s novel The Extinction of Irina Rey is a genre-bender. It’s a satire on celebrity, a mystery novel, a thought-provoking interrogation of the art of translation and an exploration of the connections between us humans and the life around us. Plus, it’s really funny.
The Extinction of Irina Rey is about eight translators and their search for a world-renowned author who goes missing in a primeval Polish forest. Read an excerpt here.
About The AuthorJennifer Croft won the International Booker Prize for her translation of Olga Tokarczuk’s novel, Flights. She’s also the author of Homesick, which won the Saroyan Prize, and has written for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and other publications.
We talk with Rue Matthiessen, daughter of the famed writer Peter Mathiessen about her family memoir, Castles And Ruins: Unraveling, Family Mysteries, And Literary Legacy In The Irish Countryside.
Then, Claire Coughlan tells us about her twisty-turny whodunit, Where They Lie. It’s a murder mystery set in 1968 Dublin, where the detective isn’t a policeman, but a young female news reporter on the make.
And finally we air a short clip from our conversation with Fintan O’Toole last St. Patrick’s Day about his personal history of modern Ireland, We Don’t Know Ourselves.
Writers Voice— in depth conversation with writers of all genres, on the air since 2004.
Find us on Facebook at Writers Voice with Francesca Rheannon, on Instagram @WritersVoicePodcast or find us on X/Twitter @WritersVoice.
Key Words: Rue Matthiessen, memoir, author interview, Claire Coughlan, Ireland, St. Patrick’s Day, , memoir, podcast, book podcast, author interview, Writer’s Voice, Francesca Rheannon, mystery fiction, crime fiction, Peter Matthiessen
A Journey To Ireland Reveals A Family’s SecretsIn her memoir Castles and Ruins, Rue Matthiessen uses her memories of those two journeys to Ireland to dig deeper into her parents’ literary legacy, their stormy marriage, and their complicated relationships to their children.
Decades after spending a summer in the Irish countryside with her parents—author Deborah Love and National Book Award winner Peter Matthiessen—Rue Matthiessen took her young family back to Ireland to revisit locales from that season in the sixties. As a guide, she had her mother’s book, Annaghkeen, named for the castle that overlooked their home in Galway.
The book is also a vivid portrait of the artistic community on the East End of Long Island that flourished in the 1960s and 70s.
A Thrilling Crime Fiction Debut Set in 1968 DublinFormer investigative journalist Claire Coughlan always wanted to write crime fiction. And we are so glad she’s finally been able to do so. Her debut novel is Where They Lie.
It’s 1968 Dublin and Ireland is on the cusp: the strangle grip of the old order of the Catholic Church is just beginning to slacken. There are new opportunities for women — in investigative journalism, for example. But contraception won’t be available until 1985 — and abortion until 2018.
That’s fifty years after Coughlan’s protagonist, the young female journalist Nicoletta Sarto, takes on the task of investigating a case long gone cold: the death of a young woman that could be linked to a clandestine abortion clinic.
Sarto vividly brings 1968 Dublin to life, where the upper crust thinks its privilege will protect it against accountability for its crimes — until it doesn’t.
We talk with Amitav Ghosh about his masterful history of the opium trade, Smoke and Ashes: Opium’s Hidden Histories.
Then, Manjula Martin tells us about her personal and “pyro-natural” history of California wildfires — the ones she lived through in 2020 and the ones Indigenous people lived with before white settlers moved in and took their land. Her book is The Last Fire Season.
And finally, we read a poem from Mosab Abu Toha’s book Things You May Find Hidden In My Ear.
Writers Voice— in depth conversation with writers of all genres, on the air since 2004.
Find us on Facebook at Writers Voice with Francesca Rheannon, on Instagram @WritersVoicePodcast or find us on X/Twitter @WritersVoice.
Key Words: Amitav Ghosh, history, opium trade, author interview, Manjula Martin, climate change, global warming, fire season, memoir, podcast, book podcast, author interview, Writer’s Voice, Francesca Rheannon
Narco States of Colonial CapitalismWhen Amitav Ghosh finished the novels of his famed Ibis Trilogy, he became curious about the opium trade. The lives of his characters, 19th-century sailors and soldiers who navigated the vast expanse of the Indian Ocean, were intertwined with the currents that carried not just ships, but their precious cargo—opium.
He was surprised to find how much that commodity had shaped the destinies of not only India, but of China, colonial empires — and the United States.
What startled Ghosh even more wasn’t just the historical backdrop, but the realization that his own family history was entangled in that trade.
Enter Smoke and Ashes: a book that combines travelogue, memoir, and historical research to weave together threads of horticultural history, the myths of capitalism, and the enduring impacts of colonialism.
Read An Excerpt
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Fire Season: Past, Present and FutureManjula Martin traded city life for the serene woods of Northern California in pursuit of a deeper connection to the wilderness of her childhood. Struggling with chronic pain, she sought solace in tending her garden beneath the majestic redwoods of Sonoma County.
However, the very landscape she cherished was under threat from escalating wildfires exacerbated by climate change.
As wildfires ravaged the West in 2020, Martin and countless other Californians were forced to evacuate amidst a global pandemic. The Last Fire Season delves into the intricate role of fire in the ecology of the Western landscape while at the same time shining a critical lens on the colonialist practices that have contributed to their current plight.
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Read more: Amitav Ghosh, SMOKE AND ASHES & Manjula Martin, THE LAST FIRE SEASONTranscript: Amitav GhoshWhen Amitav Ghosh finished the novels of his famed Ibis Trilogy, he became curious about the opium trade.
The lives of his characters, 19th century sailors and soldiers who navigated the vast expanse of the Indian Ocean, were intertwined with the currents that carried not just ships, but their precious cargo, opium.
He was surprised to find out how much that commodity had shaped the destinies of not only India, but of China, colonial empires, and the United States.
What startled Ghosh even more wasn’t just the historical backdrop, but the realization that his own family history was entangled in that trade.
Enter Smoke and Ashes.
It’s a book that combines travelogue, memoir, and historical research to weave together threads of horticultural history, the myths of capitalism, and the enduring impacts of colonialism.
Amitav Ghosh, welcome back to Writers’ Voice.
Thank you very much.
It’s a pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me.
This book, Smoke and Ashes, Opium’s Hidden Histories, is really a fascinating look into, as you say, hidden, a history that so many of us in the United States, but also elsewhere in the world, were just completely unaware of.
You were born in West Bengal, which borders China, and you grew up in Calcutta, yet you say that you never understood how central China was to India, and the connection does run very much through the opium trade.
Tell us about how you found out about this, why you decided to focus on this story.
Actually, it was the story that took me into it.
I didn’t intend to write books about the opium trade at all.
When I started working on my trilogy of novels called the Ibis Trilogy, my interest was really in indentured labor.
It was in the journeys of all the Indians who left India in the 19th century, essentially to become substitutes for slaves in Britain’s island colonies.
This was what I really wanted to write about, and so on.
My interest was also in the maritime trade of the Indian Ocean.
That’s how I began.
But as I got into the research, I discovered, in fact, that the most important thing that was happening in the Indian Ocean in the 19th century was, in fact, the opium trade.
There was no getting around it.
I just had to find my way into that story.
You say that this story is important not only, let’s say, for understanding China and India, and those connections that you just pointed to, but because it says something about how the world is perceived and understood.
What do you mean by that?
Well, I think the way that we conceive of world history and so on is really a very Eurocentric view.
You know, we conceive of the West and Europe being the center of all the major developments of the last 200 or 300 years.
But in fact, once we start paying attention to what was happening in Asia, we see a completely different picture.
And I think this is a very important thing.
You know, one has to try and understand what’s really going on in the world.
Because as we see now, China has, for millenniums, been a world power, you know, and it’s important for us to recognize that.
Right.
Of course.
I found interesting that you uncovered that your own family’s hometown had a personal connection to the opium trade.
Tell us about that and what, you know, what it made you feel.
You know, it was a very strange, it was a very strange thing because the story that my father always told us when I was a kid was that our family left our ancestral village in what is now Bangladesh in the 1850s, and they left because of a terrible flood, which swept away the village.
So then they started traveling and eventually they came to rest in this place called Chapra, which was really, you know, what shall I say, a very obscure, an obscure town in Bihar on the Gangetic Plain.
I often used to wonder as a child why they had chosen that place of all places to move to.
But then in the course of writing this book, I discovered that in fact, Chapra was a major center for the opium trade.
The surrounding district was one of the largest producers of opium.
So you know, I don’t have any proof of this or anything, but my feeling, my suspicion is that they were there because of the economy created by opium.
Talk a little bit about the importance of the opium trade to the Indian economy.
I mean, we’re going to go more deeply into, of course, its role in the British and the American economy as well, which is really the center of your story in this book, Smoke and Ashes, Amitav Ghosh.
But what importance did it have for Indian business?
Before the arrival of the English, before colonization by the British, opium was not an important commodity for the Indian economy at all.
It was a very minor, minor commodity.
India produced medicinal opium in small quantities.
But then once the British began to use opium in order to buy Chinese tea, opium became a very large part of the colonial economy.
So I wouldn’t even say the Indian economy.
I would say it was the colonial economy that was really built upon opium in some sense.
The British Empire in Asia was essentially a narco state, largely funded by opium.
And this is true not just of the British Empire, but also of the Dutch Empire and the French Empire in Asia.
You know, the French colonies in Indochina really subsisted off opium, as did the Dutch East Indies and so on.
So you know, opium was a foundational aspect of European colonial economies.
Yeah, and explain the nexus of which the opium trade was a part and why.
I mean, you just said the British really formed a narco state.
The British imperial power was a narco state, as was the Dutch, and you know, in some ways we can also say the Americans, which we’ll get to.
But connect the dots for us.
Why tea, opium, slaves, coerced labor?
What is the connection with all these?
The story really begins with tea, because tea became popular in England around about the late 17th century.
And by the 18th century, by the mid 18th century, tea was very, very important to the British Empire.
And all this tea came from China.
Taxes on tea were the second largest source of revenue for the British state.
So they were very heavily dependent on the tea economy, and in that sense, dependent also on trading with China.
What happened thereafter is that tea had to be paid for with silver, because European states didn’t produce anything that the Chinese valued or cared for.
So they had to find silver to trade for tea.
So what happened over the years is that silver, which was once plentiful because Europeans were also looting South America, forcing indigenous people and slave labor to mine silver, especially in Peru.
But by the mid 18th century, there wasn’t that much silver in circulation.
So the British had to find some sort of alternative commodity to trade for the tea that they so desperately needed.
And they decided they fixed upon opium.
So over a period of just about 40 years, they increased the exports of opium from India to China tenfold, and then ultimately a hundredfold.
So they created this enormous narcotics-based economy for the colonial state, and the colonial state was completely dependent on it, dependent on the revenues from opium, because opium also created other ancillary industries, for example, shipping and so on.
So it became a very deeply interconnected web of linkages between the British production of opium in India and the whole global economic and financial system.
You know, Amitav Ghosh, one of the most interesting, I wouldn’t call it a metaphor, I think it’s stronger than that, that you use to talk about opium, and I think it really does come in here.
You treat it almost as a sentient being, or you say it’s a plant that has shaped culture and history.
You give it a kind of agency as a non-human entity.
So I wonder if you could help us see what you’ve just spoken about, the development of the opium trade through the lens, through that lens of opium as an agent of human history.
Yes, well, it wasn’t me, actually, who made that connection.
I think many people who’ve, you know, looked at the history of opium, looked at these cycles of addiction that opium creates, you know, many people have come to the same conclusion, including the American diplomat, who I actually quote, you know, he’s a historian and diplomat, and he suggests that opium is in its way some kind of sentient entity.
And certainly, you know, it does seem to me that one indication of this, I mean, it’s impossible for us to know what agency can mean in a plant, but one indication of it is opium’s ability to create, you know, cycles of repetition, so that we see that the opioid crisis that you have in the U.S. today is in so many ways uncannily similar to what happened in China in the 19th century.
Could you say more about that?
Yeah, there’s so many kinds of similarities, you know, for example, in China, the British and American traders who were carrying opium to China always said, oh, we are just meeting a demand.
But in fact, what we see with opium, it creates its own kind of demand.
So what really matters is the supply.
And this is true, perhaps, of many other addictive substances as well.
So similarly, just as the British were able to grow the opium market in China from almost nothing to a fantastic proportion by the late 19th century, where maybe as many as 30 percent of China’s population at that point, which would be like more than 100 million people, were using opium.
You know, similarly, we see a similar kind of cycle in America.
I mean, before the Sacklers introduced toxicontin, there was no demand for prescription opioids.
But within six years, there was an enormous demand and it’s still growing.
Thousands of people are dying of it.
More people died of opioid overdoses in a seven-year period than died in the entire Second World War.
I mean, more Americans died of opioid overdoses than Americans who died in the Second World War.
So these are absolutely staggering figures, you know.
And you know, for a long time, these drug companies managed to get away with it.
And I think that’s a large part of the anger and resentment you see in rural America today, that they just felt that no one was seeing them, that no one was paying attention to them.
And in fact, in China as well, drug merchants used to target, you know, people who are poor, people who had to do a lot of manual labor, because opium makes it possible for you to forget about your aches and pains.
And we see exactly the same pattern unfolding in America, you know, in the 21st century.
You know, the big Purdue pharma actually literally targeted minors in Appalachia and so on, and poor communities in West Virginia and, you know, other parts of other surrounding regions.
So again, the weird thing about an opioid crisis is that the crisis actually unfolds out of sight.
You know, it unfolds indoors.
I mean, you could walk through the streets of many American cities and never know that there was an opioid crisis.
And it was the same in China in the 19th century.
But slowly and surely, this crisis is eating away at structures and institutions of all kinds.
I mean, I can hardly explain to you that there have been innumerable cases of corruption within the American law enforcement agencies.
And this is essentially exactly the same thing that happened in China.
China historically had a good law enforcement system.
But because the sums of money involved in drug trading are so huge, eventually the Chinese law enforcement system also became very deeply corrupt.
And the other thing that it does is that it creates a deep suspicion about institutions of state.
So in the 19th century, the whole Chinese system of governance came to be really beleaguered because people just lost faith in it.
And that’s what we see today in many parts of America as well.
People have just stopped believing in the institutions of state.
So I think you do see these cycles of repetition all the time.
And you think that it’s the opioid crisis that has led to a loss of trust or that it’s just one of many factors?
Many factors, as was the case also in China in the 19th century.
So yes, it is.
But I think it’s a much more important factor than we realize because, you know, what’s happening in the little villages in Appalachia, in many parts of the Northeast as well, is that people see that those people that they trusted most, like pharmacists, doctors, became corrupted, you know, simply by being given some sorts of handouts by the big drug companies.
And this begins to eat away at people’s trust in their societies.
So in America, of course, you know, the 2008 crisis also occurred, a huge sort of financial shock.
But again, that shock destroyed faith in banks and so on.
So I think we see actually a multidimensional crisis of many kinds.
But the opioids are right there, you know, working away, unseen, but, you know, a very important factor in this multidimensional crisis.
Well, that’s so interesting.
And multidimensional also is the role that it played in the origins of the opium trade in the United States.
As you point out in this book, Amitav Ghosh, in Smoking Ashes, Opium’s Hidden Histories, that the opium trade, you know, we tend to think that slavery was the underpinning of American wealth, of the building of the American wealth, certainly of the upper classes.
But opium seems to play at least as important a part.
Tell us about that history, that contribution.
You know, I’m not a statistician.
I can’t tell you which was comparatively more important.
And I think, you know, if you weigh them up, slavery probably played a much larger role in the American economy.
But certainly within the economy of the Northeast, opium was a very, very important factor, you know.
And actually, the big slaving states always pointed this out.
They made a huge propaganda point of, you know, how the Northeastern states had founded their economies on opium.
And this was actually a very important factor within the entire economy of Northeastern America.
And at some point, I’m sure some economic historian will, you know, tot up the numbers and tell us exactly how important it was.
But what we do know for certain is that a very small group of American traders, basically New Englanders, went to China, got heavily involved in the opium trade.
And within two or three years, they would amass these fantastic fortunes and come back, you know, to New York or Boston or Salem or wherever.
And then because they were young men and because the experience of trading in China had taught them a great deal about international credit systems, about finance and so on, they became pioneers of American industry.
Many of them became very deeply involved in railroads, for example.
So many of America’s first railroads were essentially financed with opium money.
This is also true of the banking systems, of insurance, of hoteleering.
It’s interesting also that many of these opium traders were actually big philanthropists.
So many American universities and so on, they got huge endowments from opium money.
Also true of museums, hospitals and so on.
So opium is completely, you know, built into the structure of the early American economy.
The American sort of economic industrial development that happened, you know, in the first half of the 19th century really couldn’t have taken place in the way that it did without those huge injections of capital from opium.
And we’re talking about such folks as John Jacob Astor, the Delanos of the family of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the Forbes, you mentioned museums, the Peabody Museum.
How did the U.S. and for that matter, the British, the Western imperialist powers in general, how did they justify their use of opium, basically the creation of these narco states?
Well, as I said, a large part of the justification really, I mean, at least the stated justification came from ideologies of free trade.
You know, this is the immediate period after, let’s say, Adam Smith and David Ricardo and so on.
So they just claimed that, you know, the laws of the market just dictated that the opium trade be continued simply because there was a demand and the demand had to be met by supply and so on and so forth.
So that was the explicit justification.
And England, the British government took this so far that they actually attacked China in 1840 to force the Chinese to keep their markets open to British opium.
This is the first opium war.
In the U.S., many people still think that the opium war was about China exporting opium to the West.
In fact, it was exactly the other way around.
The Chinese were desperately trying to stop the inflow of opium from British colonies, but the British actually forced them by going to war to keep their markets open.
So that part of the justification was, of course, just about free trade, the laws of capitalism and so on.
But there was another justification, you know, as they saw it, which they would not necessarily say publicly, though they did also often say publicly, which is just that they believe that, you know, it was just racism.
They just believe that, you know, Orientals are depraved and corrupt, so they need opium.
So they had no qualms about it.
They thought that their own countries could never be affected by drugs.
They really believed this.
They believed that no white man would ever take opium, which is an astonishing thing, because in the 1860s, actually many Americans took opium because it was an anesthetic that was widely used during the Civil War.
Yet, you know, there were all these racist tropes surrounding drug taking.
And as you know, those racist tropes endured even in the 1960s, 1970s and so on.
So racism actually really had a lot to do with it.
I mean, to themselves, they just thought, you know, we may be harming people far away, but they’re just Orientals.
They’re a different race.
And you have to remember that period also when slavery was still in existence, very much in existence in the United States, when the United States was really waging also these wars of extermination against Native Americans.
So maybe to them, it didn’t seem like a big deal.
I mean, you know, they’re just causing, you know, untold harms to people far away.
You talk in the book, in Smoke and Ashes, you also talk about the anti-opium movement and you draw parallels to the climate movement.
What are the lessons that one has for the other?
You know, from the 1870s onwards, actually, it started even earlier than that, a worldwide anti-opium movement came into being.
And it’s one of the great stories of international solidarity, you know, I mean, the Chinese spearheaded this movement, it was very important in India, it was actually a precursor to the Indian National Movement.
But churches and women’s groups in Europe and in America were very, very influential in the anti-opium movement.
So the anti-opium movement is really an example of a major, you know, social movement taking on a major commercial enterprise.
And you have to remember that the opium trade was then backed and sponsored by the world’s most powerful political entities.
That is to say, the British Empire, the French Empire, Dutch Empire, and so on.
So in that period, those empires were even more powerful than energy corporations are today.
And these empires were also very, very clever in the ways in which they tried to fight the anti-opium movement.
They invented all these excuses and so on.
They essentially invented the whole playbook, which, let’s say, the tobacco industry would later use in relation to, you know, the anti-smoking movement.
So I think the prime sort of lesson of all this is that it is possible for a global social movement to take on very, very powerful entities and eventually to defeat them.
Because because of this movement, all the major European powers had to agree to certain constraints on drug trading.
So I think certainly the climate movement today can take heart from this example.
Well, on that hopeful note, really important note, I want to thank you so much, Amitav Ghosh. This is really a fascinating book, Smoke and Ashes, Opium’s Hidden Histories. Thanks so much for talking with us about it.
Thank you so much, Francesca, for having me. It was a real pleasure.
Transcript: Manjula MartinWhen Manjula Martin moved from the city to the woods of Northern California, she wanted to be closer to the wilderness that she’d loved as a child.
She was also seeking refuge from a health crisis that left her in chronic pain, and she found a sense of healing through tending her garden beneath the redwoods of Sonoma County.
But the landscape that Martin treasured was an ecosystem already in crisis.
Wildfires fueled by climate disruption were growing bigger and more frequent.
Each autumn, her garden filled with smoke and ash, and the local firehouse siren wailed deep into the night.
In 2020, when a dry lightning storm ignited hundreds of simultaneous wildfires across the West and kicked off the worst fire season on record, Martin, along with thousands of other Californians, evacuated her home in the midst of a pandemic.
Both a love letter to the forests of the West and an interrogation of the colonialist practices that led to their current dilemma, the last fire season follows her from the oaky hills of Sonoma County to the redwood forests of coastal Santa Cruz to the pines and peaks of the Sierra Nevada, as she seeks shelter, bears witness to the devastation, and tries to better understand fire’s role in the ecology of the West.
Manjula Martin, welcome to Writer’s Voice.
This is just a terrific book, The Last Fire Season, a personal and pyro-natural history.
You begin this book with the start of a fire near your home in Northern California, north of San Francisco.
This was 2020, the first year of the COVID pandemic, and at the start of fire season.
You and your partner, Max, evacuated, put us there.
What was happening and what was it like?
You know, so it’s mid-August in Northern California.
I live in the woods amongst redwoods and other evergreen trees.
And I live very much in the trees, under the trees.
Our fire season here traditionally didn’t start until like mid to late September, October, November.
It’s usually the highest risk time for fires.
But that year was unique in that we had a historic lightning storm, a dry lightning storm.
So no rain or very little rain in some places, no rain where I lived.
So you know, it’s four in the morning and we hear lightning and thunder and it wakes me up and I sort of run to the window to see what’s happening.
We can’t really see the sky where we live because there are very large trees above us.
But it’s very clear that there is a lot of lightning and it’s very close and it’s widespread also.
And so being people who live in a place that’s at high risk for wildfire, we know that, you know, it’s likely some trees are being hit by lightning and will catch on fire.
And so I start packing, basically write that in there.
That evening, no fires made themselves known to us.
It took actually, I think about a day or two for us to really understand that there were large wildfires had been sparked throughout Northern California and basically sort of a ring of fire is what the map looked like to me.
And so that kind of launched off this epic season of historic wildfires, wildfires that are bigger and badder and longer than previous wildfires.
And for me, it really launched this like journey that’s portrayed in the book of coming from a place of being very afraid of fire and fire being sort of like a mysterious specter hanging over me to learning more about the actual history of fire in the place where I live, how it’s connected to climate change, which is something that people who live everywhere can relate to and how that connects with my own very personal experience of being a part of nature.
Yes.
And you said that this was unique, this dry lightning storm, but I actually read the other day that lightning is going to be coming much more concentrated, many more lightning strikes in one place that that is actually a climate.
Yes.
And I should add, we have had those lightning storms do occur and have always occurred, but as with many things, they’re getting stronger.
Yeah, exactly.
Now you could escape the fire and you did, but you could not escape the smoke.
Talk about the process of evacuation.
And I just want to quote you before you answer.
You say it’s an ever evolving equation of risk, comfort, and resources.
So tell us what you mean by that and what it was like to evacuate.
Well, you know, there are many different levels of evacuation.
Something that people who don’t live in a place with evacuations might not understand is, you know, you get some warning most of the time, sometimes not, but in my case, I had warning.
And then, you know, there are different stages, like official stages, like they tell you, you know, oh, it’s a threat, it’s a warning, it’s mandatory, you know, there are these different levels and they have the map all sectioned off into areas and that sort of thing.
So in a way, there’s this kind of like odd bureaucracy to it, where you’re kind of waiting for word from some higher authority as to what’s going to happen to you.
And as I think I learned, and many people learned, especially during the COVID pandemic, you know, these systems are not always as resilient as we would want them to be or as on it as we would want them to be.
And so at that time, I had already really had a sense that some of these larger systems in our society really were failing.
So one thing about evacuation is you never know what to believe and you never know how freaked out to get, you know.
We had seen here in Sonoma County time and time again, things getting worse than we thought they could get, and that’s something I think that we can all relate to in the year 2024, you know.
So that was sort of the psychological state I was in when evacuating.
The actual evacuation itself, you know, it’s hectic, you don’t know what to take, you don’t know what to bring.
You suddenly can’t think of anything that would be important to you or anything that, or conversely, you think everything is important to you, you know, and you just go as soon as you can.
For us, we had an evacuation plan, which was to go to my hometown, which is Santa Cruz, California, which is about three hours south of where I live.
And that had always been, you know, our go-to place.
It feels like a very safe place for me.
I grew up there.
It’s a very sort of wonderful town.
And we realized very quickly that, you know, there was also a fire outside of Santa Cruz.
And so this sort of widespread aspect of this fire event was new to me, although evacuating wasn’t.
And, you know, it really, at times, it feels like there’s nowhere to go.
And I’m very aware that that’s an experience that people who live close to the front lines of climate change have all over the world, and it’s not necessarily new for some communities.
It wasn’t even new for my community, but it definitely seems to have accelerated in recent years.
And this was the feeling of that acceleration, you know.
I think there’s an idea that, like, you evacuate, you go to a shelter or you go to a friend’s house, and then you stay there until the danger is over.
But for us, that wasn’t really how it was.
It was every day sort of having the discussion of, like, well, what do we think is safest?
What is doable?
What can we afford?
You know, who do we know?
Can we get ahold of them?
And it sort of just feels endless when you’re in it.
Yeah, I’m struck by a description in the book as you’re evacuating south, going south towards Santa Cruz, like your forehead is glued to the window next to you as you’re watching the smoke just everywhere, just going on down.
It must have been really terrifying.
Yeah.
I mean, I won’t lie.
It was terrifying.
I think in the book, you know, I try to have it not be too—I guess I’m frustrated by narratives that are very sensationalistic around disaster, and so that’s something that I really was trying to counter in the book, trying to portray that fear, but also really trying to portray, you know, the context of that fear and the ways in which those feelings are evolving all the time.
So let’s take a step back.
You go into some of the history of fire in California.
I mean, California is an ecosystem that’s fire-adapted, including, of course, the redwoods.
You lived in or adjacent to a redwood grove.
Talk about California as a fire-adapted ecosystem and how the indigenous people of California used fire to, as you say, garden their landscape.
I just love that metaphor.
Yeah.
Thank you.
The gardening metaphor, I should say, isn’t something that I came up with.
It’s sort of widely used in ecology circles, but it’s one that really captivated my imagination and I think really works when trying to talk to this about, you know, with people who may not know the history.
California’s ecosystems are all fire-adapted.
California has always had wildfires, and since time immemorial, California has also had fires that were introduced by the humans who lived there in order to manage the land, to reduce the risk of larger fires, and also to sort of, you know, restore health to the ecosystem, whether that means, like, burning things to inspire new growth of plants that you can then use, or whether it means burning an area so that the food that deer like is more available to them, and then the deer is your food, you know.
Humans always had this back-and-forth relationship with fire, and always have had.
And that was something that, you know, I was aware of previous to this season, but I think hadn’t really sunk in how devastating the effects of fire suppression and colonialist fire management had been on that cycle.
When California was colonized, part of that campaign was to exterminate the indigenous people here and to displace them from the land, and part of the displacement strategy was outlawing fire.
And you know, as we know, anyone who grew up in the 20th century, you know, Smokey the Bear was the mascot of, like, you know, fire is bad, don’t do fire.
But indigenous people who live here, you know, are still using fire on the land, and there’s actually been some amazing activism and forward movement on that in recent years, led by indigenous people in the West that has been really inspiring, and that I talk to, I talk with folks about that a little bit in the book.
So that’s kind of the larger context.
Yeah, and actually, I want to get back to the indigenous use of land, but also just before that, what was so interesting to me is that it’s not just settler colonialism that did this, but also the conservation movement.
And John Muir, talk about this kind of nature rendered as an abstraction, how the conservation movement fed into the causes of these megafires that we’re seeing now, and how that’s all wrapped up in the attitude towards the indigenous people.
Yeah, the early conservation movement as, you know, embodied by folks like Muir, or Gifford Pinchot, or Roosevelt, they’re often credited with sort of preserving these great landscapes, which it’s true, they did preserve them.
But a lot of the psychology and motivation behind that actually was not super great.
Many of the early conservationists were also really into eugenics, the sort of racist pseudo science that was also taken up by Nazi Germany at some points.
And the idea behind a lot of conservation efforts, not all, but most at the time, was, you know, to preserve these virginal, they thought, landscapes, but only for certain people.
Who has access to these landscapes?
The idea was to sort of preserve them for people like them.
So namely, you know, white people of means.
And again, coming back to that garden metaphor, there’s a story that people talk about a lot of, you know, folks coming to the West and seeing these majestic, truly mind blowing landscapes, you know, and being awed by them being like, these are amazing.
And you know, assuming that what they were looking at was a wilderness, an unpeopled land, right?
When in fact, the land was very occupied at the time.
And the land was being tended by the people who lived here.
And the people who lived here lived in a different kind of relationship to the land than the colonialists and the conservationists.
You know, instead of thinking of the land that was something that was pure and virginal, or as something that was sort of ripe for extraction, there was a more reciprocal relationship.
And so that was tied up in the colonialist attitude around nature, you know, the idea that like, we are separate from nature, we can control it.
And this is a wilderness and we shall conquer it.
In fact, it wasn’t a wilderness, it was a garden.
The people who lived here had been tending it for millennia.
Yeah, I’m going to quote you now, because this is such a beautiful sentence, I think that really expresses what you’re talking about in terms of the indigenous attitude toward the land.
You write, culture is land, land is spirituality, spirituality that values a reciprocal existence with the other than human world is also survival.
Say more about that.
I think that’s something that, for me, is really the thrust, the whole sort of larger point of this project is really looking at the deeper relationship that people have with our surroundings.
So it’s not just that the land needs fire.
It’s not just that we need fire on the land.
It’s actually really looking at like the attitudes that we hold and these attitudes, which can be very spiritual and very deep about sort of how we fit into the ecology that we live in.
Right.
And there’s this very human hubris that’s like, you know, we are somehow accepted from all the rules of nature.
We are somehow outside of it, you know, we have large scale impact on it, we can control it.
And while we do have large scale impact on it, as we’ve learned with climate change, we can’t really control it.
And that’s something like intellectually I’ve always known, you know, and a lot of people are aware of that cycle of sort of culture and survival that’s involved in humans relationship with our surroundings.
But it wasn’t something I really wrestled with changing and challenging and experiencing in myself until the events of this book and then the process of writing the book.
Yeah.
And it really expresses it perfectly.
I mean, just before we started this conversation, I was reading a report about the ocean circulation system that is going to shut down sometime between 2025 and say 2075.
And you know, here we’re creating that because we are causing the ice sheets to melt into the ocean.
And once that happens, it will be millennia, many millennia before that can be reversed.
So it’s a perfect example of that.
And it will really make, I think one scientist said, adaptation will become impossible for places like Europe and North America, you know, the Northeastern coast where I live.
Yeah, I mean, yeah, you all know up there as well.
I mean, I think, you know, there’s a lot of talk right now in environmental circles about like, you know, what they’re calling climate doom as opposed to climate denial, which is this idea that like it’s too late to do anything, you know, and that is something I really dug into in the book because we are having these historical events, these unprecedented events.
In fact, it seems like every day there’s another unprecedented event, you know, right now as I’m talking to you, there’s like unprecedented winter storms where I live and trees are falling on houses in my neighborhood because of the wind.
But I think for me, that sort of binary between either you have to like, be really sort of like, we can fix it, we can do it.
Or you’re a doomer and you’re negative and you’re not taking action.
I feel like that’s a really limiting paradigm to set up for people, for regular people especially like I’m not a climate scientist, you know, I’m a writer.
And that was something I really wanted to get into in the book was sort of this idea of what, you know, I talk about this in the book, what the writer Donna Haraway calls staying in the trouble, this idea of living in this really messy in-between place where like we have these dire predictions, the dire things are actually happening right now.
We know that the people who have the power to really affect change at the climate level are not doing that over and over again.
The people with power are not, you know, taking any action that would bring about any solutions.
And so where does that leave us, right?
Is it just like, oh, we’re screwed, you know, or is it like, oh, we have to have hope for like a magical happy ending.
And for me, my experience of daily life during this climate change era has been very in-between those things.
And I actually find that, and I explore this in the book, in the action of sort of allowing yourself to live in that mess and in that sort of uncertainty and chaos and finding ways to connect with community and other people during that time and finding ways to take action during that time.
Like to me, that’s where the hope is and that’s where the power is.
It’s not in some sort of idea about, you know, a certain temperature goal or something like that, something that me as an individual person, like I don’t have a lot of control over that, right.
But I do have control over the kinds of communities that I’m forming, the kinds of actions that we are taking and over my relationship with the place that I live.
That’s beautiful.
And speaking of which, talking about the kinds of communities people are building, let’s talk about the Indigenous Conservation Movement, TERRA, Tribal Eco-Restoration Alliance.
Tell us about them.
How are they dealing with fire?
How are they practicing good fire?
Yeah, this is a group that I spent some time with in the book, in the course of researching the book.
And, you know, they’re one of many groups, I think, probably anywhere in the world, but certainly anywhere in North America, there are local Indigenous groups doing sort of amazing work protecting and restoring right relationship with the landscape.
And I would encourage listeners to seek out those groups in their communities and learn more about what they’re doing and really try to follow their lead and also to donate to them.
So this group is called TERRA.
They’re in Lake County, which is the next county over from Sonoma, and is far more fire prone than where I live, actually.
And it’s a really cool project because it’s a small nonprofit.
They’re in association with one of the tribal nations there in that community.
And it’s not just that they’re practicing good fire and doing prescribed burns and cultural burns, which they are doing, but they actually have this secondary goal of creating jobs in the community that are good jobs.
So it’s not only that the work they’re doing is like restoring these good relationships with the land, it’s also that the jobs that they are doing are restoring sort of economic justice to the people as well.
Yeah.
And you and your partner, Max, also worked on reintroducing fire to the woods around your home.
Well, we haven’t done that yet.
That’s a long term goal.
You know, there are a lot of bureaucratic and sort of labor challenges to getting there.
But we have been in discussion with a lot of our neighbors and done some stewardship work days with a lot of our neighbors to sort of do what we can to clear dead fuel from the forest floor and hopefully to prep the land for good fire in the future.
You know, and that’s an option that’s available to me because I am relatively able bodied.
I have time to do it.
My community is enthusiastic.
It’s not always an option for everyone and certainly not for people who live in more urban environments.
But for me, that’s a way that I have been able to really directly change the way that the environment that I live in is responding to potential fire as well as other potential problems.
You know, the other way that that really comes into my life is, of course, which is a large thread in the book, is through gardening.
Yes.
And it’s a very healing place for you because there’s another intertwined thread in your book.
One is fire, of course, but the other one is illness.
And you just said you’re relatively able bodied, but boy, that’s a hard won able bodiedness.
So talk about the interrelationship between what happened to you physically, your own body, and, you know, how you weave that into the thread of this book.
Yeah.
I mean, the main narrative of the book follows this journey of the fire season of 2020 and, you know, it jumps forward and back, bringing in research and context and some of those interviews that I’ve done with activist groups and that sort of thing.
But the other main thread of the book is an experience that happened to me at the same time that the wildfire crisis has increased, which is that I have chronic pain.
And the chronic pain stems from very long series of horrific surgeries and interventions that happened to me.
But initially, it was I had an IUD, a birth control device that basically malfunctioned and attacked my body, and in the course of trying to remove parts of that IUD, a lot of other things happened that were also bad, ended up having a hysterectomy.
And that has all left me with chronic pelvic pain, which I talk about in the book as something, you know, that’s ever present in my life.
And to me, I think there was a there was a really strong corollary between sort of this idea of like living in pain, and the idea that I might always live in pain, with this idea of living with fire, and, you know, on a larger scale, living with climate change.
And those are both things that are really huge events that you don’t have a lot of control over, but have very specific physical and emotional impacts in your life.
And they’re also events that are somewhat resistant to narrative, which I found to be an exciting challenge as a craft challenge.
Yes, I wanted to talk with you about that, because you you mentioned Amitav Ghosh, who I actually spoke with last week.
Yeah, he has a new book, right?
Yeah, it’s about the opium trade.
But I also had spoken to him about one of his novels previously.
And he’s written a book also about narrative and climate change.
So telling climate stories, I mean, this is, you know, one of the ways that we do live in this in between time, a time, maybe not precisely of unrealistic hope, but nor of unrealistic doom.
I mean, we just are going to be doing what we need to do, right?
So talk about the climate narrative and the way you crafted this book within that context.
Yeah, you know, this is one of the reasons why it was very important to me that this book be actually be a memoir and be a personal story.
I could have easily written a book that was like a lovely reported, you know, journalistic work on the wildfire crisis, and other people are writing great books like that.
But to me, that wasn’t the whole story.
You know, part of, I think, and something Ghosh talks about in his work is, it has been really difficult for humans to make culture around climate change.
There are a lot of reasons why and that is always changing to, you know, the book that I cite in my book, you know, he wrote in 2016.
So things have changed a bit since then.
But he ultimately framed it as like a lack of imagination, I believe the phrase was, that is basically a result of this larger denial that people have, which is that this is really happening, right?
And we even though we know that we just cannot deal with it.
And so for me, the way to deal with it is to actually allow it into my life, my whole life.
And that was one of the reasons why I wanted to include this, this more personal story about pain.
The other sort of strong connection between the pain narrative and the wildfire narrative is that in my process of recovering from my surgeries, I got really into gardening, which, you know, it didn’t literally heal me like gardening is not actually good for my physical problems.
It’s hard work.
But the experience of creating beauty, what I found to be very restorative, and my garden is mostly a flower garden, it’s flowers and fruit trees.
So a lot of great beauty we’re talking about, right?
And so for me, you know, it was it was the act of gardening in the wake of my health crisis, that really put me more into direct relationship with literally the ecosystem that I live in.
And that was sort of what allowed me to, to, to understand the greater crises in the ecosystem around me, including the fire crisis, as well as many others, and to really connect those two.
So for me, this, the garden was this, this physical site, that sort of literally and metaphorically connected all these experiences in my life.
And that’s threaded into the book as well.
You know, a lot of the scenes in the garden are scenes where I’m sort of making these connections between personal experience and a larger pyronatural history.
And it’s such a beautiful, really inspiring book, Manjula Martin, the book is The Last Fire Season, A Personal Empyronatural History.
Thank you so much for talking with us here about it.
Thank you so much, Francesca, it’s been lovely.
Manjula Martin is co-author with her father, Oren Martin, of Fruit Trees for Every Garden, and has written for the New Yorker and other publications.
She edited the anthology, Scratch, Writers, Money, and the Art of Making a Living.
Listen to or read an excerpt from The Last Fire Season at writersvoice.net.
We talk with Charles Derber about the book he co-wrote with Suren Moodliar, Dying For Capitalism, How Big Money Fuels Extinction And What We Can Do About It.
Then we talk with Andy Lee Roth about Project Censored’s yearbook, State of the Free Press 2024: The Top Censored Stories and Media Analysis of 2022–23.
And finally, we read a poem from Mosab Abu Toha’s book Things You May Find Hidden In My Ear.
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Key Words: Charles Derber, Andy Lee Roth, author interview, book podcast, democracy, press freedom, podcast, Project Censored, nonfiction
Podcast Show Notes: Interview with Charles DerberIntroduction
- Charles Derber, a co-author of the book “Dying for Capitalism,” discusses critical issues surrounding capitalism, technology, and climate change with Francesca on Writer’s Voice.
- Suren Moodliar is Co-author of the book, a South African with ties to the Mandela household and an ANC activist.
Key Points from the Interview
- Capitalism and Growth: The conversation emphasizes how capitalism’s inherent drive for infinite growth poses challenges for sustainability on a finite planet.
- Fetishism of Commodities: Drawing from Marx’s concept, the interview touches on how consumerism and material production under capitalism contribute to resource depletion.
- Triangle of Extinction: Gerber introduces the concept linking capitalism, environmental destruction, and militarism as interconnected forces driving global crises.
Insights from the Interview
- Challenging Green Capitalism: The interview delves into the limitations of green technology within capitalism in addressing climate change.
- Technology and Capitalism: Gerber highlights the misconception that technology alone can solve deep-rooted social, environmental, and political issues.
- Historical Context: The discussion explores how capitalism’s evolution from water to coal to oil was influenced by social and political factors rather than just technological efficiency.
Podcast Show Notes: State of the Free Press 2024Introduction
In this segment, Andy Lee Roth, the associate director of Project Censored, discusses key trends in the State of the Free Press in the United States.
Roth highlights significant changes in the media landscape since Project Censored’s establishment in 1976, emphasizing the impact of media deregulation, increasing concentration of ownership in major corporations, and the rise of the internet.
Trust in Journalism and Partisan BiasRoth delves into the complexities surrounding trust in journalism, attributing low trust levels to corporate media reflecting specific worldviews that may not align with public interests. He distinguishes between corporate and independent news sources, emphasizing the need for critical evaluation of media content.
Influence of Intelligence Agencies in Big TechThe discussion shifts to the influence of former U.S. and Israeli intelligence agency employees in tech giants like Google, Meta, and Microsoft. Roth raises concerns about potential government influence on these platforms and its implications for information regulation and individual rights.
Department of Homeland Security’s Disinformation Governance BoardThe conversation touches on the Disinformation Governance Board under the Department of Homeland Security, highlighting its impact on progressive media outlets. Internal documents revealed discussions around governing information, sparking public outcry and raising questions about freedom of expression.
ConclusionThe episode underscores the critical role of media literacy, challenges posed by partisan bias, and the need to safeguard independent journalism amidst evolving media landscapes. Roth’s insights shed light on pressing issues shaping the contemporary state of the free press.
Read more: Charles Derber, DYING FOR CAPITALISM & Andy Lee Roth, STATE OF THE FREE PRESS 2024TranscriptSpeaker 1: Charles Gerber, welcome to Writer’s Voice.
Speaker 2: Thank you. Good to be here, Francesca.
Speaker 1: Dying for Capitalism, you wrote this book with Surin Modliar. Tell us about him.
Speaker 2: He’s an interesting guy.
He’s a South African who grew up in a family very close to the Mandela household.
His father was an ANC activist.
And we have a chapter in the book about abolitionism and the lessons of abolitionism for the struggles we’re talking about against extinction and the subject of dying for capitalism.
We have the tools today to get to zero emissions by 2030.
Speaker 1: I recently spoke with the climate scientist Michael Mann, and he reiterated that point actually by 2030, not even by 2050.
But dying for capitalism challenges the idea that green technology within capitalism, that is a kind of green capitalism, can prevent disaster.
Why?
Speaker 2: Francesca, I’m really glad you highlighted that question because it just is really an important question, and it’s a question that is important because technology and faith in technology has always been a kind of guiding spirit of American leadership, mainstream American conversation.
That is, Americans have learned from their corporate leaders and their political leaders that the solution to all of our social, deep social, environmental, political problems rest with technology.
And that kind of technophilia, let’s call it, love of technology and the view that problems arise from technology and can be solved by technology, is particularly dangerous politically because it leads people to feel that it’s not the social, economic, political, cultural systems that are driving our problems.
It’s that we’re just not using the right technology to organize our society.
So in the climate, an example you give, I think this has become a kind of really dangerous myth enshrined in much of the, even among the groups of people who are aware of climate change and want to see it stop as soon as possible.
And that’s the idea that if we simply could do anything from buy electric cars or shift the grid over toward green energy, toward non-fossil fuels, that this is going not only to stop climate change, but stop it quickly and solve this problem.
And so let me just say a couple of things about this.
One is that I’m not dismissing the importance of technology.
Technology is important.
I’m all for intensified technological shifts away from fossil fuel.
In the book, in fact, there’s an interesting historical dialogue about how capitalism came to be linked to fossil fuels.
When early British industrialists in the 19th century, period when Charles Dickens was writing about epidemics and had bad health, part of this book is also about epidemics and other kinds of public health catastrophes.
But capitalism emerged originally with the possibility in London and the early factories in England with water power.
And the steam engines powered by water were efficient, but the industrialists came to believe that water would be too easily seen as a public good and therefore might not be subject to their control as the public mobilized to sort of maintain supplies of water at reasonable prices for themselves.
So they shifted over to coal.
And then by the mid 19th century in Britain and Europe, coal was becoming a dominant force.
But then two things happened.
One is that coal proved to be dangerous for industrialists, not technologically, but for organizing reasons.
When you put a bunch of people in coal mines, they work under difficult, long conditions close together.
And so coal miners have a long history of organizing against their work problems.
And the early industrialists began to worry that reliance on coal would build a labor force that would be rebellious.
And so that combined in the United States and then later in Europe, particularly in World War I, with a second factor, which was the rise of military, of wars, like particularly World War I, where the demand for oil became very intense because there were the first aviation and much of the nature of technology that was required in World War I required large amounts of oil.
And this was after Rockefeller in the 1890s had sort of begun the oil revolution.
So capitalism moved from water to coal to oil and gas.
And there were a combination of factors that were not technological, but more social and political that led to these changes in energy and technology.
All of which to say is that, you know, the technology and the particular kind of energy that we use is heavily mediated by and determined by political and power issues as much as by technical efficiency.
Even if you were able to move with electric cars and make a great amount of movement toward non-fossil fuels, we would still have a massive, that would be, of course, incredibly great and powerful to have a drastic revolutionary shift toward non-fossil fuel energies.
But in a capitalist society, let’s say we do this and we embrace what people like Bill Gates will call green capitalism and you know, people like Gates argue this is the solution: Capitalism is not the problem.. It’s the solution because capitalism is the most presumably technologically innovative system and therefore it can more quickly shift the technology toward a sustainable kind of technology.
The other thing is that even if you had a highly activist climate Democrat pushing toward massive amounts of green energy, you know, solar and wind technology and so forth, all of which would be good, it wouldn’t solve the problem altogether because capitalism creates, capitalism is a system of basically selling everything on the market for profit.
That’s what capitalism is. It’s a system that says everything is for sale and small numbers of people have the power and the money that are driving this system.
So even if you’re moving toward a much stronger mix of green energy, non-fossil fuel, there’s never been a stable model of capitalism that is a material non-growth model of capitalism that’s been proved to be possible.
So one of the natures that we discuss in the book is simply that capitalism is a system basically pursuing infinite growth, infinite production for sale on the market on a finite planet.
You know, there’s only one planet there, a finite number of resources, a finite amount of land and the resources, even if you’re using green energy for a lot more of production, the nature of the economic and social system that we’re living under would, in our judgment, lead to a level of material production and expansion into more and more and more areas of uninhabitable, currently uninhabitable land.
About half the world, I think right now, is uninhabitable because industry has chosen not to try to pursue this, whether we’re talking about large amounts of the Amazon.
Capitalism is not happy, you know, living in a system of limited growth.
It always wants to take off the braid, to sort of put the pedal to the metal and speed production as far and as fast as it can.
And if it does that, it’s going to consume too much of the planet.
Over the longer term, the demands of infinite production, you know, capitalism is a system that makes people kind of addicted to consumption and mass consumerism.
The very first chapter of Karl Marx’s famous book on capitalism called Das Kapital was called the fetishism of commodities.
You know, he was saying that in capitalism, commodities, things we buy, the stuff that fills our closets and our homes becomes essentially eroticized, you know, fetishism is a kind of like a sexual addiction in which people simply can’t be happy unless they’re consuming more and more.
If you’re consuming more and more as sort of your dominant cultural value and the dominant economic fuel of the system, even if you’re using green energy, you’re going to exhaust the resources of the planet.
And we also know from electric cars already and from wind turbines and so forth, that there’s a lot of carbon emissions that can emerge as you’re trying to use these non-carbon forces.
It just takes a lot of other kinds of rare minerals and production and transportation to get, you know, these wind turbines and these electric cars or solar panels, you know, going on a massive scale.
Speaker 1: Yes, and I think I completely agree with your larger point.
I have to say Capital is probably my favorite book.
And fetishism, the fetishism of commodities is an absolutely central concept and I want to circle back to that.
But I do want to point out, because there has been a lot of, I think, manipulation of the left on the issue of, you know, the carbon emissions embodied in clean energy.
It’s a lot less, number one, and number two, there are real drives for recycling of all of these materials so that the actual consumption will be far less, which is different than fossil fuels, which is something you have to burn continuously in order to have the machinery operate.
But let’s get back to the fetishism of commodities.
I mean, we have it on steroids, of course, social media drives it.
I was just listening to something the other day about how bad furniture has gotten because people are just, it’s kind of fast fashion of furniture because people want to have the latest styles they see on Instagram.
So how do you re-educate people in a way that doesn’t incite their resistance and their rage?
Speaker 2: Well, just before I talk that, let me just recycle back, if we could, to the basic argument of the book.
If we had a picture, it would be the picture that you’ve seen, Francesca, of what I call the triangle of extinction, which is like a triangle with capitalism at the top and then arrows of causation going down toward environmental death and destruction on one side and down toward military death and destruction on the other side.
And then linking at the bottom, causal arrows, war and militarism are major forces driving climate change and climate change is a major force driving militarism.
In fact, the Pentagon, which is legally required to tell the American people what are major national security threats for the last few years, has written that climate change is the number one threat to national security in the United States.
What they don’t say is that the biggest emitter of carbon in the world, the biggest institutional emitter of carbon in the world, is the Pentagon, which emits more carbon every year than any other institution in the world.
So much of this book is an attempt to basically make as clear and simple and historically grounded as possible the nature of this triangle, which sort of shows the interlinkage between capitalism, which is a sacred, you know, it’s very hard in the mainstream to raise any question about capitalism.
And here we have, if you buy even a quarter of our argument, you’re saying you’re playing with a system, which is the most dangerous system people have ever created.
And we’re showing why when, and the book goes into some historical and analytical detail to say why there is this intrinsic connection between capitalism and climate change and not just climate change, but other forms, biodiversity crises that, you know, every day different species are dying.
I’m an animal lover.
I have a dog.
I lost a dog recently, which is one of the most grievous things that’s happened to me.
We’re collectively losing our dogs, you know, our animals.
When I was talking about expanding, you know, into all areas, what we’re doing is expanding into areas, which animals have typically have been able to live in without being assaulted by humans.
This is of course, part of the pandemic risk as well.
But these connections between capitalism, climate change, and militarism are really, really important for people to understand, because once you think about these issues, it changes the way you think about the kinds of movements that we need to stop this whole madness from continuing, because you have to be able to intertwine.
It’s not just a matter of stopping the insatiability of or the fetishism of commodities.
It’s a broader set of issues.
Speaker 1: Absolutely.
And I’m so glad that you did put it in that context.
The part of the book that I think certainly excited my interest the most, not that the other didn’t, but how we do actually build movements to get out of this.
And the fascist movement is strengthening in America. And this is truly, truly terrifying.
What is the way, both in the long term and the short term, that we can begin to overcome this, you know, the use of divide and conquer to promote fascism in this country and build solidarity, a true working class movement?
Speaker 2: Well, I wish I had a hundred percent answer for you and everybody.
Everybody is thinking about this question.
And I should say, the issue of fascism, I explore at great length.
I have a new book coming out on democracy called Who Owns Democracy, and it goes into great depth on fascism.
In this book, I’m looking at capitalism.
There’s a very important relationship between capitalism and fascism, which maybe we can talk a little bit about.
I actually argue that American fascism, America was formed as a marriage between a neo-fascist confederate slave state and a neo-capitalist northern merchant capitalist state.
It was like a somewhat troubled marriage between two deep states in a sense of neo-fascist southern deep states.
And the reason I call that state fascist was that it was based primarily on slavery, which was based on a caste model of power.
And that is what fascism is.
It’s a system that tries to sort of organize around the notion of biologically based power based on racial purity and racial power and so forth.
Whereas capitalism looks at class and organizes power based on class.
And this marriage between the South and the North lasted for about 75 years before it was like a troubled marriage that became very troubled.
And we look at that in this book, we look at this period, because I think the one way to answer your question of what do you do is you look at periods of history where people were able to do what appeared impossible, like when we have a chapter on the lessons of abolitionism.
And during the period of this troubled marriage that was the fascist deep state and the corporate deep state, the North and the South, there was just a sense that, well, you’re crazy if you’re an abolitionist, because human history has always had slavery.
It’s impossible to ever stop this kind of caste system.
And abolitionism was a very small movement, and it built a fairly large constituency over 75 years.
So we look at how that happened.
And it’s an interesting story, and it’s relevant to our movements today.
So what are the key ways in which the abolition movement, what are some of the critical lessons that we can learn from the abolition movement and apply today?
Well, one is it takes a lot of perseverance in the face of what seemed to be overwhelming odds against you.
I mean, you know, when William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass escaped, it started as a very small, and people said it was impossible.
And what happened was that you had a kind of, first of all, you sustained hope in the face of what appeared to be a hopeless situation, which is what a lot of people, the young people are feeling today.
And that happened partly by virtue of the openness to very different kinds of groups with very different kinds of politics, finding ways to find common ground.
I mean, for example, William Lloyd Garrison, who was a radical revolutionary socialist leader, very, very abolitionist, a New Englander, found common ground with, say, Harriet Beecher Stowe, a woman who was in the middle class, very middle class, very moderate.
And she was bringing a kind of cultural sort of approach to change.
And Uncle Tom’s Cabin became kind of a manifesto of the abolitionist movement.
And it was very, very different than the politics of, say, either Frederick Douglass or probably the leading black abolitionist who, and, you know, Frederick Douglass was interesting because he, he spent a lot of his time as an ex-slave, he went to England, he, he, he recognized the relation between the labor movement and the anti-slave movement.
And he recognized the importance of joining together cultural strategies, for example, Frederick Douglass became the most widely photographed person of the 19th century.
And he did that partly because he was realizing that images, cultural images, swayed people’s politics and moved people’s movements.
And it got him into connection with a very wide range of constituencies.
So I mean, one of the lessons of abolitionism is that, and there wasn’t a single party, there were some people who were totally against joining the major power system, there were other abolitionists who joined, created their own parties or joined in with other parties.
So there was a, what, what I take away from this is that there was a, a very open approach that encouraged solidarity across many different kinds of both people, groups, and strategies of change from economic change to cultural change, from revolutionaries like John Brown who were going to burn things down to very pacifist, you know, nonviolent people.
Somehow this movement came together around a kind of sense of emergency and moral urgency that is not irrelevant to what we’re facing today.
And it brought together, you know, people who did not become locked into fragmented single-issue kind of things, they brought together people from many, many different frameworks who found a kind of common moral community around the horrors of slavery and the sense of emergency that was coming into play as the civil war became closer.
And I just think that, yeah, that’s, it’s a very fertile period and people now who are terrified of fascism coming full tilt with Trump are spending a lot of time looking at that period of history and trying to understand how the civil war happened, how it might happen again and how we can take action to do, you know, to try to change this.
This is the fascism election issue, since we’re talking in election year, is really important because the dangers of fascism and of Trumpism as a political force are happening over and above in a sense, these existential terrors that we’re facing.
I mean, in other words, climate change, even if we didn’t have Trump, we would have an emergency around climate change in this country, in the world.
Even if we didn’t have Trump, we would have an emergency around nuclear war and other kinds of weapons of mass destruction.
Even if we didn’t have Trump, we would have massive emergencies around the economic system, the extreme inequality, the pathology of billionaires seeking to exploit and plunder the planet for their own wealth and the political power that they’ve been able to accumulate with the incredible concentration of money that they have.
So we have a system that’s an extinction system, even on top of no fascism, we would still be facing an emergency and we’re just layering this on top.
Just one positive thing, I don’t know if you saw this, Sean Fain, UAW leader, just announced it on May 1st, 2028, that seems a ways away, there will be a general strike, all workers in the country will come together for a general strike, which has not happened in the United States.
So the summer of strikes is also sort of a sign that the amazing number of systemic perils we’re facing are not completely demobilizing the population.
Speaker 1: And he is such a hero to so many that I fear that if we wait till 2028, the moment will be over.
I mean, I’d like to say Sean Fain for president, actually.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no kidding.
Speaker 1: And he is, I believe that the UAW is going to endorse Joe Biden.
You know, Biden has his good points, but unfortunately he has really weakened the kind of coalition that you’re talking about because of his stance on Palestine.
You teach in a college. What do you think?
Do you think that young people will come out and vote for Biden in spite of their anger at him for the stance he’s taken on Palestine?
Speaker 2: This is a super important question, Francesca.
As I told you before we started talking, I’m doing a podcast exactly because of that dilemma.
I think there’s a real risk that young people and many others, I mean, for me, I think it’s urgent to keep Trump out of power for the obvious reasons we started to talk about around fascism and so forth, which is not a joke.
It’s worth noting that people normalized Hitler before Hitler and the sort of powers that be in Germany, the conservative forces in Germany really felt he was just sort of a crazy, Hitler was a crazy joke.
He could be controlled quite easily by the conservative establishment and so forth.
And I think both liberals and conservatives in this country have taken a little bit of this attitude toward Trump.
Not everybody, I mean, obviously, but there are many people who need to be engaged in trying to stop Trump who feel, well, Biden is so bad because of the war.
And I understand this because I feel it myself.
I understand that Biden’s militarism is so terrible that it becomes hard to support him.
But if you look at the bigger picture and you recognize what a Trump administration would do in the Middle East and particularly in regard to, for example, Palestine, let alone Iran or China and so forth, you realize that that is just one of many ways in which Trump would raise the ante and so forth.
So I think the question of mobilizing, there is still a majority of people in this country that here’s a hopeful sign.
Despite the unquestioned moral kind of embrace of capitalism by all the dominant elites in the country, major polling agencies have been polling Americans about their emotional reaction to the word capitalism and the word socialism.
I don’t know if you’ve followed this polling, but it’s been going on for a number of years.
And what it’s showing is that there is a steadily growing plurality of Americans who are having a negative association to the word capitalism and a positive association with the word socialism.
And if you take young people and a variety of other Democratic sort of constituent bases, this is growing.
And that is the favorability of some kind of alternative to capitalism in the polls is growing.
And capitalism, I mean, even the far right has a long history of challenging Wall Street.
And you hear people like Ron DeSantos and many Trump is challenging corporatism and corporate power and so forth.
So there is a large majority of the country that is, in fact, about 80 to 90 percent of people in the United States say that big money, corporate power is the greatest threat to the world.
They talk about them as globalists, global companies.
But they recognize that there are a tiny number of people and companies that are making trillions, literally, of dollars where the great majority of people are, their livelihoods are in peril and their lives are in peril.
So I mean, it’s not utopian to feel that there is a way to navigate toward reaching people who feel this way.
And one of the problems I feel, and I’ve written about this in several books, is that the left has played a role in losing the ability to speak to, for example, much of the white working class or to rural folks.
And the reason is the way the left, the left since Clinton, basically the New Deal got abandoned after Reagan, basically, remember Bill Clinton made that famous phrase, the Democrat Party is no longer the party, a big government, they moved to globalization.
And white working class people moved like in an emergency toward the Republican Party because they correctly understood that the Democratic Party was abandoning class politics and sort of a critique of the economic system in favor of more siloed identity politics, whether it was anti-racism or gender politics, all of which of course are important.
But when they become the basis of political organization in this way that I call siloed, meaning they’re each in their own silo, this is the very opposite of what happened during the abolitionist movement.
You’re seeing, for example, Black movements moving in competition with Latinx movements or Asian American movements or women.
I mean, this identity model has basically opened the door wide open for corporatism and for the Republican Party moving in and saying, oh, these lefties just think you’re privileged white people because the left is no longer offering a conversation about capitalism and about the economic system, which is brutally abandoning large numbers, both economically and culturally, you know, white working class people have very good reason to feel angry and to feel this is where I think a lot of the critique of Trump’s personality, as crazy as he is, is missing the underlying forces, which we talk about in this book about the capitalism itself, which are giving ordinary working people very good reason for abandoning the Democratic Party and for abandoning Biden, for example, right now.
And so the book gets into that to some degree.
And so in a funny way, it’s not funny, it’s tragic that the left or liberalism in many ways is fueling right wing growth, fueling the Trumpist kind of movement and fueling the fascism that it hates.
And this happened to some degree in Germany in the 30s.
Speaker 1: And contrast that, I think, with the huge popularity of Bernie Sanders campaign, which actually brought together all those disparate points and talked about a multi ethnic, a multicultural working class movement based on solidarity.
It’s not difficult to actually bring all those things together.
And Marianne Williamson, I heard her the other day on Democracy Now!, you know, her message is very much like Bernie’s in that sense.
She says, we really have to base this on a politics of love, by which she means solidarity, and that the only way to counter the hate is with love.
I wonder what you think of that.
Speaker 2: Well, I agree with the way you framed it just before you mentioned Marianne Williamson. In 2016, you may remember that Bernie Sanders did very well.
He was brought back in the primary elections in Michigan and Wisconsin, where the effects of outsourcing and globalization among steelworkers and autoworkers and all that was greatest.
Bernie ran up big margins in those states.
The corporate Democrats pushed him out.
And it’s very similar in a way, it’s always interesting to imagine what would have happened if corporate Democrats, when Roosevelt was running for the fourth time, people knew he was going to die.
And Henry Wallace, a socialist, was a logical choice, Eleanor Roosevelt wanted him to be president.
The corporate Democrats mobilized.
They were afraid of Wallace, and for good reason at the time, because Wallace would have run a very different country then, and probably would have might have avoided the Cold War.
And Truman was much more of a militarist and much more willing to sort of, you know, live with the corporate system than the New Deal.
And so I think that’s the thing that’s happening.
The danger today is that the corporate, you know, that money plays such a central role in the Democratic Party, as well as the Republican Party.
And, you know, liberals are so tied to foreign policy ideals and to capitalism in a very general sense, even though they want reforms.
And as you say, Biden did some good things in his first two years that I didn’t anticipate.
He moved a little bit away from the kind of neoliberal push for that the Democrats have been embracing since Reagan and since Clinton, and Obama also.
And it’s important to remember that under the Obama administration, the racial gap between blacks and whites grew, and the gap between rich black people and poor black people grew under Obama.
This is not to try to desecrate Obama, but to say that neither Clinton nor Obama, the two Democrats after Reagan, who really pulled America away from the New Deal in a kind of a class economically oriented politics, neither of those two Democratic presidents did much to try to move it in the opposite direction.
And that’s why so many workers, the most important, in my view, the most important political phenomena driving the possibility of fascism and of extinction, is the movement of so many working class people away from the Democratic Party, because they don’t feel the Democratic Party is speaking to their needs, and they’re right about that.
Biden was a little bit better.
He began to use a more massive public goods approach.
In the book, Dying for Capitalism, we argue at the very heart of capitalism is the idea that everything is for sale.
So it’s all commodities.
Everything is produced as a commodity society.
And we introduced the idea of saying, the alternative to that is a public goods society.
In other words, that’s a language that’s not very familiar to people, but public goods are things that are produced not for profit, but for public well-being.
And the New Deal, Roosevelt during the Depression, was able to essentially use that as a message to encourage a lot of public spending on both on the environment, on jobs, on social welfare programs and so forth.
And so I think part of the problem is the need to move back away from this siloed identity politics toward a kind of economic politics that looks at public goods.
Climate change is a public catastrophe, nuclear war, that once you start using the conversation of not just a profit for the market, but for public goods, you can have a conversation about all these issues.
So a lot of this book is about what it would mean and look like to create a society based on public goods.
Well, that’s a great place to end. The book is Dying for Capitalism, How Big Money Fuels Extinction, and What We Can Do About It. Charles Berber, thank you so much for talking with us here about this very absolutely crucial
We talk with Les Leopold of the Labor Institute about his groundbreaking study of the political cost of mass layoffs. His book is Wall Street’s War on Workers: How Mass Layoffs and Greed Are Destroying the Working Class and What to Do About It.
Then we re-air a clip from our 2013 interview with Les Leopold about his book, How To Make A Million Dollars An Hour: Why Hedge Funds Get Away with Siphoning Off America’s Wealth.
And finally, we read some poems from Mosab Abu Toha’s book Things You May Find Hidden In My Ear.
Writers Voice— in depth conversation with writers of all genres, on the air since 2004.
Find us on Facebook at Writers Voice with Francesca Rheannon, on Instagram and Threads @WritersVoicePodcast or find us on X/Twitter @WritersVoice. Read transcripts at the Writer’s Voice Substack.
Key words: Les Leopold, Wall Street, layoffs, author interview, book podcast, nonfiction, podcast, Writer’s Voice
Economy Not Working For Many AmericansThe economy is going great, right? Wages are up, unemployment is at record lows, so why do so many Americans feel that the economy isn’t working for them?
And what does that mean for the upcoming presidential election?
Wall Street’s War On WorkersThese are the questions Les Leopold answers in his latest book Wall Street’s War on Workers: How Mass Layoffs and Greed Are Destroying the Working Class and What to Do About It. As the title makes clear, the crisis of mass layoffs and the failure of either political party to address it has left Americans feeling like the economy is rigged against them – and no one in politics is taking their side.
Leopold says that the failure of the so-called “party of the working class,” the Democrats, to stand against mass layoffs is the real reason many working class people have abandoned it. And he says workers are far more progressive, even white workers, than the pundits would have you think.
About the AuthorLes Leopold is the co-founder of the Labor Institute and the author of numerous books, including Runaway Inequality, The Looting of America and How to Make a Million Dollars an Hour. Listen to more of our interviews with Leopold here. Check out Leopold’s Wall Street’s War On Workers Substack here.
The Rundown We talk with Michael Wolraich about his book, The Bishop And The Butterfly: Murder, Politics, And The End Of The Jazz Age. Then, we re-air part of our conversation with Paul Kix about You Have To Be Prepared To Die Before You Can Begin To Live: Ten Weeks In Birmingham That Changed America. … Continue reading A Jazz-Age Murder That Toppled Gotham’s Mayor
We talk with Elizabeth Flock about her book, The Furies. It follows three remarkable women — in the US, in India and in Syria — who took justice into their own hands to defend themselves, other women and their communities against abuse. Then, environmental journalist Stephen Robert Miller tells us about his book, Over The … Continue reading Women, Vengeance, and Justice: Elizabeth Flock, THE FURIES. Plus, Stephen Robert Miller, OVER THE SEAWALL
Mind & Liberation: Unveiling Frantz Fanon’s Revolutionary Psychiatry and Post-Colonial Vision. Also, a Cherokee murder mystery. We talk with Adam Shatz about his acclaimed biography, The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon. Then, a Cherokee murder mystery based on two very real crises affecting Indigenous communities: missing and murdered women and environmental racism. … Continue reading Adam Shatz, THE REBEL’S CLINIC & Vanessa Lillie, BLOOD SISTERS
We talk with world-renowned climate scientist Michael Mann about climate, past, present and future. His book is Our Fragile Moment: How Lessons from Earth’s Past Can Help Us Survive the Climate Crisis. The world is largely past climate denialism (except for the Republican Party and its fascist leader Donald Trump.) But what has replaced it … Continue reading Hope For The Climate Crisis: Michael Mann, OUR FRAGILE MOMENT
We talk with authors Douglas Preston and Emma Donoghue about a collaborative novel whose characters — and their stories — are each written by a different, major literary voice: Fourteen Days: An Unauthorized Gathering. Then, we remember Martin Luther King Jr’s birthday by airing some of our conversation with Jonathan Eig, about his biography, King: … Continue reading Douglas Preston & Emma Donnoghue, FOURTEEN DAYS
We talk with Cory Doctorow about his new novel The Lost Cause, “a solarpunk science fiction novel of hope amidst the climate emergency.” It imagines an America where another better world is possible, while confronting the evils of today. Writers Voice— in depth conversation with writers of all genres, on the air since 2004. Find … Continue reading Cory Doctorow, THE LOST CAUSE
We explore the people of North Sentinel Island, who are thought to be the last un-contacted tribe on Earth. Our guest is historian, essayist, and author Adam Goodheart and his book is The Last Island: Discovery, Defiance, and the Most Elusive Tribe on Earth. Read The Interview Transcript Then, we talk with author, gardener and … Continue reading Adam Goodheart, THE LAST ISLAND & Jennifer Jewell, WHAT WE SOW
Turtles are jaw-droppingly amazing. Some can run faster than a 10-year-old; some can climb trees; others have shells that glow in the dark. We talk with The Soul of An Octopus author Sy Montgomery and illustrator Matthew Patterson about this and more amazing things about turtles. Their acclaimed book is Of Time And Turtles: Mending … Continue reading Sy Montgomery & Matthew Patterson, OF TIME AND TURTLES
Antisemitism and conspiracy theories. Also, how to protect wildlife by protecting people. First, we talk with Mike Rothschild about his book: Jewish Space Lasers: The Rothschilds and 200 Years of Conspiracy Theories. It’s about the persistence of rightwing antisemitism and its link to conspiracy theories. Then, scientist Adam Hart tells us about how people become … Continue reading Mike Rothschild, JEWISH SPACE LASERS & Adam Hart, DEADLY BALANCE
We talk with labor educator and activist Steve Babson. His book is The Forgotten Populists: When Farmers Turned Left to Save Democracy. Then, Heather Has Two Mommies author Lesléa Newman tell us about the enduring legacy of Matthew Shepard. Her new book is Always Matt: A Tribute to Matthew Shepard. Writer’s Voice — in depth … Continue reading Steve Babson, THE FORGOTTEN POPULISTS & Lesléa Newman, ALWAYS MATT: A Tribute to Matthew Shepard
The US military is one of the biggest engines driving private profits in the world. But whats the cost to the rest of us? We talk with Norman Solomon about his new book, War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine.
But first, we explore George Eliot’s scandalous solution to “the marriage question.” We talk with Clare Carlisle about her book, The Marriage Question: George Eliot’s Double Life.
Writers Voice— in depth conversation with writers of all genres, on the air since 2004.Find us on Facebook at Writers Voice with Francesca Rheannon, on Instagram and Threads @WritersVoicePodcast or find us on X/Twitter @WritersVoice.Read transcripts and subscribe at the Writer’s Voice SubstackLove Writer’s Voice? Please rate us on your podcast app. It really helps to get the word out about our show.
Key Words: Clare Carlisle, George Eliot, Norman Solomon, Militarism, US military, book excerpt, podcast, book recommendations, author interview, book podcast, book show, history
Clare Carlisle
George Eliot was a contradiction. One of Britain’s most celebrated novelists, she took a male name as a nom de plume, was in a “marriage” notably not consecrated by the state, and made oodles of money more than her de facto husband, George Henry Lewes.
Yet she was opposed to women’s suffrage, insisted on being called “Mrs. Lewes”, and, early in her career, deferred to Lewes’ opinions of what kind of a writer she should be, even when she disagreed with him. Perhaps not the feminist icon one would think — or was she?
Philosophy professor Clare Carlisle explores Eliot’s and Lewes partnership from the perspective of how it illuminates the contradictions of marriage: the push and pull between autonomy and interdependence that any such partnership entails.
But The Marriage Question also situates Eliot within the social currents and confines of her own time, providing a nuanced portrait of the great novelist.
Clare Carlisle teaches philosophy at King’s College London. She is the author of several other books, including on the philosophers Spinoza and Søren Kierkegaard. She also edited George Eliot’s translation of Spinoza’s Ethics.
The Marriage Question is out from Macmillan.
Norman Solomon
Did you know that since 9/11 happened, the U.S. has added $2 to the federal discretionary budget for militarism for every $1 added to invest in communities? Less than $2 out of every $5 in discretionary spending is available to fund such things as primary and secondary public education, housing programs, child care programs, federal disaster relief, environmental programs, and scientific research.
And talking about the environment, the US military is one of the largest, if not the largest, single contributor to the greenhouse gases that are wreaking havoc on our planet.
Yet the pro-military drumbeat is relentless from the US press and other opinion-makers.
Journalist, media critic, author and activist Norman Solomon delves into the hidden cost of the US military machine in his terrific new book, War Made Invisible.
Norman Solomon is co-founder of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. In addition to War Made Invisible, he’s the author of War Made Easy and Made Love, Got War.
Read an excerpt from War Made Invisible
We talk with historian Ahmed White about the Wobblies and the capitalist war on radical workers. His award-winning book is Under the Iron Heel.
Then Nikhil Goyal tells us about his book, Live to See the Day: Coming of Age in American Poverty. It follows three children as they struggle to survive in the poorest neighborhood of the poorest large city in America.
Writers Voice— in depth conversation with writers of all genres, on the air since 2004.Find us on Facebook at Writers Voice with Francesca Rheannon, on Instagram and Threads @WritersVoicePodcast or find us on X/Twitter @WritersVoice.Read transcripts and subscribe at the Writer’s Voice Substack.Love Writer’s Voice? Please rate us on your podcast app. It really helps to get the word out about our show.
key words: IWW, poverty, Nikhil Goyal, Ahmed White, history, creative nonfiction, labor history, podcast, book recommendations, author interview, book podcast, book show
One Big Union
In 1917, the Industrial Workers of the World was rapidly gaining strength and members in its campaign to build One Big Union uniting all workers.
Within a decade, this radical union was effectively destroyed, the victim of the most remarkable campaign of legal repression and vigilantism against a labor movement in American history.
Capitalist Repression, Rank-and-File Courage
Historian Ahmed White has been fascinated with the story of the IWW for more than 20 years. Not only because of the repression the union suffered, but also because of the incredible courage of its members who stood up against it.
Now he’s come out with an award-winning book, Under The Iron Heel, that tells that story of rank and file courage and the repression it defied.
About The Author
Ahmed White teaches labor and criminal law at the University of Colorado Boulder and is author of several books on American labor history.
Read an excerpt from Under The Iron Heel
Coming of Age in American Poverty
Over 11 million children — 16% of all kids nationwide — were living in poverty in 2020. That’s the highest child poverty rate among advanced industrialized nations. And, of course, poverty’s burdens fall heaviest on the backs of children of color.
It’s a shameful record for the richest country in the history of the world. It’s also a direct result of the neoliberal policies that have shredded the social safety net of the New Deal and LBJ’s War on Poverty.
Three Kids From One of America’s Poorest Neighborhoods
Nikhil Goyal brings the devastating impact of those policies vividly to life in his book, Live To See The Day. In it, he follows three Puerto Rican children from Philadelphia’s Kensington neighborhood.
It’s a coming-of-age story, one beset by the multifaceted violence of poverty. But it’s also a story of the incredible resilience of these children and their mothers, as they strive to survive with dignity.
About The Author
Nikhil Goyal is a sociologist and policymaker who served as senior policy advisor on education and children for Senator Bernie Sanders when Sanders chaired the U.S. Senate Budget Committee and Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions.
Read an excerpt from Live To See The Day
David Goodman talks about his book, An American Cannabis Story about Puffin Farm in Washington State. And Carl Hart discusses Drug Use For Grownups: Chasing Liberty In The Land of Fear.
We talk with historian Martha Hodes about her memoir My Hijacking: A Personal History of Forgetting and Remembering. In 1970, she survived six days as a hostage on a hijacked plane when she was twelve years old. Then, teacher Adam Bessie tells us about his take on how the pandemic has driven us apart—and what it will take to bring us together. His graphic pandemic memoir is Going Remote: A Teacher’s Journey.
Paul Kix tells us the thrilling story of the fight to end Jim Crow, led by the greatest figures of the Civil Rights Movement—and won by children. His book is You Have To Be Prepared To Die Before You Can Begin To Live.
Buzzy Jackson tells us the story of the anti-Nazi saboteur, Hannie Schaft and the lessons it holds for us as we confront fascism today. Her novel based on true events is To Die Beautiful. Then Francesca reads a short excerpt from her own father’s story of resistance in the same war.
Ava Chin tells us about her stunning family memoir/history of the Chinese Exclusion Act in America, Mott Street: A Chinese American Family’s Story of Exclusion and Homecoming.
Then we talk with Tanis Rideout about her new novel The Sea Between Two Shores. It’s about two families, one Canadian and one from an island in Vanuatu, who must deal with the legacy of colonialism in the South Pacific and the responsibilities they have to each other.
We talk with Jeff Goodell about how climate change is causing extreme heat that is pushing Planet Earth beyond habitable boundaries. Also, Lynn Zinser talks about climate liability lawsuits.
The post Jeff Goodell talks climate change in THE HEAT WILL KILL YOU FIRST & Suing the Fossil Fuel Industry appeared first on Writer's Voice.
We talk about the rise of mass fascism in America with Jeff Sharlet. His book is The Undertow. Also, a review of Dennis LeHane's new novel, Small Mercies.
The post Talking the Trumpocene with Jeff Sharlet & A Review of Dennis Lehane’s Small Mercies appeared first on Writer's Voice.
Family separation continues to devastate the lives of children, as explored in Sylvia Rodriguez-Vega's book, Drawing Deportation: Art and Resistance among Immigrant Children. This poignant work delves into the traumatic experiences faced by immigrant children and showcases the healing power of art in their recovery. In another thought-provoking book, You Are The Universe: Ram Dass Maps The Journey, Amy Beutens brings to life the profound teachings of renowned spiritual teacher Ram Dass. With captivating illustrations and co-editing by Julie Weinstein, this graphic book conveys a transformative message of love and unity, appealing to both teens and adults.
The post Justice for Immigrant Children with Sylvia Rodriguez-Vega & Ram Dass with Amy Beutens appeared first on Writer's Voice.
As a physician I'm perhaps more aware than most people of how perilous our everyday lives are and how quickly they could transition to something quite disastrous. And I think in America especially we exist in a sort of denial of our mortality…As a result we are very shocked when any hint of tragedy comes our way.
The post Writer, Humanist and Physician Abraham Verghese, THE COVENANT OF WATER & CUTTING FOR STONE appeared first on Writer's Voice.
"I feel like if we can spend time in a place like one of these Happy Valleys that still holds these wisdom cultures that had these technologies and these systems that survived thousands and thousands of years before industrialization, that maybe we can learn how to respect the land again."
The post Jane Marshall, SEARCHING FOR HAPPY VALLEY & A Story from Francesca appeared first on Writer's Voice.
We talk with Peggy Orenstein about her book, Unraveling: What I Learned About Life While Shearing Sheep, Dyeing Wool, and Making the World’s Ugliest Sweater.
But first, Katy Simpson Smith tells us about her new novel, The Weeds. It weaves history, botany, feminism and the climate crisis together into a compelling and sharply funny tale.
Writers Voice— in depth conversation with writers of all genres, on the air since 2004.Like us on Facebook at Writers Voice with Francesca Rheannon, on Instagram @WritersVoicePodcast or find us on Twitter @WritersVoice.Love Writer’s Voice? Please rate us on your podcast app. It really helps to get the word out about our show.Tags: Writer’s Voice, podcast, book recommendations, author interview, book podcast, book show, book excerpt, nonfiction, fiction, botany, knitting
Katy Simpson Smith, THE WEEDS
In The Weeds by Katy Simpson Smith, two women, one from today’s Mississippi and another from Italy in 1854, navigate the Roman Colosseum documenting the plants they find there for their respective employers.
Through a list of seemingly minor plants and their uses—medical, agricultural, culinary—these women calculate intangible threats: a changing climate, the cost of knowledge, and the ways repeated violence can upend women’s lives.
They must forge their own small acts of defiance and slip through whatever cracks they find to redefine the roles women are given and have taken from them, and the lives they make for themselves.
About the Author
Katy Simpson Smith is the author of four novels and one book of historical nonfiction.
Listen to or read an excerpt from The Weeds
Listen to Other Writer’s Voice Interviews with Katy Simpson Smith
Peggy Orenstein, UNRAVELING
When the Covid Pandemic lockdown upended Peggy Orenstein’s life, she decided she needed something compelling to do.
So of course, she decided to learn one of the most difficult skills there is: shearing sheep.
That’s because, a lifelong knitter, she thought it would be great fun to make a sweater from scratch: from shearing to carding the wool to dyeing it and, finally, knitting it.
Along the way, she learned a lot of other things, too, like the environmental impact of fleece—and even worse, its artificial alternative—how women’s handwork has changed the world, colonialism and color and much more. Orenstein shares her findings in her new book Unraveling.
About the Author
Peggy Orenstein is the author of numerous books, including Girls and Sex, Boys and Sex, and Cinderella Ate My Daughter.
Read or listen to an excerpt from Unraveling
Next Week on Writer’s Voice
Amy Beutens, You Are The Universe and Jane Marshall, Searching for Happy Valley.
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Today on Writer’s Voice, an eclectic offering. Later in the show, we talk about eggs: actual, mythological and artistic. Author Lizzie Stark tells us about her book, Egg.
But first, we talk about media literacy, something that is vital if we are to preserve and strengthen democracy. We speak with Allison Butler about the book she co-wrote for Project Censored, THE MEDIA AND ME: A Guide To Critical Media Literacy For Young People.
Writers Voice— in depth conversation with writers of all genres, on the air since 2004.Like us on Facebook at Writers Voice with Francesca Rheannon, on Instagram @WritersVoicePodcast or find us on Twitter @WritersVoice.Love Writer’s Voice? Please rate us on your podcast app. It really helps to get the word out about our show.Read Transcript
Tags: writers voice, podcast, book recommendations, media, media literacy, author interview, book podcast, book show, book excerpt, nonfiction, eggs
Media Literacy And Young People
Young people are voracious media consumers. 8 to 18 year olds pack in more than 11 hours of some form of media every day, often multi-tasking between a number of different media streams and screens.
Yet how much do they really understand about how to consume media–the biases and manipulations that are part and parcel of the media landscape? Not so much. In fact, media literacy among young people is quite low.
Teaching Critical Inquiry About Media
That’s a lack that Allison Butler and her nine co-authors seek to redress with their terrific book for young people, high-school age through college (and just as useful for grownups.)
The Media and Me is a guide to critical media literacy, developed by a collective of writers brought together by Project Censored, an organization devoted to educating students and the public about the importance of a truly free press.
The book gives readers critical inquiry skills, covering topics like storytelling, building arguments and recognizing fallacies, surveillance and digital gatekeeping, advertising and consumerism, among other issues.
About the Author
Allison Butler is director of the Media Literacy Certificate Program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
The Amazing Egg
The egg is an object so common, so ubiquitous—and we’re talking eggs of all types—that most of us probably don’t think much about it, unless we are planning to cook it, usually in its chicken-derived form.
But the egg is a powerful symbol in mythology, an object of art—and not just for Easter, a concern of prospective parents, and even a target for crime.
Lizzie Stark’s book Egg: A Dozen Ovatures lays out an unconventional history of this cellular workhorse, from chickens to penguins, from art to crime, and more.
Listen to An Excerpt
About the Author
In addition to Egg, Lizzie Stark is the author of two other nonfiction books, Pandora’s DNA and Leaving Mundania. Her writing has been featured in the Washington Post, the Daily Beast, and the Philadelphia Inquirer, among other publications.
The post Media Literacy: Allison Butler’s MEDIA & ME. Also, EGG with Lizzie Stark appeared first on Writer's Voice.
Writer’s Voice spends the hour with Jonathan Eig talking about his acclaimed new biography, KING: A Life. It’s a captivating portrait of the renowned civil rights leader, unveiling new material and providing an intimate perspective.
“He suffered tremendously from doubt. And he suffered terribly from the effects of the FBI assault on him. He kept doing his work. He kept marching forward. He kept going more and more boldly into the breach. But it had an impact. He was hospitalized several times, maybe, fair to say, many times for exhaustion, for just succumbing to the stress of what he was doing. So that kind of courage in the face of doubt, to me, makes him even more heroic.” — Jonathan Eig
Writers Voice— in depth conversation with writers of all genres, on the air since 2004.Like us on Facebook at Writers Voice with Francesca Rheannon, on Instagram @WritersVoicePodcast or find us on Twitter @WritersVoice.Love Writer’s Voice? Please rate us on your podcast app. It really helps to get the word out about our show.Key words: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., MLK, Jonathan Eig, history, biography, podcast, book recommendations, author interview, book podcast, book show, creative nonfiction
An Intimate Portrait
There have been many books written about Dr. MLK, Jr. But the one just published by Jonathan Eig stands out, not only for the new material Eig reveals but for the intimacy of his portrait of the famed civil rights leader.
A Journey of Purpose
The book delves into Dr. King’s upbringing, his initial hesitations about following in his father’s preaching footsteps, and the pivotal moment when he realized that his path was chosen by a higher power, as he saw it, for the cause of racial justice.
Relentless Persecution
The book uncovers the relentless persecution endured by King at the hands of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, who called the Reverend “the most dangerous man in America.”
The Complex Man
King: A Life explores the multifaceted character of MLK, Jr., including his flaws as a man and husband, such as sexism and undervaluing women’s leadership in the civil rights movement, as well as his tendency to borrow words from others in his writings.
Undaunted Courage
Eig writes movingly about King’s profound courage in the face of unrelenting attacks and his undying faith in humanity. The book brings it all comes together in a spellbinding story written by a master storyteller.
Jonathan Eig is the author of six books, including a biography of Muhammed Ali.
Read or Listen to An Excerpt
Read the Interview Transcript
New York Times Article about Freedom Riders
Coming up Next Week on Writer’s Voice:We talk with Allison Butler, THE MEDIA AND ME: A Guide to Critical Media Literacy for Young People. Also, Lizzie Stark tells us about her book, EGG: A Dozen Ovatures.
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Did you know that American English (not British English) is one of the very few languages that has no dialects? No matter where you are from in this big country, you can easily understand the speech of anyone else. That’s true, even with having different regional accents or ethnic differences such as Black English.
That’s one of the many fascinating things one learns from reading Ilan Stavans’ anthology of writings in American English, spanning 450 years of our history as a nation. We talk with Stavans about The People’s Tongue: Americans and the English Language.
Writers Voice— in depth conversation with writers of all genres, on the air since 2004.Like us on Facebook at Writers Voice with Francesca Rheannon, on Instagram @WritersVoicePodcast or find us on Twitter @WritersVoice.Love Writer’s Voice? Please rate us on your podcast app. It really helps to get the word out about our show.Key words: language, English language, Ilan Stavans, anthology, podcast, book recommendation
American English Spanning the Centuries
Ilan Stavans’ anthology The People’s Tongue features a wide array of letters, poems, memoir, stories, songs, documents, and essays, from Sojourner Truth and Abraham Lincoln to Henry Roth and Zora Neale Hurston, from George Carlin and James Baldwin to Louise Erdrich and hiphop artist Kendrick Lamar— all elucidating the breadth and depth of this free-wheeling, eclectic, ever-changing, immigrant-forged magnificent language of ours.
Stavans Brings Immigrant’s Sensibility to Our Language
Ilan Stavans is an immigrant himself, and, as such, he has a deep understanding of how the immigrant experience has shaped American English, giving it a richness and elasticity that few other languages can rival.
But he also notes the debt it owes to the indigenous peoples of this continent, whose stamp on the land is most obvious in the numerous place names that remind of their presence — and of the settler’s theft of their territory.
About the Author
Ilan Stavans is the author of many books and anthologies. He’s professor of Humanities, Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College.
The post Americans and the English Language with Ilan Stavans, THE PEOPLE’S TONGUE appeared first on Writer's Voice.
I’ve been thinking about climate change lately in really simple terms: that it’s really about the people and the places we love. It isn’t actually any more complex than that. So, yes, we talk a lot about parts per million and all these degrees of warming and all these complex things. And they are indeed metrics that scientists use to talk about climate change. But if you just strip it all the way back, it is really about protecting those places that we love and the beautiful planet that we live on as well. — Joëlle Gergis
We spend the hour with IPCC climate scientist Joëlle Gergis, talking about her powerful and moving book, Humanity’s Moment: A Climate Scientist’s Case for Hope.
It’s about how she grapples with the grief her scientific findings confront her with — but also the hope she feels as she witnesses how the tide is turning toward climate protection.
Writers Voice— in depth conversation with writers of all genres, on the air since 2004.Like us on Facebook at Writers Voice with Francesca Rheannon, on Instagram @WritersVoicePodcast or find us on Twitter @WritersVoice.Love Writer’s Voice? Please rate us on your podcast app. It really helps to get the word out about our show.Key terms: climate change, IPCC, Joëlle Gergis, climate science, podcast
Climate Impacts Happening Much Faster Than Predicted
When climate scientist Joëlle Gergis set to work on the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Sixth Assessment Report, the research she encountered kept her up at night. Through countless hours spent with the world’s top scientists to piece together the latest global assessment of climate change, she realized that the impacts were occurring faster than anyone had predicted.
In Humanity’s Moment, Gergis takes us through the science with unflinching honesty, explaining what it means for our future, while sharing her personal reflections on bearing witness to the heartbreak of the climate emergency unfolding in real time.
Political Will To Act Means Feeling Our Connection To The Planet
Gergis shows us that the solutions we need to live sustainably already exist—we just need the political will to create a better world. Humanity’s Moment is a climate scientist’s guide to rekindling hope, and a call to action to restore our relationship with ourselves, each other, and our planet.
About the Author
Joëlle Gergis is a climate scientist and writer at the Australian National University. She was a lead author on the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Sixth Assessment Report and is also an advisor to the Climate Council, Australia’s leading independent body providing expert advice to the public on climate change and policy. In addition to Humanity’s Moment, she is the author of Sunburnt Country: The Future and History of Climate Change in Australia.
Read An Excerpt
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Our Miraculous Microbiome Is Under Threat
Our microbiome, the collection of microbes that live in and on our bodies, is under threat. Antibiotics, processed foods, and even stress can disrupt the delicate balance of our gut bacteria, leading to a range of health problems. Problems with our gut microbiome could be factors in the rise of diabetes, obesity, food allergies and even developmental disorders like autism.
We talk with filmmakers Sarah Schenck and Steven Lawrence about their film The Invisible Extinction. It’s about the threats to our life-supporting microbiome and the scientists racing to save our vanishing microbes before it’s too late.
Writers Voice— in depth conversation with writers of all genres, on the air since 2004.Like us on Facebook at Writers Voice with Francesca Rheannon, on Instagram @WritersVoicePodcast or find us on Twitter @WritersVoice.Love Writer’s Voice? Please rate us on your podcast app. It really helps to get the word out about our show.Key words: microbiome, biodiversity, documentary, Sarah Schenck, Steven Lawrence, film, podcast, diabetes, obesity, health, autism
The Invisible Extinction
People living in modern societies are experiencing an “Invisible Extinction” of the biodiversity of organisms in our bodies, with serious consequences for our health. And it’s happening even faster than the climate crisis.
In their film The Invisible Extinction, Sarah Schenck and Steven Lawrence follow scientists Gloria Dominguez-Bello and Marty Blaser into places like the Amazonian jungle to find out what is killing our microbes and what we can do about it.
They also talk to researchers in China and Israel, who are on the hunt for cures to common diseases that may be caused by the loss of diversity in our gut microbiome.
About the Filmmakers
Sarah Schenck is a writer, director, and producer who makes films to advance public health. Previous films include Virgin, the comedy Slippery Slope and an episode for the PBS weekly news program “Need to Know,” that focused on childhood obesity.
Steven Lawrence is a producer-director who has been making documentaries for over 30 years, including The Cat Rescuers, winner of the 2018 Hamptons International Film Festival animal rights award. He worked Michael Apted on several films, including The Long Way Home and Married In America and created the Emmy-award winning series Born In The USSR.
Interview Transcript
The post What’s Happening To Our Microbiome: THE INVISIBLE EXTINCTION with Sarah Schenck and Steven Lawrence appeared first on Writer's Voice.
How can we make the change we need to save our future?
I spent a lot of time studying how we as collective agents of history have helped foment enormous change and also how we have failed at it. That was another important element, to look at the revolutions that did not work. Because unlike basically every one of those revolutions, this is something we can’t miss on. We’re not going to get a do-over on this. It’s now or never. — Stephen Markley
We talk with Stephen Markley about his acclaimed new novel about the climate crisis, The Deluge. It lays out the different paths that may be taken to changing the political will to tackle climate, the unintended consequences they lead to, and the twists and turns of political, ecological and individual fates that intertwine and react with each other.
Then we talk about what we can do in our own lives to protect our planet from climate disaster. We air excerpts from our interviews with Peter Kalmus (Being The Change) and Darr Reilly of Carbon C.R.E.W.
Writers Voice— in depth conversation with writers of all genres, on the air since 2004.Like us on Facebook at Writers Voice with Francesca Rheannon, on Instagram @WritersVoicePodcast or find us on Twitter @WritersVoice.Love Writer’s Voice? Please rate us on your podcast app. It really helps to get the word out about our show.We Can Solve The Climate Crisis
We have the science, the technology and the money to deal with the climate crisis. Solar and wind are the cheapest forms of energy. Yes, we can improve on the tech and drive costs even lower. But basically, we know how to get to net zero carbon emissions by 2050, which scientists tell us can avert the most catastrophic impacts of climate change.
And good news! It turns out that once the world reaches net zero, global temperatures will stop going up in as soon as three to five years. And half of human-made CO2 emissions would drop out of the atmosphere within about 30 years. We can do this.
The Real Barrier to Climate Action
So what’s stopping us? In short, political will. And the lack of political will in tackling the climate crisis is driven by two other crises: the crisis of economic inequality, which drives the crisis of democracy.
That’s the key takeaway from Stephen Markely’s brilliant and engrossing new novel, The Deluge.
Different Paths to Action on Climate
The book lays out the different paths that may be taken to changing the political will to tackle climate, the unintended consequences they lead to, and the twists and turns of political, ecological and individual fates that intertwine and react with each other.
How could a pro-climate mass movement get created? What about eco-sabotage? Or electoral politics? And how do the fossil fuel interests and the politicians they control try to stop that change? Can they be resisted and overcome? And finally, how can democratic movements counter increasing authoritarianism to save our future?
These are all questions Markely explores In gripping prose and vivid characters — like Kate Morris, the charismatic leader of the mass climate movement, Fierce Blue Fire. He brings the near future into sharp focus, making the world we are moving toward vividly real.
About The Author
In addition to The Deluge, Stephen Markley is the author of the novel Ohio, and two memoirs, Iceland and Publish This Book.
Read an excerpt from The Deluge
What You Can Do To Protect The Climate & Live Better
Earth Day happens this week, a time for people to celebrate our beautiful planetary home and honor it by thinking of ways we can protect it. We’ve taken two excerpts from past episodes that help us do just that.
First, a clip from our 2017 interview with atmospheric scientist Peter Kalmus. Last year he was arrested for locking himself onto an entrance to the JP Morgan Chase building in downtown LA. That bank is the number one funder of fossil fuel projects around the world.
But before that, Kalmus wrote a book about how to make personal choices to help protect the climate, Being The Change: Live Well and Spark a Climate Revolution. It’s not just about decreasing your own carbon footprint, but motivating other people to do the same.
Connecting Neighbors with Carbon C.R.E.W.
One way to spread the word on climate is to connect with your neighbors. That’s what a new initiative aims to help anybody do. It’s called Carbon C.R.E.W. and it was co-founded by our guest from early January of this year, Darr Reilly.
Carbon C.R.E.W. was an outgrowth of her activism with the global climate movement called Project Drawdown, founded by Paul Hawken.
Drawdown talks about 100 solutions to the climate crisis that people and communities can take on their own. And Carbon C.R.E.W. is designed to make that easy for small groups of friends and neighbors to do. Members of a Carbon Crew meet for five sessions to develop their own personal carbon reduction plan.
Since that interview that we aired in January, Carbon C.R.E.W. has upgraded its program. It’s now a turn-key process to set up and host a carbon crew, with scripts, handouts, worksheets and resources. Learn more about it here.
The post How To Save The Planet, Collectively & Individually: Stephen Markley, DELUGE, plus Peter Kalmus & Darr Reilly appeared first on Writer's Voice.
Spring is here and the birds are returning. But the roar of the leaf blowers is a big turn-off to our feathered friends:
Right now they’re starting to migrate back in from Central and South America and either coming through or stopping to stay and breed. And if they’re going to a spot where there’s this constant noise, well, why are they going to want to nest there?
We talk with Nancy Lawson about her book, Wildscape: Trilling Chipmunks, Beckoning Blooms, Salty Butterflies, And Other Sensory Wonders Of Nature. It’s about the vibrant web of nature outside our back door—where animals and plants perceive and communicate using marvelous sensory abilities we are only beginning to understand.
Then, a novel links the Pandora myth to a young namesake in Jane Austen’s London — and a mystery that must be solved. Susan Stokes Chapman tells us about Pandora.
What We Are Missing and Messing Up About The Nature Around Us
As Writer’s Voice celebrates Earth Month, we are watching the Earth come alive with the new Spring season. But how much of the wildscape around us do we really appreciate? How much of it can we truly see, hear or smell? And how much of it are we disturbing and suppressing with our heedless pursuit of perfect lawns and gardens filled with fancy exotics?
Naturalist Nancy Lawson’s first book, The Humane Gardener, explored the importance of creating habitats for wildlife in our own backyards by creating diverse ecosystems with pollinator-friendly native plants and other wildlife-friendly practices.
The Five Senses of the WIldscape
Lawson’s new book Wildscape takes us deeper into understanding the secret lives of the animals, insects and plants that surround us.
Lawson takes readers on a fascinating tour of the vibrant web of nature outside our back door—where animals and plants perceive and communicate using marvelous sensory abilities we are only beginning to understand.
Organized into chapters investigating each of their five senses, Lawson’s exploration reveals a remarkable world of interdependent creatures with amazing capabilities.
About the Author
In addition to WIldscape, Nancy Lawson is the author of The Humane Gardener: Nurturing a Backyard Habitat for Wildlife, a habitat consultant, and a national speaker on garden ecology. She founded Humane Gardener to pioneer creative planting strategies and other animal-friendly landscaping methods.
A Turtle In Nancy Lawson’s Garden
The Pandora Myth
The Ancient Greek myth of Pandora is a cautionary tale about the dangers of female curiosity—curiosity that unleashes all the ills that plague Man.
But what if that curiosity is actually a strength? One that expresses the power of female creativity? That’s a theme explored in Susan Stokes Chapman’s novel Pandora.
A historical novel with touches of Gothic horror, good old-fashioned mystery and a fascinating look at the illegal trade in antiquities in London in 1799, Pandora is a cinematic and compelling work of fiction, where the discovery of a mysterious ancient Greek vase sets in motion conspiracies, revelations, and romance.
Susan Stokes-Chapman is a writer based in North Wales. Pandora was first published in the UK in January 2022 and became an instant #1 bestseller. It came out in the US in January from Harper Perennial.
The post The Five Senses of the Wildscape with Nancy Lawson & A Mystery about Pandora’s Box with Susan Stokes Chapman appeared first on Writer's Voice.
Oh, those pesky beavers, Interfering with our property values! Right?
Wrong. We talk with Leila Philip about beavers, a keystone species that we need to protect as we face the challenges of climate chaos. Her book is Beaver Land: How One Weird Rodent Made America.
Then, we missed it last week: the Day of Transgender Visibility. But with all the vicious rightwing attacks on transgender people and the fascist laws being passed against them, we thought “better late than never.”
So, we bring you a piece from our archives that we first aired in 2019. It’s an excerpt from our interview with Mimi LeMay about her memoir What We Will Become. It’s about how her family learned to come to terms with the fact that their young child was transgender—and how they came to support him.
Writers Voice— in depth conversation with writers of all genres, on the air since 2004.Like us on Facebook at Writers Voice with Francesca Rheannon, on Instagram @WritersVoicePodcast or find us on Twitter @WritersVoice.Love Writer’s Voice? Please rate us on your podcast app. It really helps to get the word out about our show.April Is Earth Month
Today, we begin our programming for
Earth Month—because one day, Earth Day, is really not enough to celebrate this miraculous only world we’ve got. We’ll be featuring segments on the environment for the rest of April.
Beaver Land
We kick Earth Month off with Leila Philip’s wonderful book Beaver Land. An NPR Science Friday Book Club Selection and New York Times Editors’ Choice, Beaver Land is a fascinating exploration of one of the most important animals we hardly ever think of.
Philip tells us how beavers engineered the landscape of North America. When they were nearly extirpated, we lost their “ecosystem services” to our detriment. And now, as we face the devastating impacts of climate chaos, beavers can play a key role in making us more resilient.
But isn’t it the height of narcissism to always think about the worth of other animals from the point of view of what they can do for us? One of the key pleasures of reading Beaver Land is the wonderment and awe the reader feels in learning about this magnificent creature.
Beavers have shaped the land for good. We can learn a mighty lesson about being good stewards of our planet from them.
About The Author
Leila Philip is an American writer, poet and educator. She is the author of award-winning books of nonfiction which have received glowing national reviews. In addition to Beaverland, her books include: A Family Place: A Hudson Valley Farm, Three Centuries, Five Wars, One Family, Hidden Dialogue: A Discussion Between Women in Japan and the United States, The Road Through Miyama) and one collection of poetry (Water Rising).
Watch the trailer for The Beaver Believers
Celebrating Transgender People
150 bills against transgender people are being considered in state legislatures across the country. This is an unprecedented number—but even one bill is too much.
Back in 2019, when we interviewed Mimi LeMay about her book What We Will Become, it seemed like transgender people were finally beginning to get the respect and love they deserve.
Her son Jacob knew he was a boy from the age of three, but his parents didn’t accept that fact until he was five. It hurts the heart to think what he must be going through now as he witnesses the mean-spirited bigotry and hatred driving so many Republicans as they try to take away his freedom to be himself.
LeMay’s memoir unfolds in two strands—one about her getting free of her upbringing in a conservative Orthodox Jewish family and the other about her son Jacob, and his journey from being LeMay’s daughter, Em to becoming accepted as a transgender boy. This excerpt is about Jacob’s journey.
The post The Wonders of Beavers: Leila Philip, BEAVER LAND plus Transgender Appreciation Day: Mimi LeMay, WHAT WE WILL BECOME appeared first on Writer's Voice.
We talk with Elsa Panciroli about her book, BEASTS BEFORE US: The Untold Story of Mammal Origins and Evolution. Delving into the fascinating and little-known history of mammal evolution, she provides a fascinating and uplifting look at the resilience of life on this planet, through the lens of how mammals came to be.
Then, motivated by the pandemic lockdown, many people renewed a gardening tradition that was all the rage during WWII, the Victory garden. We kick off the gardening season talking with gardening book author Maggie Stuckey about The Container Victory Garden: A Beginners Guide To Growing Your Own Groceries.
Writers Voice— in depth conversation with writers of all genres, on the air since 2004.Like us on Facebook at Writers Voice with Francesca Rheannon, on Instagram @WritersVoicePodcast or find us on Twitter @WritersVoice. Love Writer’s Voice? Please rate us on your podcast app. It really helps to get the word out about our show.Keywords: mammal evolution, paleontology, Elsa Panciroli, Beasts Before Us, University of Oxford, research fellow, science writers, container gardening, victory gardens, Maggie Stuckey, vegetable gardening
When Did Mammals Get Their Start?
Mammals like us got our start when the dinosaurs went extinct 66 million years ago, right?
No, actually. We began w-a-a-y before that, when the Earth had only one continent and centipedes the size of cars roamed the land. It was like an alien planet. Those creatures are long extinct, but mammals rebounded to spread throughout the globe.
A New Understanding of Extinction
Why is this important? Because, as we are now in the midst of the Sixth mass extinction event in the Earth’s history, we can learn a whole lot about life, extinction and regeneration from the 350 million-year-long mammal lineage we come from.
Elsa Panciroli’s book Beasts Before Us provides a fascinating and uplifting look at the resilience of life on this planet, through the lens of how mammals came to be. It reframes the narrative of our mammalian ancestors and provides a counterpoint to the stereotypes of mighty dinosaur overlords and cowering little mammals. It turns out the earliest mammals weren’t just precursors, they were pioneers.
About the Author
Elsa Panciroli is a Scottish palaeontologist who studies the evolution and ecology of extinct animals. She is a researcher based at the University of Oxford and associate researcher at the National Museums of Scotland.
Read an excerpt from Beasts Before Us
Container Gardening
Gardening season is heating up. Seedlings are sitting in home greenhouses and some are already in their beds — and containers. Some people rely on containers for home-grown veggies for convenient access and protection from pests. But many other folks rely on them for lack of space.
Container Gardening is Tricky
But gardening in containers can be tricky: they can get too little or too much water and it’s best to get varieties that thrive in small spaces.
Maggie Stuckey’s new book The Container Victory Garden is a great guide for beginners. It also recounts the history of Victory Gardens, from their start in WWI to their flourishing in WWII, with stories about some of those gardeners of old.
About The Author
Maggie Stuckey is the author of numerous books about gardening, including Gardening From the Ground Up and The Complete Herb Book.
The post Elsa Panciroli on mammal evolution, BEASTS BEFORE US & gardening author Maggie Stuckey, THE CONTAINER VICTORY GARDEN appeared first on Writer's Voice.
Why does the Democratic Party struggle so much to win elections by comfortable margins (when it isn’t losing them) despite the fact that the Republicans are so extreme?
Could there be a hint in the fact that so many ordinary Americans keep losing ground economically, no matter who holds the reins of power? Clearly, the myth of the American Dream isn’t working.
In this episode, we talk first with Ed Burmila about his book, Chaotic Neutral: How the Democrats Lost Their Soul in the Center. Then, Alissa Quart of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project tells us about her just released new book, Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves from the American Dream.
Writers Voice— in depth conversation with writers of all genres, on the air since 2004.Like us on Facebook at Writers Voice with Francesca Rheannon, on Instagram @WritersVoicePodcast or find us on Twitter @WritersVoice.And don’t forget to subscribe to Writer’s Voice and leave us a review on your favorite podcast platform.Have The Democrats Lost Their Soul?
In Chaotic Neutral, Burmila examines the Democratic Party’s shift towards the political center-right over the past three decades and argues that this has come at a great cost, both to the party and the country.
He makes the case that the party has lost its soul and its ability to effectively represent its constituents, suggesting that it’s time for a new approach.
The American Dream Doesn’t Work Anymore (it never did)
The American Dream says, anyone can go from rags to riches by pulling themselves up by their bootstraps. It’s a cruel myth that Alissa Quart of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project explodes in her new book, Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves from the American Dream.
In Bootstrapped, Quart explores the ways in which the “American Dream” has been sold to us as a means of achieving success and happiness, but has instead created a culture of overwork, burnout, and inequality. She provides practical solutions for breaking free from this cycle and creating a new American Dream based not on “rugged individualism” but on social solidarity.
In this episode, we dive deep into these two important books and have a thought-provoking discussion about the state of American politics and culture.
About the Authors
Ed Burmila has written for the Nation magazine and the Washington Post and hosts the podcast Mass for Shut-ins.
In addition to Bootstrapped, Alissa Quart is the author of four other nonfiction books, including Squeezed: Why Our Families Can’t Afford America. She is the Executive Director of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project and the author of two books of poetry, Thoughts and Prayers and Monetized.
The post How The Democrats Lost Their Soul & The End of the American Dream: Ed Burmila & Alissa Quart appeared first on Writer's Voice.
We talk with Fintan O’Toole about his scathing — and tender — personal history of modern Ireland, We Don’t Know Ourselves. Then we hear Seamus Heaney reading a poem and a rare recording of storyteller Susan Porter reading from the Irish legend of Cuchulain.
Writers Voice— in depth conversation with writers of all genres, on the air since 2004.Like us on Facebook at Writers Voice with Francesca Rheannon, on Instagram @WritersVoicePodcast or find us on Twitter @WritersVoice.Love Writer’s Voice? Please rate us on your podcast app. It really helps to get the word out about our show.A Personal History of Modern Ireland
As a journalist and critic for the Irish Times since 1988, Fintan O’Toole has had a front row seat on Ireland’s cultural, political and economic transformation from European backwater to center of global business.
His bestselling book, We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History Of Modern Ireland, is unsparing in its critique of those who ruled the country. But it’s a critique founded on a profound love for his long-beleaguered compatriots. And O’Toole draws a cautionary lesson for us here in the US, as the lines separating Church and State become ever more eroded.
The Irish Theocracy
When Fintan O’Toole was born in 1958, Ireland was perhaps the poorest country in Europe. Most of its people scrabbled out a meagre living on the land. The country’s main export, aside from cattle, was its own youth; facing bleak prospects at home, young people fled abroad to England, America and elsewhere in droves.
“Religion and politics are pretty important things in and of themselves, but when you fuse them into a single identity, it actually becomes pretty toxic.” — Fintan O’Toole
Ireland was also in the grip of what can only be described as a theocracy. The Catholic Church ruled over the most intimate aspects of people’s lives: the family, reproduction, sexuality, education and healthcare. Anything that violated the strict dictates of the Church was severely punished — except, of course, for the pedophilia rampant among the priesthood, which was ignored. Corruption reigned in both Church and State.
The Irish Tiger
Now Ireland is a global center for the technology and pharmaceutical industries. Abortion and gay marriage are legal. The gender apartheid that reigned of old has been overturned. Much has changed, although the Irish Tiger’s neoliberalism hasn’t put an end to corruption—it’s just altered the playing fields.
About The Author
Fintan O’Toole is a columnist for the Irish Times and teaches at Princeton University. He was drama critic for the New York Daily News, as well as the Irish Times, and is a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books.
A New York Times Bestseller, We Don’t Know Ourselves was named among the 10 best books of 2022. It’s now out in paperback from W.W. Norton.
Seamus Heaney’s Poem “Whatever You Say, Say Nothing”
Susan Porter, the Story of Cuchulain
During the 1960s hippie heyday of Big Sur, California, the storyteller Susan Porter recorded an album of Stories from Irish Mythology. Francesca’s father, Guido Teunissen, lived on Porter’s property in a house on a promontory overlooking the Pacific Ocean. She has in her possession a cassette tape of Porter’s album, sent to her by her father. We hear a clip from the story of Cuchulain, read by Porter. The audio quality is faded — but that only adds to it air of mystery.
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We talk with historian Felicia Kornbluh about her book, A Woman’s Life Is a Human Life: My Mother, Our Neighbor, and the Journey from Reproductive Rights to Reproductive Justice.
Then we re-air a clip from our conversation with Dolen Perkins-Valdez about the famous reproductive justice case that inspired her novel Take My Hand.
Writers Voice— in depth conversation with writers of all genres, on the air since 2004.Like us on Facebook at Writers Voice with Francesca Rheannon, on Instagram @WritersVoicePodcast or find us on Twitter @WritersVoice.Love Writer’s Voice? Please rate us on your podcast app. It really helps to get the word out about our show.Key words: International Women’s Day, reproductive rights, reproductive justice, abortion rights, reproductive choice, Roe V. Wade, women’s history month, podcast
Introduction
This week’s episode celebrates International Women’s Day. It’s the first March 8 since the US Supreme Court overturned Roe V. Wade, relegating women instantly to the status of second class citizens without control over their reproductive choices. Choice still exists in those states that protect it—but for how long? A decision could come soon banning access to abortion medication throughout the land.
The fight continues: on March 7, five women sued the state of Texas after being denied medically necessary abortions, asserting the state’s draconian abortion ban threatens the lives and health of pregnant people.
Reproductive Rights, Reproductive Justice
We center our episode on the fight for reproductive choice. Our first guest is Felicia Kornbluh. Her book, A Woman’s Life Is A Human Life, chronicles the spell-binding story of how the first law legalizing abortion in the US was passed—in New York in 1970.
But it also tells a second parallel story, the fight for reproductive justice, protecting poor women against involuntary sterilization.
Both stories touched Kornbluh personally. Her mother, Beatrice Kornbluh-Braun, was prominent in the fight for abortion rights; her neighbor, Dr. Helen Rodriguez-Trias, who lived across the hall in her childhood home in a New York apartment building, was instrumental in the fight against involuntary sterilization of poor women of color.
About the Author
Felicia Kornbluh is Professor of History and Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at the University of Vermont. She’s the author of two previous books, The Battle for Welfare Rights and Ensuring Poverty: Welfare Reform in Feminist Perspective. She has also served as a board member for Planned Parenthood.
Listen to an Excerpt from A Woman’s Life Is a Human Life
(Music Credit: Abortion Song by The New Haven Women’s Liberation Rock Band from the album Papa, Don’t Lay That Shit On Me, ℗ 2005 Rounder Records. Distributed by Concord.)
Reproductive Justice: the Relf Sisters Case
In her interview, Felicia Kornbluh spoke about the pivotal case for reproductive justice in the US, Relf v. Weinberger, which resulted in a prohibition against the use of federal funds for involuntary sterilization.
Last September, we spoke with Dolen Perkins Valdez, whose novel Take My Hand was based on that case. We play an excerpt from that interview. Listen to the whole interview here.
The post Celebrating Reproductive Choice: Felicia Kornbluh, A WOMAN’S LIFE IS A HUMAN LIFE & Dolen Perkins-Valdez, TAKE MY HAND appeared first on Writer's Voice.
We talk with John de Graaf about his new film, Stewart Udall, The Politics of Beauty. It takes an in-depth look at the life and work of Stewart Udall, a man who played a pivotal role in shaping America’s conservation and environmental policies.
Then we listen back to our 2007 interview with Les Leopold about his biography of labor leader and environmentalist Tony Mazzochi.
Key Words: environment, conservation, labor, OSHA, biography, documentary film
Writers Voice— in depth conversation with writers of all genres, on the air since 2004.Like us on Facebook at Writers Voice with Francesca Rheannon, on Instagram @WritersVoicePodcast or find us on Twitter @WritersVoice.Love Writer’s Voice? Please rate us on your podcast app. It really helps to get the word out about our show.Background:
Stewart Udall served as the Secretary of the Interior under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson from 1961 to 1969. During his time in office, he helped create national parks, protected wilderness areas, and advocated for conservation efforts. Udall was instrumental in passing important environmental legislation, such as the Wilderness Act of 1964 and the Land and Water Conservation Fund Act of 1965.
Summary of the Film:
John de Graaf’s film Stewart Udall, The Politics of Beauty explores Udall’s life and career, beginning with his childhood in Arizona and continuing through his time as Secretary of the Interior. The film features interviews with Udall’s family members, friends, and colleagues, as well as environmental activists and tribal members who worked with Udall on conservation efforts and the fight for justice for Navajo uranium miners. The film also delves into Udall’s personal life, including his marriage to Lee Udall, who was an environmental activist in her own right.
Discussion:
Director John de Graaf talks about his inspiration for making the film and shares some of the insights he gained while researching Udall’s life and career. We also discuss Udall’s impact on America’s conservation and environmental policies, and how his legacy continues to influence the conversation around these issues today.
Udall Trailer 2:21 from Greg Davis on Vimeo.
Tony Mazzochi, Labor Leader and Environmentalist
During our first segment today, mention is made of the great labor leader and environmentalist Tony Mazzochi.
Back in 2007, Writer’s Voice spoke with Les Leopold about his wonderful biography of Mazzochi, The Man Who Hated Work And Loved Labor. We re-air an extended excerpt from that interview. You can listen to the entire conversation here.
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To celebrate Black History Month, we re-air our 2015 interview with acclaimed biographer James McGrath Morris about his biography, Eye on The Struggle: Ethel Payne, First Lady Of The Black Press.
Description
Black History Month honors the vital contributions made by African Americans throughout history, including the important role they played in the civil rights movement.
One of the unsung heroes of this movement was Ethel Payne. In this special podcast episode, acclaimed biographer James McGrath Morris discusses his biography of Payne, Eye on the Struggle, and sheds light on her remarkable life and legacy.
Through Morris’s captivating storytelling, listeners can gain a deeper understanding of the crucial role of the black press in the civil rights movement and the ongoing fight for equality.
Keywords: Black History Month, Ethel Payne, First Lady of the Black Press, civil rights movement, James McGrath Morris, biography, Eye on the Struggle, Washington Press Corps, White House Press Corps, Chicago Defender, Martin Luther King Jr., Emmet Till, McCarthyism, Pulitzer.
Introduction
The great civil rights struggles of the mid-twentieth century, with their emphasis on non-violent political action, depended crucially on press coverage to gain impact and, ultimately, success.
But their stories may have gone untold were it not for newspapers like the Chicago Defender and other organs of the black press. They broke the stories that the white mainstream media picked up and disseminated to a wider audience. Yet few in that wider audience even knew of the existence of the black press.
First Lady of the Black Press, Ethel Payne
Perhaps no reporter was more important Ethel Payne, star reporter and Washington Press Corps correspondent for the Chicago Defender, the black press’ paper of record from the years of the Great Migration through the civil rights movement.
Dubbed “the First Lady of the black press,” she told the world about a young leader emerging out of the civil rights movement in Atlanta named Martin Luther King, Jr. She told the story of Emmet Till’s mother, who had to view the badly mutilated body of her 14 year old son after the brutal beating that took his life. She hammered a nail into the coffin of McCarthyism when she reported on the persecution of a lowly African-American Pentagon employee absurdly accused on being a Communist spy.
The first African American woman to be part of the White House Press Corps, she courageously buttonholed presidents with searching questions about racial prejudice and civil rights. Unlike many of her colleagues then and now, she was no mere stenographer but held the powerful to account for their policies and views.
James McGrath Morris Brings Payne’s Biography To Life
Yet few Americans have ever heard of Ethel Payne, much less understood the giant role she played in reporting the story of civil rights in America. James McGrath’s spellbinding biography of Payne, Eye on the Struggle: Ethel Payne, the First Lady of the Black Press, corrects the oversight, bringing Payne’s story to light within the context of her history-making times.
In addition to Eye on the Struggle, James McGrath Morris is the author of the acclaimed biography Pulitzer: A Life in Politics, Print, and Power and two other books. He produced the following video clip about Payne.
The post Celebrating Black History Month: Interview with Biographer James McGrath Morris on Ethel Payne, First Lady of the Black Press appeared first on Writer's Voice.
We speak with Chetna Maroo about her debut novel, Western Lane. It’s a beautifully written coming of age story about a young girl and her British Indian family who are trying to come to terms with the recent death of the family matriarch.
Then, for Black History Month, we hear my 2008 interview with Ta-Nahisi Coates about his first book, The Beautiful Struggle: Between the World and Me.
Writers Voice— in depth conversation with writers of all genres, on the air since 2004.Like us on Facebook at Writers Voice with Francesca Rheannon, on Instagram @WritersVoicePodcast or find us on Twitter @WritersVoice.Love Writer’s Voice? Please rate us on your podcast app. It really helps to get the word out about our show.Chetna Maroo
Chetna Maroo’s debut novel Western Lane is about sisterhood, family and recovery from loss.
After her mother’s death, 11-year old Gopi and her father bond on the squash court, where she discovers her love of the game and her own strength and capacity for renewal. Her older sisters support her as she moves beyond traditional expectations for a girl in her British Indian family.
The tale is told in Maroo’s deeply evocative prose, disciplined and precise to achieve for the reader an extraordinary intimacy with the characters.
Chetna Maroo’s stories have appeared in anthologies and literary magazines. She won the 2022 Plimpton Prize for Fiction.
Ta-Nahisi Coates
Black History Month always affords a great opportunity to rummage around in the Writer’s Voice archives for good material to re-air.
Ta Nahisi Coates on “respect”:
On the news, you know, whenever you hear about people talking about Black youth and their “respect killings” — you know, somebody got shot over respect — people look at these folks like they’re crazy. In fact, respect is what people lean on when they have nothing else. It’s just true of everyone. Now, I’m not defending that, obviously. But if you feel like you have nothing else to live with, that’s all you got when your back is to the wall.
This time, we go way back to 2008 to a terrific interview Ta-Nahisi Coates gave Writer’s Voice after he’d just published his first book, The Beautiful Struggle. In the intervening years, he’s gone on to become one of the most celebrated contemporary figures for his writings on race in America.
The post Grief, Sisterhood & Becoming an Athlete: Chetna Maroo, WESTERN LANE & Black History Month: Ta-Nahisi Coates, THE BEAUTIFUL STRUGGLE appeared first on Writer's Voice.
We talk with V, formerly known as Eve Ensler about her collection of essays and poems, Reckoning.
Then in honor of Black History Month, we listen back to my 2019 interview with DaMaris Hill about her narrative in verse, A Bound Woman Is A Dangerous Thing: The Incarceration Of African-American Women From Harriet Tubman To Sandra Bland.
Writers Voice— in depth conversation with writers of all genres, on the air since 2004.Like us on Facebook at Writers Voice with Francesca Rheannon, on Instagram @WritersVoicePodcast or find us on Twitter @WritersVoice.Love Writer’s Voice? Please rate us on your podcast app. It really helps to get the word out about our show.
I sometimes wonder, is it harder to go through violence or to witness violence? Is it harder to see those that you love go through a terrible experience or to actually go through it yourself? I think sometimes they’re equally painful, but I think I’ve also had this incredible privilege and honor to travel this world and to sit with women across this planet who told me their stories, shared their deepest secrets with me, opened their hearts to me, so I could be part of the listening part of the receiving of those stories. And you know, at times it’s been very, very hard. But I also feel I’ve also been privy to those women transforming that pain into so much beauty, so much wisdom, gardens and healings and organizations and struggle that has grown into this massive global movement.
V
When Eve Ensler first put on her play The Vagina Monologues, she set off a reckoning on the part of women all over the world with the violence and oppression that they had experienced at the hands of a patriarchal system.
She went on to meet with women victims of the violence of war—in Kosovo, Congo and elsewhere—and hear their stories of horrific abuse. But also to witness their courage and their creation of communities of resilience.
Then Ensler came to a reckoning of her own—with the horrific abuse she had suffered as a child as the hands of her father. We spoke with her about her book about that personal reckoning, The Apology, in 2019.
Now, she’s renamed herself “V”—her “freedom name”, as she calls it— and she’s come out with Reckoning, a powerful collection of writings that sum up the personal and political reckonings with patriarchy she has been making throughout her long career.
Listen to our 2019 interview with V about The Apology
DaMaris Hill
Back in 2019, we spoke with poet and author DaMaris Hill about her narrative in verse, A Bound Woman Is A Dangerous Thing: The Incarceration Of African-American Women From Harriet Tubman To Sandra Bland. In honor of Black History Month, we replay that interview.
The post How To Reckon With Patriarchy: V, RECKONING & Black History Month: DaMaris Hill, A BOUND WOMAN IS A DANGEROUS THING appeared first on Writer's Voice.
We talk with Korean American writer Heinz Insu Fenkl about his autobiographical novel Skull Water. It’s about his youth in Korea as the son of a Korean mother and German-American father, the trauma of war and the dizzying transformation of Korea from the old ways to modern life.
Then, jelly fish, bugs and garbage, oh my! We talk with marine scientist Dr. Stephanie Wear about the importance—and the joys — of “eating ugly.” She hosts the new documentary series Eating Ugly, on Discovery+.
Writers Voice— in depth conversation with writers of all genres, on the air since 2004.Like us on Facebook at Writers Voice with Francesca Rheannon, on Instagram @WritersVoicePodcast or find us on Twitter @WritersVoice.Love Writer’s Voice? Please rate us on your podcast app. It really helps to get the word out about our show.Heinz Insu Fenkl
Growing up in a military family as the son of a Korean mother and German-American father, Heinz Insu Fenkl got both an insider’s and an outsider’s view of post-war South Korea.
The insider part came from his closeness to his Korean family, especially his Big Uncle, a geomancer and failed scholar. From his uncle and other relatives, he imbibed the stories and legends of old Korea. He also heard tell of the terrible traumas of the Korean war. These stories form one thread of the book that takes place in 1950.
The outsider part came from being a mixed race kid in high school, who found his only friends among a group of other mixed race kids like himself. Their adventures—and misadventures—form the coming-of-age story that forms the other thread of the book, that follows his character Insu in the year 1974.
Heinz Insu Fenkl teaches creative writing and Asian studies at the State University of New York, New Paltz. His previous novel Memories of My Ghost Brother was named a PEN/Hemingway Award finalist.
Read the New Yorker story Five Arrows based on an excerpt from Skull Water
Dr. Stephanie Wear
More that 30% of food is wasted globally—and as much as 50% in the US. That comes to about 1.4 billion tons of food worldwide, enough to feed 2 billion people. Each year, the food the US wastes emits as much greenhouse gases as 42 coal-fired power plants.
So how to cut down on waste? One way, according to Dr. Stephanie Wear, is to “eat ugly.” That’s the title of a new Discovery + series she hosts.
The series highlights groundbreaking food pioneers who are already making important and fascinating progress in changing the way we eat, from jelly fish to bugs and more.
Dr. Stephanie Wear works for Conservation International. “Eat Ugly” is presented by The Nature Conservancy, and produced by Tandem Stills + Motion, Inc. in partnership with Passion Pictures. It streams on Discovery +.
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We talk with Ray Nayler about his novel of speculative fiction, The Mountain In The Sea. It was named by Slate Book Review as one of the Best Books of 2022.
Then, we remember Victor Navasky, the long time editor of the Nation magazine. He died January 24 at the age of 90. We listen back to my 2006 interview with him about his memoir, A Matter of Opinion.
Writers Voice— in depth conversation with writers of all genres, on the air since 2004.Like us on Facebook at Writers Voice with Francesca Rheannon, on Instagram @WritersVoicePodcast or find us on Twitter @WritersVoice.Love Writer’s Voice? Please rate us on your podcast app. It really helps to get the word out about our show.Ray Nayler
We’ve all heard the classic question, is there other intelligent life in the Universe? But what about other intelligent life right here on Earth?
Of course, we are already learning about the many forms of intelligence among the other animals we share our world with, from ants to whales. And some say plants also have consciousness and intelligence.
But we’re really asking: is there any other species that matches us in complexity of thought and creativity? Could we be on the brink of inventing that species with the development of advanced Artificial Intelligence? And how would we respond to other intelligences, whether natural or human-made?
Ray Nayler explores these questions In his brilliant and beautifully written novel of speculative fiction, The Mountain In The Sea.
In a world where ocean life is under constant threat of extinction from human activity, a species of octopus with highly evolved intelligence— Octopus Sapiens, if you will — is discovered. One of the discoverers is the world’s only fully aware and self-conscious android, Evrim, a nonbinary being banished to an island marine refuge in the Con Dao peninsula of Vietnam after being rejected by the rest of humanity.
Nayler’s novel questions society’s assumptions about human superiority and the right to dominate other species. It urges us to understand that we are connected to all the life around us, neither above or below, but in equal relationship to it.
Ray Nayler’s critically acclaimed short fiction has appeared in many magazines and anthologies, including The Very Best of the Best: 35 Years of The Year’s Best Science Fiction. He has worked in the Foreign Service and the Peace Corps, including a stint as Environment, Science, Technology, and Health Officer at the U.S. consulate in Ho Chi Minh City. He currently serves as the international advisor to the Office of National Marine Sanctuaries at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The Mountain and the Sea is his first full-length novel.
Read more about Ray Nayler and his work
Victor Navasky
Long time Nation magazine editor Victor Navasky died January 24 at the age of 90. Navasky came to The Nation as editor in 1978, and was made publisher and general partner in 1995. He chaired the Columbia Journalism Review and was Director of the George Delacorte Center for Magazine Journalism.
He was an editor for the New York Times Magazine, and a columnist for the Times’ Book Review. His book Naming Names won the National Book Award in 1982.
We spoke with him in 2006 about his book, A Matter of Opinion. It’s a passionate, funny look at his life in journalism and at the field of magazine journalism in general.
The post Ray Nayler, THE MOUNTAIN AND THE SEA & Victor Navasky Remembered appeared first on Writer's Voice.
A landmark win under Pennsylvania’s Green Amendment to its constitution led Maya van Rossum to imagine much, much more. We talk with her about her book The Green Amendment: The Peoples Fight For A Clean, Safe, And Healthy Environment.
Then, in honor of Martin Luther King’s birthday this week, we re-air our 2018 interview with David Margolick about his book The Promise and the Dream. It’s about the connection between Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bobby Kennedy in the fight for civil rights.
Writers Voice— in depth conversation with writers of all genres, on the air since 2004.Like us on Facebook at Writers Voice with Francesca Rheannon, on Instagram @WritersVoicePodcast or find us on Twitter @WritersVoice. Find Francesca atLove Writer’s Voice? Please rate us on your podcast app. It really helps to get the word out about our show.Maya K. Van Rossum
On November 2, 2021, New Yorkers voted to amend the State’s constitution to enshrine into law each person’s “right to clean air and water, and a healthful environment.”
With the adoption of this Green amendment, New York became the third state in the nation to include environmental rights in its Bill of Rights, following Pennsylvania (1971) and Montana (1972.)
The movement to get a Green Amendment into New York’s constitution was spearheaded by the grassroots organization, Green Amendments For the Generations, founded by Maya K. van Rossum. The group is working to secure constitutional recognition and protection of environmental rights in every state and ultimately at the federal level.
Van Rossum writes about the Green Amendment movement in her book, The Green Amendment: The Peoples Fight For A Clean, Safe, And Healthy Environment.
Learn more about Green Amendments For the Generations
David Margolick on Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bobby Kennedy
We honor Dr. King’s birthday by re-playing a long segment from our 2018 interview with David Margolick about his book The Promise and the Dream.
It’s about a story that lay hidden until Margolick uncovered it: the relationship between Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bobby Kennedy and the crucial role that relationship payed in the passage of civil rights legislation in the US.
Listen to the the entire interview here
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We remember Russell Banks, who passed away on January 7 at the age of 82. We last spoke with him in 2016, about his memoir Voyager, and re-air that interview today.
But first, we talk with Danielle Clode, award-winning natural history writer, about her new book Koala: A Natural History and an Uncertain Future.
Writers Voice— in depth conversation with writers of all genres, on the air since 2004.Like us on Facebook at Writers Voice with Francesca Rheannon, on Instagram @WritersVoicePodcast or find us on Twitter @WritersVoice.Love Writer’s Voice? Please rate us on your podcast app. It really helps to get the word out about our show.Danielle Klode
The years 2019 and 2020 saw perhaps the worse fire season in Australia yet. The mega fires were devastating not only for human communities but for Australia’s wildlife. The toll was unimaginable. Among its victims, were many members of that species of charismatic cuteness: the koala. The flames raged across their native eucalyptus forests, devastating their habitat.
Yet koalas are also incredibly resilient. During their long presence on Planet Earth, they’ve come through previous eras of climate chaos, rebounding from population crashes to thrive again. It’s a fascinating story that holds lessons not only for the koala, but also for all the other species it shares the planet with — including us.
Danielle Clode examines that story in her new book Koala: A Natural History and an Uncertain Future. She’s an award winning author of numerous non-fiction books. Her writing includes natural history, essays, science-writing, historical fiction and best-selling children’s books as well as documentaries.
Francesca Remembers Russell Banks
I was saddened to hear that Russell Banks passed away on January 7. When I first came upon his novels—I think The Sweet Hereafter was the first — I was struck that he delved so sensitively into the lives of the working class — a demographic that is all too often overlooked in the catalogs of the major publishing houses.
Later, I had the privilege to interview him about his novels Reserve and Lost Memory of Skin, his collection of short stories, A Permanent Member of the Family, and finally his memoir Voyager.
In memory of his passing, we re-play my conversation with Russell Banks about that memoir.
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Why is it so hard to get the hair-on-fire action on climate we need to deal with the crisis? Could it have something to do with our brains? We talk with Dr. Ann-Christine Duhaime about her book, Minding The Climate: How Neuroscience Can Help Solve Our Environmental Crisis.
Then, we talk with one climate activist who’s putting Duhaime’s lessons on how to change minds about the crisis to work: Darr Reilly, co-founder of the Carbon Crew Project.
Writers Voice— in depth conversation with writers of all genres, on the air since 2004.Like us on Facebook at Writers Voice with Francesca Rheannon, on Instagram @WritersVoicePodcast or find us on Twitter @WritersVoice. Find Francesca at mastodon.social[at]FRheannon.Love Writer’s Voice? Please rate us on your podcast app. It really helps to get the word out about our show.Ann-Christine Duhaime
As we produce this show, a bomb cyclone is bearing down on the west coast—the second in two weeks. Buffalo New York is digging out of its most deadly blizzard, ever. Meanwhile carbon pollution in the atmosphere is spiking to record levels and Europe is basking in record January heat—climatologists say it’s an “extreme event” unlike anything in European history.
The steady drumbeat of climate catastrophe is clamoring in our ears.
But how many people are really listening? Listening in a way to make the changes we need to make in time to survive?
Why aren’t they listening–and is there anything we can do to change that?
Neuroscientist Dr. Ann-Christine Duhaime tackles this question in her book, Minding The Climate. She explores how our long evolution as a species has shaped our brains to respond to immediate threats, but to miss or discount ones that play out over the long term.
But she also shows that the brain’s enormous capacity for change is reason for hope. By understanding both the barriers and the spurs to change, we can move the needle on climate action.
Read an excerpt from Minding The Climate
Darr Reilly, Carbon Crew Project
When Francesca read Ann-Christine Duhaime’s book Minding the Climate, she immediately thought of her friend Darr Reilly. She’s an advocate and practitioner of Drawdown, the climate action movement developed by Paul Hawken. It promotes 100 solutions to the climate crisis that ordinary people can engage in.
Growing out of her work with Drawdown, Reilly co-founded the Carbon Crew Project. It’s a program geared for small groups of friends and neighbors to lessen their carbon footprint, step by step.
Resources mentioned by Darr Reilly:
Carbon Crew Project
Pachamama Alliance
The True Cost movie
2040 Regenerators
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It’s the last week of December 2022. The days are already starting to get longer. A great time to start thinking about next year’s garden. And, with next year around the corner, a good time to look back at some of our favorite interviews of 2022.
Today, we talk with garden columnist Jeff Lowenfells about his book, Teaming with Bacteria. It’s the fourth in his groundbreaking series about building the soil microbiome to create a flourishing soil food web.
Then we hear excerpts from our 2022 interviews with Bill McKibben, Mohsin Hamid and Keri Blakinger.
Writers Voice— in depth conversation with writers of all genres, on the air since 2004.Like us on Facebook at Writers Voice with Francesca Rheannon, on Instagram @WritersVoicePodcast or find us on Twitter @WritersVoice.Love Writer’s Voice? Please rate us on your podcast app. It really helps to get the word out about our show.Jeff Lowenfells
If we don’t do anything about it, some say, we have about sixty years left of soil. And without soil, we don’t have food, at least not enough to feed the world. The remedy? Regenerative agriculture that builds the soil by using nature’s own methods.
Jeff Lowenfels has been writing about gardening for over 45 years. He writes the column Alaska Gardening and Growing for the Anchorage Daily News. But perhaps his greatest contribution to gardening is his series on the soil food web or soil microbiome.
He began in 2010 with Teaming with Microbes, followed by Teaming With Nutrients. Teaming With Fungi, and now Teaming with Bacteria.
Jeff Lowenfels is a former president of the Garden Writers Association; he was inducted into the organization’s Hall of Fame in 2005
He Wrote a Gardening Column. He Ended Up Documenting Climate Change
Best of 2022
It’s that time of year to look back at 2022 before we leave to head to the New Year. This was one of our best years for interviews. We spoke with Nobel laureate for literature Abdulrazak Gurnah, NoViolet Bulawayo, whose novel Glory was shortlisted for the Booker prize, and presidential candidate Marianne Williamson, among many other terrific conversations.
So it was tough to choose among them. Today we’ll hear excerpts from three of our favorite interviews. The full list with links to the interviews is below.
Bill McKibben
We spoke with world-renowned climate protector Bill McKibben about his wonderful memoir The Flag, The Cross And The Station Wagon: A Graying American Looks Back at His Suburban Boyhood and Wonders What The Hell Happened.
Listen to the full episode
Mohsin Hamid
We talked with Hamid about his brilliant and thought-provoking novel, The Last White Man.
Listen to the full episode
Keri Blakinger
Finally, we hear an excerpt from my interview with Keri Blakinger about her memoir, Corrections In Ink.
Listen to the full episode
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Francesca Rheannon reads her story “The Food Philosophe.” It’s about a Winter Solstice feast in Provence that led to some delicious life lessons.
Writers Voice— in depth conversation with writers of all genres, on the air since 2004.Like us on Facebook at Writers Voice with Francesca Rheannon, on Instagram @WritersVoicePodcast or find us on twitter @WritersVoice.Love Writer’s Voice? Please rate us on your podcast app. It really helps to get the word out about our show.
And check out our previous episode here:
The Food Philosophe by Francesca Rheannon
Twenty years ago, Francesca Rheannon spent several months living in southern France. Soon after her arrival in the Fall of 2001, she became good friends with a couple living in the old Roman town of Apt. She had been introduced to them — Michel, a chef, and his wife, Marie-Jo — by her friend, the writer Fabienne Pasquet.
On December 21, Marie Jo and Michel threw a dinner party to celebrate the Winter Solstice. The food was divine, the wine likewise, and the company convivial — and Francesca ended up learning a profound lesson about the French Art of Living. Francesca wrote up her experience in the story, “The Food Philosophe,” part of a longer memoir of her sojourn in Provence, titled Province of the Heart.
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We talk with Elsa Sjunneson about life as a deaf-blind person and the rights every disabled person should have. Her book is Being Seen: One Deafblind Woman’s Fight to End Ableism.
Later in the show we talk with podcaster and author Kathryn Nicolai about her book of stories for better sleep, Nothing Much Happens: Cozy & Calmng Stories to Soothe Your Mind & Help You Sleep. It’s based on her wildly successful podcast of the same name.
Writers Voice— in depth conversation with writers of all genres, on the air since 2004.
Like us on Facebook at Writers Voice with Francesca Rheannon, on Instagram @WritersVoicePodcast or find us on Twitter @WritersVoice. Find Francesca at mastodon.social/@FRheannonLove Writer’s Voice? Please rate us on your podcast app. It really helps to get the word out about our show.Elsa Sjunneson
Disability rights are human rights. Yet how often does our society actually acknowledge, much less honor, that frame? The truth is, despite the Americans with Disabilities Act, our society isn’t set up to meet the needs of disabled people. Not by a long shot.
Elsa Sjunneson has been contending with that reality for a long time. As a Deafblind woman with partial vision in one eye and bilateral hearing aids, Elsa Sjunneson lives at the crossroads of blindness and sight, hearing and deafness.
Her book Being Seen explores what it means to be disabled in America, how disabled people are portrayed in the media and why ignoring their needs damages us all.
Sjunneson is a disability rights activist, a media studies professor and a writer. She has written extensively on issues relating to disability and representation in the media. She also writes speculative fiction and has been a Hugo Award finalist seven times.
Read or Listen to an Excerpt from Being Seen
Elsa Sjunneson Exorcises Helen Keller
Kathryn Nicolai
Do you have trouble getting to sleep? Or do you nod off easily at bedtime, but then wake up in the early hours of the morning to toss and turn?
Americans have a sleep problem—and more of them are turning to sleep podcasts to help them slip off to dreamland and stay there. Many of them have found their way to Nothing Much Happens, the hugely popular podcast by Kathryn Nicolai.
On her podcast, she reads stories that promote a comforting kind of mindfulness: like the one called Holiday At Weathervane Farm. it’s “a story about hay rides through snowy fields, the ducks waddling back from a day at the pond, and a new calf born who will only ever know kindness.”
The podcast Nothing Much Happens was so successful, Nicolai new stories to create a book of the same title. Like the podcast, the book gently trains the brain to fall and stay asleep. It also includes tips for mindfulness when we are awake.
Before becoming a full time podcaster and writer, Kathryn Nicolai was a yoga and meditation teacher.
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We talk with James Vincent about his book Beyond Measure: The Hidden History Of Measurement From Cubits To Quantum Constants.
Then we replay an excerpt from our interview with Simon Winchester about his book, Land: How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World.
Writers Voice— in depth conversation with writers of all genres, on the air since 2004.Like us on Facebook at Writers Voice with Francesca Rheannon, on Instagram @WritersVoicePodcast or find us on Twitter @WritersVoice. Find Francesca at Mastodon Social.Love Writer’s Voice? Please rate us on your podcast app. It really helps to get the word out about our show.James Vincent
Humans have been measuring things since time immemorial, from the earliest hashmarks on bone—possibly to count hunting kills—to the advanced algorithms of today. Measurement is a way of bringing order and control to our world. A good thing, right?
But it also has been used to impose domination on people and on the natural world. Or to exclude some considerations in favor of others: think of how GDP measures economic growth but not the devastation untrammeled growth is wreaking upon our planet.
James Vincent examines the history and the consequences of measurement in his fascinating book, Beyond Measure. He is a journalist and writer who has written for numerous publications, including the Independent, the Financial Times and Wired. He is currently a senior reporter for the Verge. Beyond Measure is his first book.
Simon WInchester
We interviewed Simon Winchester in 2021 about his book, Land. We play an excerpt on this episode, but you can hear the entire conversation here.
Next week on Writer’s Voice: We talk with disability rights activist Elsa Sjunneson about her book, Being Seen. Also, we start dreaming about gardening, as we talk with garden columnist and author Jeff Lowenfels about the fourth in his series on regenerative gardening, Teaming With Bacteria.
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We talk with Devra Lehmann about her book, Socrates: A Life Worth Living. It’s a YA book that’s great for readers of all ages.
Then, another YA book for everyone: we talk with Dr. Seema Yasmin about her guide to inoculating ourselves against false information, What the fact: Finding The Truth In All The Noise.
Writers Voice— in depth conversation with writers of all genres, on the air since 2004.Like us on Facebook at Writers Voice with Francesca Rheannon, on Instagram @WritersVoicePodcast or find us on twitter @WritersVoice.Love Writer’s Voice? Please rate us on your podcast app. It really helps to get the word out about our show.Devra Lehmann
Socrates may be the most famous philosopher who ever lived, at least in the Western canon, but what was his philosophy really about? And does it have any relevance to us in the modern world?
Author and teacher Devra Lehmann sets out to answer the first question with her highly readable biography of the sage, Socrates: A Life Worth Living.
While she firmly situates him within his own historical context, Lehmann also shows that his philosophy of what makes life worth living not only has universal relevance, but also special salience for our troubled times.
Devra Lehmann is the author of two biographies of philosophers, Socrates and Spinoza. She’s working on biographies of Augustine of Hippo and Hannah Arendt for the Philosophy for Young People series from Seven Stories Press.
Seema Yasmin
A tsunami of false information is washing over our global civilization. Whether purveyed by Fox News, Facebook or Elon Musk’s Twitter; spewed by corrupt politicians and corporations; or spread by the likes of Q Anon, Alex Jones or the Kremlin’s troll army, false information threatens to destroy us, making it nigh impossible to deal with the overwhelming crises we face.
Is there anything we can do about it? Can we protect ourselves, our families and friends from falling victim to the lies?
Yes, says Dr. Seema Yasmin. She lays out the strategies to inoculate ourselves against the viral epidemic of false information in her terrific book, What The Fact: Finding The Truth In All The Noise. While geared toward the young adult reader, it’s really for everyone.
Dr. Seema Yasmin is an expert on epidemics, both physical and informational. She’s also a journalist, medical doctor, poet and author of five books.
Teaching guide to What The Fact
Listen to an Excerpt
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Nigerian novelist Omolola Ijeoma Ogunyemi talks about her novel of interlocking short stories, Jollof Rice and Other Revolutions.
Then, we harken back to our conversation earlier this year with NoViolet Bulaweyo about her novel of Zimbabwe, Glory. It was shortlisted for the 2022 Man Booker Prize.
Writers Voice— in depth conversation with writers of all genres, on the air since 2004.Like us on Facebook at Writers Voice with Francesca Rheannon, on Instagram @WritersVoicePodcast or find us on twitter @WritersVoice.Omolola Ijeoma Ogunyemi
Omolola Ogunyemi was born and raised in Idbadan, Nigeria but she has lived in the U.S. for many years. Her love for her homeland and its rich culture provide the inspiration for her novel, Jolloff Rice and Other Revolutions.
It’s a collection of linked short stories that follow a group of friends from their early years in a girls’ boarding school, starting in 1986 and into the middle of our century, the year 2050.
One reviewer said of the book, “Jollof Rice and Other Revolutions celebrates friendship, the power of community and home, and the joy of being a woman able to take control of her destiny… Ogunyemi’s writing has the power to reverberate through generations.”
But as the title expresses, celebration takes place within a political context that poses challenges for the books’ characters and tests their loyalty, their courage and their hopes and dreams for themselves and their families.
As they move between Nigeria and the U.S., they come to realize that while the powers-that-be can be cruel and oppressive in either country, friendship and solidarity provide salvation.
The book emerged from Ogunyemi’s short story, “Jollof Rice and Revolutions,” which appeared in Ploughshares in 2017 and was named to the list of “Other Distinguished Stories of 2017” in The Best American Short Stories 2018. It came out In September 2022, from Amistad Books, an imprint of HarperCollins.
Omolola Ogunyemi’s poetry, short stories and essays have been published widely. Jolloff Rice and Other Revolutions is her first novel.
Read an excerpt
Recipe for jollof rice
NoViolet Bulaweyo
Some of the greatest contemporary women writers writing in English come from the continent of Africa. Think Chimamanda Adichie, for example. It’s probable that our earlier guest today, Omolola Ogunyemi, will join their ranks.
Another wonderful emerging writer is Zimbabwean NoViolet Bulaweyo. Her debut novel, We Need New Names, was shortlisted for the 2013 Man Booker Prize. Her second novel, Glory, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2022.
We spoke with her about Glory back in April 2022. We listen back to that conversation today.
Coming up next week on Writer’s Voice, we talk about two terrific books for young (adult) readers of all ages. Devra Lehmann tells us about her philosophical biography, Socrates: A Life Worth Living.
And Seema Yasmin teaches us how to inoculate ourselves against misinformation. Her book is What The Fact? : Finding The Truth In All The Noise.
The post Omolola Ogunyemi, JOLLOF RICE AND OTHER REVOLUTIONS & Noviolet Bulaweyo, GLORY appeared first on Writer's Voice.
Douglas Rushkoff discusses his book, Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires. Tyson Yunkaporta talks about Indigenous thinking. His book is Sand Talk.
The post Douglas Rushkoff, SURVIVAL OF THE RICHEST & Tyson Yunkaporta, SAND TALK appeared first on Writer's Voice.
We hear about a small town on the Texas coast set on fire by hatred, xenophobia, and ecological disaster— and the woman who fought to save it.
The post Kirk Wallace Johnson, THE FISHERMAN AND THE DRAGON & Diane Wilson, AN UNREASONABLE WOMAN appeared first on Writer's Voice.
Laura Kaplan tells us about the legendary abortion service Jane and Helen Shiller talks about organizing for social justice.
The post Laura Kaplan, JANE & Helen Shiller, DARING TO STRUGGLE, DARING TO WIN appeared first on Writer's Voice.
Philip Schultz talks about his book Comforts of the Abyss & investigative journalist Carey Gillam discusses the link between paraquat and Parkinsons.
The post Philip Schultz, COMFORTS OF THE ABYSS & Carey Gillam on Paraquat and Parkinson’s appeared first on Writer's Voice.
Emi Nietfield talks about her powerful memoir, Acceptance. And we re-play our 2017 conversation with Magpie Murders author Anthony Horowitz as PBS Mystery airs the his TV adaptation.
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We talk with theoretical physicist Antonio Padilla about FANTASTIC NUMBERS. And we replay our 2009 interview with poet Richard Wilbur.
The post Antonio Padilla, FANTASTIC NUMBERS AND WHERE TO FIND THEM & Poet Richard Wilbur (Encore) appeared first on Writer's Voice.
Steve Hendricks talks about fasting. His book is The Oldest Cure in the World. Then, Millie Kerr discusses Wilder. It's about rewilding efforts around the world.
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We talk with Marianne Williamson about her book, A Politics of Love. Then Rabbi Michael Lerner tells us about his book, Revolutionary Love.
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Nobel Prize winner Abdulrazak Gurnah talks about his novel Afterlives. R.F. Kuang tells us about her fantasy/slash/alternate history novel, Babel.
The post Abdulrazak Gurnah, AFTERLIVES & R.F. Kuang, BABEL appeared first on Writer's Voice.
We talk with Octavio Solis about his short story collection about the southern border, Retablos. And Freya Sampson tells us about her novel The Lost Ticket.
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Bill McKibben talks about his new book, The Flag, The Cross And The Station Wagon. And Sarah Thankam Mathews tells us about her debut novel, All This Could Be Different.
The post Bill McKibben, THE FLAG, THE CROSS and the STATION WAGON & Sarah Thankam Mathews, ALL THIS COULD BE DIFFERENT appeared first on Writer's Voice.
Dolen Perkins Valdez talks about her novel Take My Hand. Also, rebroadcast of interview with Honorée Fanonne Jeffers about The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois.
The post Dolen Perkins-Valdez, TAKE MY HAND & Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, THE LOVE SONGS OF W.E.B. DUBOIS appeared first on Writer's Voice.
Keri Blakinger talks about her powerful prison memoir, Corrections In Ink. Then, Eve Karlin tells us about her historical novel Track 61.
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Mohsin Hamid tells us about his novel The Last White Man & Omar El Akkad on his novel What Strange Paradise.
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Bruce Holsinger tells us about his novel, The Displacements. Then, moral philosopher Elizabeth Cripps talks about her book, What Climate Justice Means and Why We Should Care.
The post Bruce Holsinger, THE DISPLACEMENTS & Elizabeth Cripps, WHAT CLIMATE JUSTICE MEANS AND WHY WE SHOULD CARE appeared first on Writer's Voice.
We talk to Mary Pipher about A Life In Light: Meditations On Impermanence. And Anita Barros talks with us about her novel, The Language of Birds.
The post Mary Pipher, A LIFE IN LIGHT & Anita Barrows, THE LANGUAGE OF BIRDS appeared first on Writer's Voice.
James Bridle tells us about his book, Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for A Planetary Intelligence. And Sy Montgomery talks about her new book, The Hawk’s Way.
The post James Bridle, WAYS OF BEING & Sy Montgomery, THE HAWK’S WAY appeared first on Writer's Voice.
We talk with Ari Rabin-Havt about his campaign memoir, The Fighting Soul: On The Road With Bernie Sanders. Then we excerpt our 2020 interview with Chuck Rocha about his book, Tío Bernie.
The post Ari Rabin-Havt, THE FIGHTING SOUL & Chuck Rocha, TÍO BERNIE appeared first on Writer's Voice.
Jim Shepard talks about his novel Phase Six. Then Cob Carlson tells us about his new documentary, The Greatest Radio Station In The World.
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Jonathan Lee on his novel about Andrew Haswell Green, The Great Mistake. Michael Mechanic on his book Jackpot, about the lives of the super-rich.
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We talk with David Bollier about his sourcebook for Commoning, THE COMMONER’S CATALOG. Then Katha Pollitt talks about abortion rights.
The post David Bollier THE COMMONER’S CATALOG & Katha Pollitt, PRO appeared first on Writer's Voice.
We talk with Kathryn Miles about her books, Trailed and Superstorm
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Jackie Higgins talks about her book, Sentient & Carl Safina discusses Becoming Wild.
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We talk with Rebecca Wragg Sykes about her bestselling book, Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art.
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Antonio Scurati talks about M: Son of the Century & Tsering Yangzom Lama discusses her novel We Measure The Earth With Our Bodies
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Philip Dray talks about A Lynching at Port Jervis:Race and Reckoning in the Gilded Age. Then Natalie Haynes tells us about her feminist interpretation of the ancient Greek myths and plays. Her book is Pandora’s Jar: Women In The Greek Myths.
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We talk with Mark Vonnegut about his memoir, THE HEART OF CARING & Oliver Milman on Biden's carbon bombs
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Mark Follman discusses Trigger Points, his book on preventing gun violence. Rachel Real talks about Catch The Sparrow, about her stepsister's murder.
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Catie Marron on Becoming A Gardener & Sharon Charde on I Am Not A Juvenile Delinquent: How Poetry Changed a Group of At-Risk Young Women.
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Frans de Waal talks about Different: Gender Through The Eyes of a Primatologist and
Richard Louv discusses Our Wild Calling.
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Lumah Mufleh on LEARNING AMERICA: One Woman's Fight for Educational Justice for Refugee Children. And for Earth Day Peter Kalmus discusses Being the Change.
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NoViolet Bulaweyo on her new novel Glory. And Jennifer Haigh discusses Mercy Street.
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We talk with Oliver Milman about his book The Insect Crisis. Then, tips on pollinator pathways.
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We talk with Rosemary Sullivan about her book, The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation.
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We talk with Ali Noorani about Crossing Borders: The Reconciliation of a Nation of Immigrants. Then, Andy Bowman tells us about how solar power is becoming the cheapest energy source. His book is The West Texas Power Plant That Saved The World.
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We spend the hour with John Nichols talking about his latest book Coronavirus Criminals And Pandemic Profiteers.
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We talk with Lee Kravetz about his novel, The Last Confessions of Sylvia P.
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We talk with journalist and author Dana Thomas about the Young Readers Edition of her book, Fashionopolis. Then, we air some clips from our 2008 interview with Michael Klare about war and energy.
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We talk with Donald Cohen about his book The Privatization of Everything: How the Plunder of Public Goods Transformed America and How We Can Fight Back.
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We talk with Malinda Lo about her YA historical romance novel Last Night At The Telegraph Club. Then Syed Masood tells us about his new novel, The Bad Muslim Discount.
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Mystery master Elizabeth George explores FGM in SOMETHING TO HIDE & DaMaris Hill talks about her narrative poem A BOUND WOMAN IS A DANGEROUS THING (Black History Month)
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We spend the hour talking with Tamara Payne about her late father Les Payne’s acclaimed biography of Malcolm X, The Dead Are Arising. It won the National Book Award.
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We spend the hour with Howard Mansfield talking about his books, Chasing Eden: A Book of Seekers and The Habit Of Turning The World Upside Down
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We talk with Thor Hansen about Hurricane Lizards And Plastic Squid and Beth Shapiro about Life As We Made It.
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We talk with archeologist David Wengrow about the book he co-authored with David Graeber, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity.
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We play excerpts from ten of our favorite episodes in 2021
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Francesca Rheannon reads her Winter Solstice story "The Food Philosophe"
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We talk with Ben Sheehan about his book, What Does The Constitution Say? A Kids Guide To How Our Democracy Works.
Then we talk with constitutional scholar Noah Feldman about his terrific new history of Lincoln and the civil war from a constitutional perspective, The Broken Constitution: Lincoln, Slavery, and the Refounding of America.
Writers Voice— in depth conversation with writers of all genres, on the air since 2004. Like us on Facebook at Writers Voice with Francesca Rheannon, on Instagram @WritersVoicePodcast or find us on twitter @WritersVoice. Love Writer’s Voice? Please rate us on your podcast app. It really helps to get the word out about our show. Ben Sheehan
These days, the signs that the US Constitution is endangered are growing all around us. From voter suppression laws, to measures to outlaw civil rights protests to flaunting the constitutional right to reproductive freedom, the assault on our constitutional rights is terrifying.
The checks and balances that keep the our three branches of government in equilibrium is being eroded by the ever-growing power of the executive and the judiciary. Meanwhile, civics seems to have largely been dropped from school curriculums.
Ben Sheehan’s book for kids, What Does The Constitution Say? is a welcome corrective to the lack of civic awareness in the US. Featuring fun facts and illustrations, the book is a clear and simple guide to understanding how our American government really works.
Ben Sheehan is a former executive producer at Funny Or Die. He’s spearheaded several efforts to boost voting and voting education.
Ben Sheehan is also the author of OMG WTF Does the Constitution Actually Say?
Fun quizz and study guide to What Does the Constitution Say?
Noah Feldman
The US Constitution, the document we all revere for its protection of rights, was founded on a terrible compromise —the protection of slavery in order to preserve the Union of states both slave and free.
But after the Civil War, the Constitution profoundly changed. It became an Emancipation Constitution with the addition of the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments.
How that happened is at the heart of Noah Feldman’s book, The Broken Constitution. It’s the first book to tell the story of how President Lincoln broke the Constitution in order to remake it. It offers a riveting narrative of his constitutional choices and how he made them.
Noah Feldman is the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard University, a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and a columnist for Bloomberg. His books include Scorpions: The Battles and Triumphs of FDR’s Great Justices and Divided By God: America’s Church-State Problem and What We Should Do About It. He’s also the host of the podcast Deep Background with Noah Feldman.
Read an Excerpt from The Broken Constitution
Read Feldman’s op ed, Lincoln Broke the Constitution. Let’s Finally Fix It
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We talk with Leonard Rubenstein about his book Perilous Medicine: The Struggle to Protect Health Care from the Violence of War.
Then, Stan Cox connects the dots between climate chaos, racism and the next pandemic. We talk with him about his book, The Path to a Livable Future: A New Politics to Fight Climate Change, Racism, and the Next Pandemic.
Writers Voice— in depth conversation with writers of all genres, on the air since 2004. Like us on Facebook at Writers Voice with Francesca Rheannon, on Instagram @WritersVoicePodcast or find us on twitter @WritersVoice. Leonard Rubenstein
Military violence against hospitals, patients, and health workers has become a common feature of modern war. Think Kosovo, Yemen, Syria and Occupied Palestine.
The attacks destroy lives. They also destroy the capacity of health systems to tend to those in need. Yet little is being done about this abomination. That’s why Leonard Rubenstein wrote the book Perilous Medicine.
A human rights lawyer who has investigated atrocities against health workers around the world, Rubenstein tells of the dangers health workers face during conflict and the legal, political, and moral struggle to protect them.
Leonard Rubenstein is professor and director of the Program on Human Rights and Health in Conflict at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. He founded the Safeguarding Health in Conflict Coalition and is a former president of Physicians for Human Rights.
Stan Cox
2020 was a year defined by crisis. For decades, scientists have been sounding the alarm about the urgency of addressing climate change, but it took COVID-19 to show that the future of human life on Earth is interconnected and at risk.
While the virus quickly spread across the globe, extreme weather events compounded the suffering and economic fallout. In the U.S., outrage over the murder of George Floyd expanded to include a growing awareness of the pandemic’s disproportionate impact on communities of color.
In The Path to a Livable Future, Stan Cox makes plain the connections between the multiple crises facing us today, and provides a vision for how to resolve them. He shows how we can work together to address the climate emergency, white supremacy, and our vulnerability to future pandemics all at once. Our future depends on it.
Stan Cox is the author of many books, including The Green New Deal and Beyond. His work has appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, and more. He works for the Land Institute in Kansas.
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We talk with deep sea explorer Edith Widder about Below the Edge of Darkness: A Memoir Of Exploring Light And Life In The Deep Sea.
Then, we revisit our 2017 interview with Sy Montgomery about the book she so-authored with Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, Tamed And Untamed: Close Encounters of the Animal Kind.
Writers Voice— in depth conversation with writers of all genres, on the air since 2004. Like us on Facebook at Writers Voice with Francesca Rheannon, on Instagram @WritersVoicePodcast or find us on twitter @WritersVoice. Love Writer’s Voice? Please rate us on your podcast app. It really helps to get the word out about our show. Edith Widder
Fireflies do it. So does the tiny bristle mouth fish and the appropriately named stoplight fish, along with countless other denizens of our deep oceans. Produce light, that is, or bioluminescence.
Edith Widder is one of the world’s leading experts on the phenomenon of marine bio-luminescence. She was also the first person to get moving images of the legendary giant squid.
In her thrilling memoir, Below the Edge of Darkness, Widder describes the wonders of the deep ocean as she pursues her questions about one of the most important and widely used forms of communication in nature. In the process, she reveals hidden worlds and a dazzling menagerie of behaviors and animals, from microbes to leviathans, many never before seen.
Below the Edge of Darkness urges us to pay attention to what we are learning about this least explored part of Earth’s biosphere before it’s too late.
Watch Edith Widder’s TED talk about finding the giant squid
Sy Montogmery
In 2017, we spoke with Sy Montgomery, famed author of The Soul of an Octopus, about a collection of essays she and Elizabeth Marshall Thomas wrote, Tamed and Untamed: Close Encounters of the Animal Kind.
Click here to read more about the book.
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We talk with Eyal Press about his new book, Dirty Work: Essential Jobs and the Hidden Toll of Inequality in America. Then we talk with Melanie Joy about Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows: An Introduction to Carnism.
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We talk with David Talbot about the book he co-authored with his sister Margaret Talbot, By The Light of Burning Dreams: The Triumphs and Tragedies of the Second American Revolution.
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We talk with Ken Follett about his new thriller, Never. Then, Anthony Horowitz tells us about his new mystery, A Line To Kill.
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We talk with Joe Lee about his graphic biography, Forgiveness: The Story of Eva Kor. Then Valerie Martin tells us about her new novel I Give It To You.
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We talk with Grammy Award-winner Victor Wooten about his book The Spirit of Music. Then, David Stebenne talks about his book, Promised Land.
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We talk with Ruth Ozeki about The Book of Form and Emptiness &
Hilma Wolitzer tells us about her retrospective collection of stories, Today A Woman Went Mad In The Supermarket.
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Geo Maher on A World Without Police & John Cavanagh & Robin Broad on The Water Defenders
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Two novels based on true stories from World War II: we talk with Jai Chakrabarti & Caroline Lea.
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We talk with Rupa Marya and Raj Patel about their book, Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice. Then, country music singer Jimmie Allen tells us about his book for children, My Voice Is A Trumpet.
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ElectrifyEverything! Saul Griffith tells us about his new book, Electrify: An Optimist's Playbook For Our Clean Energy Future.
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