Épisodes

  • "Conjunctions" Magazine: A Discussion with Bradford Morrow

    "Conjunctions" Magazine: A Discussion with Bradford Morrow
    Jun 13 2024
    Bradford Morrow is an American novelist, editor, essayist, poet, and children’s book author. A professor of literature and Bard Center Fellow at Bard College, he is the founding editor of Conjunctions literary magazine. In 2020, he published The Forger’s Daughter, which the New York Times named a “Ten Best Crime Novels of 2020 selection.” His tenth novel, The Forger’s Requiem, will be released early next year. Three essays from the Ways of Water issue are discussed today: Kristin Posehn’s “The Wave Readers” about Marshall Island natives using their intuitive, sensory skillset to navigate far-flung islands that sit only about seven feet above water; Ryan Habermeyer’s “A North American Field Guide to Glaciers,” a futuristic short story with the inklings of being a work of speculative nonfiction; and Heather Altfeld,’s “With Their Feet in the Water and Their Heads in the Fire” about dealing with intense heat, scorpions, and more, in Morocco. In each case, the climate poses unique challenges and lyrical narrative prose responses in kind with often poignant insights. A final essay covered here is Alyssa Pelish’s “The Four Notes,” a narrative discourse that displays a profound knowledge of classical music. Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of ten books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. To check out his related “Dan Hill’s EQ Spotlight” blog, visit this site. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    36 min
  • "Southern Humanities Review" magazine

    "Southern Humanities Review" magazine
    Jun 6 2024
    Justin Gardiner is the author of two nonfiction books and a collection of poetry. His most recent title is the book-length lyric essay Small Altars, published by Tupelo Press in 2024. Besides his role as Nonfiction Editor for Southern Humanities Review, Justin is also an Associate Professor at Auburn University. Founded in 1967, SHR considers subject matter both within and beyond the South. The magazine has had Justin Gardiner as its nonfiction editor for the past half decade. Four essays are discussed in the episode, with most of all of them showing evidence of the associative qualities that Gardiner, as a poet, enjoys in whatever genre. In this case, we started with Lia Greenwell’s essay “Your Soul Doesn’t Need You.” While ostensibly an essay about a carjacking she experienced, it goes wider to consider alike how well both more cognitively based therapy and poetry that speaks to one’s soul can aid recovery. In Leslie Stainton’s “Here with You,” an understanding of how the artist Joseph Cornell’s boxes reflect his life with a brother who suffered from cerebral palsy parallels the circumstances of the author’s own, younger sister. Delicacy is the order of the day. In Ceridwen Hall’s essay, “Submarine Reconnaissance: Bodies, Permutations, Voyages,” Hall delves into whether submarines are “female” (as her mom believes) or a “he” when in combat, along with many fascinating aspects of serving aboard a submarine and the “aquatic” nature of our memories and the way we must constantly “refit” our thinking. The other, remaining essay, Jennifer Taylor-Skinner’s “I Don’t Want Somebody in My House,” highlights the grand piano that serves as her companion, in contrast to how an esoteric French composer (Erik Satie) had two baby grand pianos stacked atop each other in his southern France villa. Again, expect the unexpected. Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of ten books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. To check out his related “Dan Hill’s EQ Spotlight” blog, visit this site. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    33 min
  • "Salmagundi" Magazine: A Discussion with Bob Boyers

    "Salmagundi" Magazine: A Discussion with Bob Boyers
    May 23 2024
    Robert Boyers founded the quarterly Salmagundi in 1965 and has been its editor in chief ever since. He’s the author of 12 books, including most recently Maestros Monsters: Days & Nights with Sontag and Steiner and before that The Tyranny of Virtue: Identity, The Academy and the Hunt for Political Heresies. Besides teaching at Skidmore College, he directs the New York State Summer Writers Institute. Salmagundi rightly prides itself on hosting wide-ranging, inquisitive discussions of major topics involving race, gender, literature, psychology and so much more. This discussion goes in depth on four entries from the magazine. First up: “Talking Race Matters: A Conversation with John McWhorter & Thomas Chatterton Williams” explores the limits of racial essentialism as well as total assimilation that risks denying what is unique about the Black perspective and experience. A second piece is Elizabeth Benedict’s essay, “What’s the Matter with Sex?” It tackles how far the influence of pornography has gone (astray) as a training ground that leads young men into often degrading behavior to the women they are intimate with, including the use of choking as a form of eroticism. “The Failure of Censorship” by Adam Phillips looks at how our desires endanger us and yet at the same time to deny them denies aspects of ourselves. When is and isn’t self-censorship fruitful? Finally, Salmagundi hosted a symposium called “Can the American Meritocracy Get Religion?” Five writers are responding to an editorial by Ross Douthat in the New York Times. All found Doughat’s views too narrow or incoherent to be persuasive. Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of ten books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. To check out his related “Dan Hill’s EQ Spotlight” blog, visit this site. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    43 min
  • "Orion" Magazine: A Discussion with Sumanth Prabhaker

    "Orion" Magazine: A Discussion with Sumanth Prabhaker
    May 15 2024
    Sumanth Prabhaker is the editor-in-chief of Orion and the founding editor of Madra Press. He earned an MFA in creative writing at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, where he was an editor for the journal Ecotone. Founded in 1982, Orion has evolved as a magazine over the years from the quieter, reverential environmental sensitivity that continues to distinguish it into also a wider awareness of global injustices that especially impact the Global South. In this episode, three essays were discussed that under his leadership, Sumanth Prabhaker nurtured into existence over a span that sometimes stretched into years. First among them is “How the Lark Got Her Crest” by Marianne Jay Erhardt from the Summer 2023 issue. It works from the slightest of bases, the few lines of Aesop’s fable about a lark, into a rather profound piece about how one might bury one’s father “in your head’ like the lark does. Language and honoring one’s parent becomes the grounding in this case. Second up, “The Other Bibles” by Katrina Vanderberg from the Spring 2024 issue began as almost a lark: why not include a book review of The Bible in a special issue devoted to religious rituals? The essay is at once a memorial to a husband who died of AIDS as a result of poorly monitored blood transfusions meant to help treat his hemophilia, as well as exploring the spiritual ecology of texts that come to us via illustrations in Bibles or the handiwork of the Earth itself. Third, the episode concludes by discussing “Natural Selection” by Erica Berry from the Winter 2023 issue. A Tinder ad about dating practices led into a piece on romance and even four Romance novels also written during the Year Without a Summer in 1916 when a volcanic eruption in Indonesia caused famine and disease and led, among other output, to Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin and her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley setting to work on Frankenstein. Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of ten books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    34 min
  • "Colorado Review" Magazine: A Discussion with Stephanie G’Schwind and Harrison Candelaria Fletcher

    "Colorado Review" Magazine: A Discussion with Stephanie G’Schwind and Harrison Candelaria Fletcher
    May 8 2024
    Stephanie G’Schwind is the editor-in-chief of Colorado Review and the director of the Center for Literary Publishing at Colorado State University. She has edited two anthologies, Man in the Moon: Essays on Father and Fatherhood and Beautiful Flesh: A Body of Essays, which won the 2018 Colorado Book Award for Anthology. Harrison Canelaria Fletcher is the author of Descanso for My Father, Presentimiento: A Life in Dreams, and Finding Querencia: Essays from in Between. Besides being G’Schwind’s fellow nonfiction editor at Colorado Review, he’s been an editor at Shadowbox, Upstreet and Speculative Nonfiction. He teaches at Colorado State University and Vermont College of Fine Arts. All four of the essays from recent back issues discussed in this episode involve identity, place, and survival. The first is “Who Lives in That House” by Emily Winakur. For her the home operates on the level of being a dream about the self, what matters, what the risks are, why it is that a party of our brain is devoted to memories and specifically a sense of place. As a psychologist, Winakur uses her curiosity and concern for her patients to serve almost like a home inspector, making sure they’re safe. In turn, Shze-Hui Tjoa’s “The Story of Body” concerns a mind-body split that causes the author to mostly describe herself as a distanced, alienated “Body” and “Mind” that struggles under parental demands to become an exceptional musician. In Sarah Curtis’s “The Ghost of Lubbock,” she’s not a musician, but her dad is; in fact, he played with Buddy Holly and wrote “I Fought the Law” among other notable songs. But who is her dad, really: the stage performer, or the quiet guy who deflects questions? In Jarek Steel’s “Nesting,” confinement and becoming are the dominant motifs. As a pregnant 19-year-old, she occupies a “garbagehouse” of a place, but transforms herself into a man who can look back at a very primal, vulnerable part of life and put the pieces together. Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of ten books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    36 min
  • "Oxford American" Magazine: A Discussion with Danielle Amir Jackson

    "Oxford American" Magazine: A Discussion with Danielle Amir Jackson
    Apr 25 2024
    Danielle Amir Jackson is a Memphis-born writer and critic, and the editor-in-chief of the Oxford American. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Vulture, Bookforum, Lapham’s Quarterly, the Criterion Collection, and elsewhere. Honey’s Grill: Sex, Freedom, and Women of the Blues, her first book, is forthcoming from Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Originally based in Oxford, Mississippi, hence its name, Oxford American is both a literary and general interest magazine intent on honoring the cultural wealth of the South. Four writings are discussed, beginning with “What If It All Burned Down?” by Katrina Andy, which as its title suggests, is loaded with questions about the largest slave revolt in U.S. history. It happens at the Andry Plantation north of New Orleans, in the aftermath of the successful Haitian Revolution. Two other writings involve music: there’s “How to Take It Slow” by Lauren Du Graf and “Coming Up Fancy” by Jewly Hight. The first portrays Shirley Horn, emphasizing her unique singing and piano style as well as her being such a homebody that she took a pressure cooker along with her on musical road tours. The second takes the song “Fancy” as sung by Reba McEntire and others and explores what home means when it isn’t a place of comfort. The episode’s fourth entry, “The Mustang” by Gwen Thompkins, is an evocative piece about a family journey to see grandparents at the same time that the narrator’s parents’ marriage is coming to an end. Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of ten books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    32 min
  • "The American Scholar" Magazine: A Discussion with Stephanie Bastek

    "The American Scholar" Magazine: A Discussion with Stephanie Bastek
    Apr 11 2024
    Stephanie Bastek has been with The American Scholar for 10 years, where she is now senior editor. She hosts and produces the magazine’s Smarty Pants podcast, with has just returned with a new miniseries called “Exploding the Canon” about the student protests at her alma mater, Reed College, over the mandatory freshmen humanities course eight years ago. The American Scholar plays a unique role in the literary-journalism realm: its writings often offer a response to newsworthy events but may do through an interdisciplinary approach that weaves in history or literature, for example, and aims to be far-ranging and reflective. In this episode, the first essay we focus on is Hugh Martin’s “Shooting a Dog” from the Winter 2024 issue. Set in Iraq, it invokes a parallel to George Orwell’s essay “Shooting an Elephant” set in what was then called Burma. In each case, the supposedly superior Westerner fears being seen as a fool by those he lords over. Similar tensions involving masculine pride, patriotism, and more, surface here. A second essay being covered is “The Lives of Bryan” by Jennifer Sinor from the Summer 2023 issue. The author’s brother has had four previous brushes with death, before a heart attack ends his life. A distraught father’s insistence that what Bryan has hoarded in his mobile equates to “throwing away a piece of your brother,” brings up issues of loss, transience, and the uncertain vagaries we all try to navigate as best we can. “An Outrage Sacred to the Gods” by Greg Afinogenov from the Winter 2024 issue explores his father’s death, and the role of alcoholism as a death wish that the author struggles to overcome in his own life. With “I’ll Be Seeing You” by Patricia Hampl from the Spring 2023 issue, being an outsider is front and center. Hampl has made a pilgrimage to visit a close associate of the writer Katherine Mansfield, only to be rebuffed, leading to a more fruitful connection with her guide for the occasion, an editor whose “pure homosexual” accent places him, like his American visitor, outside England’s class structure. Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of ten books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    26 min
  • "River Teeth" Magazine: A Discussion with Jill Christman and Mark Neely

    "River Teeth" Magazine: A Discussion with Jill Christman and Mark Neely
    Apr 4 2024
    Today’s spotlight is in part on the literary magazine River Teeth. I’m joined by the magazine’s senior editors, Jill Christman and Mark Neely. Jill Christman is the author of If This Were Fiction: A Love Story in Essays (the 2024 Chicago Writers Association Nonfiction Book of the Year) and two memoirs, Darkroom: A Family Exposure (winner of AWP Prize for CNF) and Borrowed Babies: Apprenticing for Motherhood. Her essays have appeared in numerous anthologies and in magazines such as Creative Nonfiction, Fourth and O, The Oprah Magazine. A 2020 NEA Literature Fellow, she teaches at Ball State University. Mark Neely is the author of Beasts of the Hill and Dirty Bomb, both from Oberlin College Press. His third book, Ticker, won the Idaho Prize for Poetry and was published by Lost Horse Press. His awards include an NEA Poetry Fellowship, an Indiana Individual Artist Grant, and the FIELD Poetry Prize. He is a professor of English at Ball State University. Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of ten books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. To check out his related “Dan Hill’s EQ Spotlight” blog, visit this site. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    30 min