Podcasts about literary studies

What happens when heartbreak becomes the starting point for a whole new purpose? In this episode of Unstoppable Mindset, I sit down with Heather Christie, author, educator, entrepreneur, and founder of Love Notes, a storytelling movement built around real stories of real love. Heather shares how commuting alone to New York City as a teenager shaped her independence, why she walked away from her creative dreams after marrying young, and how writing helped her rediscover herself after the end of a 30-year marriage. We explore storytelling, resilience, creativity, publishing, relationships, and the power of authentic human connection. You will hear how Heather transformed loneliness into hope through Love Notes, an off-Broadway storytelling series that is now expanding across the country and helping people reconnect with the many forms love can take. Highlights: 01:25 - Learn how early independence shaped Heather's confidence and resilience. 16:03 - Discover why staying true to yourself matters in life and relationships. 19:29 - Hear how heartbreak inspired a search for real love stories. 27:21 - Learn how writing helped Heather reconnect with her creativity. 32:35 - Discover the mindset that helped her push through years of rejection. 47:17 - Hear what Heather believes is at the heart of real love. About the Guest: Heather Christie is a speaker, writer-producer, educator, and the creator of LoveNotes! — Real Stories. Real People. Real Love.®—an Off-Broadway storytelling show that's expanding through satellite productions alongside an award-winning anthology. An award-winning YA author, she wrote What The Valley Knows and The Lying Season, which debuted as an Amazon #1 bestseller in Young Adult Soccer Fiction. Her essays have appeared in Salon, NextTribe, Writer's Digest, Baltimore Style, Scary Mommy, Elephant Journal, The Good Men Project, Grown & Flown, Baltimore Child, Parent.co, Her View From Home, the Erma Bombeck Writers' Workshop, and The Lighter Side of Real Estate. Heather holds a BA in Literary Studies from UT-Dallas and an MFA from Pine Manor College. She is CEO of SocRoc Soccer and an adjunct lecturer at the City University of New York. Ways to connect with Heather: Website: www.LoveNotesWorldwide.com & www.HeatherChristieBooks.com Instagram:@_heatherchristie/lovenotes_worldwideFacebook: @heatherchristiebooks / @LoveNotesWorldwideLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/heather-christie-mfa-4b976049/LoveNotes! AnthologyWhat The Valley Knows (book)The Lying Season (book) About the Host: Michael Hingson is a New York Times best-selling author, international lecturer, and Chief Vision Officer for accessiBe. Michael, blind since birth, survived the 9/11 attacks with the help of his guide dog Roselle. This story is the subject of his best-selling book, Thunder Dog. Michael gives over 100 presentations around the world each year speaking to influential groups such as Exxon Mobile, AT&T, Federal Express, Scripps College, Rutgers University, Children's Hospital, and the American Red Cross just to name a few. He is Ambassador for the National Braille Literacy Campaign for the National Federation of the Blind and also serves as Ambassador for the American Humane Association's 2012 Hero Dog Awards. https://michaelhingson.com https://www.facebook.com/michael.hingson.author.speaker/ https://twitter.com/mhingson https://www.youtube.com/user/mhingson https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelhingson/ accessiBe Links https://accessibe.com/ https://www.youtube.com/c/accessiBe https://www.linkedin.com/company/accessibe/mycompany/ https://www.facebook.com/accessibe/ Thanks for listening! Thanks so much for listening to our podcast! If you enjoyed this episode and think that others could benefit from listening, please share it using the social media buttons on this page. Do you have some feedback or questions about this episode? Leave a comment in the section below! Subscribe to the podcast If you would like to get automatic updates of new podcast episodes, you can subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts or Stitcher. You can subscribe in your favorite podcast app. You can also support our podcast through our tip jar https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/unstoppable-mindset . Leave us an Apple Podcasts review Ratings and reviews from our listeners are extremely valuable to us and greatly appreciated. They help our podcast rank higher on Apple Podcasts, which exposes our show to more awesome listeners like you. If you have a minute, please leave an honest review on Apple Podcasts. Transcription Notes: Michael Hingson  00:06 John, thank you for being here with me on Unstoppable Mindset. I hope today's conversation left you with a fresh perspective, a new insight, or at least something worth thinking about. If you're ready to go deeper into the ideas that shape how we see ourselves and others, I have a free gift for you. Head over to Michael hingson.com and download my free ebook, Blinded by Fear. It explores the invisible beliefs that hold us back and shows you how to reframe them, so you can move forward with clarity and confidence. Be sure to subscribe to our podcast, leave a review, and share this show with someone who can use a reminder that growth starts with mindset. When people think differently, we all move forward together. Thanks again for listening. Keep learning, keep questioning, and keep choosing to live with an unstoppable mindset. Hi everyone, and welcome to another episode of Unstoppable Mindset. Today we get the opportunity and the honor of chatting with Heather Christy, and Heather, Heather is an author. She and her brother have formed a company, so she's clearly an entrepreneur. She's acted, she's a keynote speaker, and I don't know what all we're going to find out in the next hour or so, but definitely an exciting person to get a chance to chat with. So, Heather, welcome to Unstoppable Mindset. We're glad you're here. Speaker 1  01:47 Thank you, Michael. I'm so honored that we're going to have a conversation today. Michael Hingson  01:52 And Heather lives in New York City, she lives in Manhattan, or as we all know it, the city. And before we started this, we were talking about the fact that winter is coming everywhere. Ah, well, what do you do as long as you don't get too much snow back there? Speaker 1  02:11 Yeah, the winters have been pretty mild here the last couple years, so see what happens. Michael Hingson  02:16 Yeah, time will tell. Well, why don't we start? Tell us about the early Heather growing up in some of those things. Speaker 1  02:22 Okay, well, as a young person, I, I wanted to be an actress, and I grew up in a really small rural town, about two hours due west of New York City, in Pennsylvania. It's called the Holy Valley. Michael Hingson  02:37 What town? Speaker 1  02:39 Oh, it's called Oli Oley Valley, it's actually a Michael Hingson  02:42 valley. Okay, Speaker 1  02:43 historic site. And so I had a really interesting sort of upbringing, because I, before it was really in vogue, I was on a work-study program, and I would spend half my day in this small Pennsylvania town, and then I would jump on a bus - it was called the Bieber Bus back then - and drive to New York City on the bus, and that was like two to two and a half hours each way, get off in the, you know, huge metropolis of New York City, go on auditions, go sees, or if I had a booking, I'd do the booking, and then I would jump back on the bus and go all the way back to rural Pennsylvania, and that's how I spent like all my high school years was back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, and then I actually graduated early. I graduated halfway through my senior year. I had enough of my credits done that I'd actually, the first half of my senior year, I went to community college, and I took a class in the evenings, so I could be done by Christmas break, and the only requirement I still needed to fulfill was my physical fitness, so I ended up moving to New York City, and then I would take my physical fitness classes at Steps Dance Studio, and then I was still able to graduate with my class in June, but I was living in New York City from January on of what would have been senior year. Yeah, so it was like the early me, and the one thing that was sort of interesting when I was on the work study, my mom was a mathematician, and my dad was a an ER doctor, so they actually tutored me. My mom tutored me in math, and my father tutored me in chemistry. And then, like my history teacher back back in the day, we had Walkmans, and he would record his three lessons on a Walkman, and I would listen to them on the bus back and forth from New York. Michael Hingson  04:43 Yep, Lockmans were the big thing back in time. Sony created a very clever thing, but as with everything, the technology has advanced beyond that. Now Speaker 1  04:58 that's right. Yeah, now my kids. Wouldn't even recognize a Walkman, Michael Hingson  05:02 they wouldn't recognize a cassette either. Speaker 1  05:05 That's right, yeah, it would be like an ancient artifact. Michael Hingson  05:08 What's really strange is there are a lot of people who don't even really know anymore what CDs are. Speaker 1  05:14 That's true, yeah. Michael Hingson  05:16 Much less, well, and DVD is sort of going the same way, it hasn't quite got there, but we, we are new now, moving more into streaming and things like that, but, gee, what a crazy world. Well, so you went through high school, basically commuting to New York. What did your parents think of that? Speaker 1  05:35 Well, I was one of four children, I was the oldest child, and what's remarkable is in the beginning, my mother would go with me, but it was hard to do that, and have you know three other children at home, so by the time I was 15 I was doing it on my own, and when I.. it's just like such a different culture that children are raised in now, there's sort of this idea that we, we can't let them kind of do their own thing, you know, like there's, we're so follow every move and thing they do, but that was like a lot of independence my parents granted me at such a young age, and so they thought, I mean, it was great, and they gave me the support I needed, but at the same time they allowed me to be really independent at a pretty young age. I know when I tell people, "Oh, yeah, I moved to New York City when I was 17 by myself, they're like, "And your parents let you do that? And New York, and this was in the late 80s, early 90s, and New York was like a whole different place, like when I get off the bus at Port Authority back then, like now that whole strip Times Square is kind of sanitized and disified, but back then it was, it was a little rough, Michael Hingson  06:56 it was a lot of X-rated things, and all that, I did some commuting more in the early 90s. I sold products, and I would travel back to New York, because that's where I sold to. I traveled from California, and I remember it was there was a lot of stuff on 42nd Street that was very X-rated, and so on, a lot different than the musical 42nd Street, but that's okay. Speaker 1  07:20 That's right, yeah, Michael Hingson  07:21 but it is a lot, a lot cleaner now than it was, and I remember times I would go out of my hotel and there would be people who would say you really shouldn't be walking around on your own, and why not, and they said, well, because it's pretty dangerous here, and you know, the the angels that that were out there insisted on escorting me everywhere I went, just because they were concerned about me, and I wasn't, although I understand the the situation, but I wasn't going to go in the middle of Central Park at night either, so you know, Speaker 1  07:58 right, and I was a lot the same for me. I remember, though, getting.. I would get off the bus at the Port Authority, for people who know you, New York City, it's on Eighth Avenue, and then I would feel like I wasn't like fully safe until I could get to Lord and Taylor, which was on Sixth Avenue. Yeah, and then it felt like everything got a little bit safer and calmer, the energy changed. Michael Hingson  08:23 Yeah, Speaker 1  08:23 that Michael Hingson  08:24 was a lot different. You could always go to St. Patrick's Cathedral for refuge too. So, but yeah, the Port Authority was an interesting place to go, and I understand. Well, how did.. how did all that affect you, and how did, how does what you did back then kind of affect you in the way you think today, especially with children and so on? Would you give them that same level of independence today? Speaker 1  08:52 That's a really interesting question. And my children are a little older than I was at that time now, but I do think about when they were 15, 1616, years old, and if I'm to answer the question really honestly, I don't know that I would have. I just feel like, and I don't know what's changed about society that makes it that way, that and part of it I think is maybe like the news cycle just is constantly highlighting everything that's wrong and fear based that that's what we see and it's in our faces so much more because we have all this access to it through social media that it it creates sort of this, this like undercurrent in parenting that, that we're, that we're oftentimes afraid, like, what could happen to our children. So, I don't know if I actually would have let them commute like that by themselves, you know? Like, yeah, I don't think I would have. Michael Hingson  09:56 Yeah, it's definitely different now than it was then, and. And I think you're right with especially the news cycle and also in reality there's there's so much gun violence and other stuff going on and I ask people when we talk about it I ask is it really that there's more now or it's just more visible in the news, and I'm not sure that it's just visibility. I think there is more stuff going on, and it's not being stopped nearly as effectively or as aggressively as it should be, and it does make it a scarier world. It's tougher, I think, by far to be a kid now than it was when you were a kid, much less I believe when I was growing up. We just didn't see the kinds of things that we see today, and I don't think it's all just exposure from the news. I think there's there's some truth to the fact that that there are other issues going on, Speaker 1  11:00 right, that it actually is a more dangerous world that we live in. Michael Hingson  11:03 Yeah, and I think that it is something that we do have to think about, and hopefully someday sanity will come back to it all. I agree, I'm of the opinion that eventually it will, but you know, so that's cool. But, but still, we have to do what we do, but I also think that we can't stifle our children, we have to give them the opportunity to grow. It may be that you might, when your children were the age you were, you might have decided, well, one of us just has to go with you all the time, and we're going to just to keep an eye on you, or you have other people that help, but I think being so aggressively smothering that you don't let children grow is a problem too. Speaker 1  11:53 Yeah, I agree. I think that's, I mean, there's that saying, and maybe I'll get it right, or maybe I'll get it wrong here, that we need to give our children roots and wings, Michael Hingson  12:02 yeah, Speaker 1  12:02 and that's the challenge, is to find the balance, Michael Hingson  12:06 yeah. Well, and so for you, you were given a lot of independence. How did that shape kind of your attitude, and how does it shape the way you look at life today? Speaker 1  12:20 Well, that's a really great question, and for all the independence that I had as a young person, and maybe, maybe I was given too much independence in some ways, because I, I ended up marrying very young, and and I often wonder, like, had my parents not given me as much independence, if I would have done that, but yeah, I still think I'm very independent now, and I've tried to instill that in my children as well, and I think they're, they're really great kids, and they've launched really well, which I know is a common problem with today's young adults, is the this sort of inability to to launch, and I, I feel really good. My both my kids have done that and done it well. Michael Hingson  13:15 Well, and all you can do is your best, Speaker 1  13:19 right? Michael Hingson  13:20 I think we don't do this nearly as much as we should, but it ultimately comes down to, you know, kids want all sorts of independence, and so on. Parents are, are.. I'm talking about parents who really think about what they do, they may not want children to have that much independence, but I think the key is that you really need to communicate with your kids and teach them what's going on and why, Speaker 1  13:48 right. I think that's it's to be open and transparent with, with our children is very, and to have like the hard conversations and give them a safe space in which they can speak to Michael Hingson  14:02 the other side of that is that we should hold them to the same standard and say when you have issues and so on, we're here, we're not going to judge you, you need to have the hard conversations with us too. And I don't think we do nearly as much of that. I know when I was growing up, we had a lot of conversations. Of course, I was blind. I've been blind my whole life, and I encountered a lot of different things growing up, and my parents were glad to talk with me about blindness, and glad to talk with me about different things about independence, and it also was true that they allowed me to be independent. I mean, I rode my own bike around the neighborhood, and some other.. I'm not the only blind kid that did that in the world, but in my town I was brand.. and I think that, you know, I'm. Sure, that I was watched, but parents didn't interfere. I mean, I even fell off the bike a couple times until I really learned how to ride it, but they allowed me to have the opportunity to grow, and I think that there is a way to do that without, without, well, without stifling your kids, and that you can, you can let kids grow, and we should really emphasize curiosity a lot more than we do. Speaker 1  15:29 I agree, I think that's really important, is to give kids the space to grow and encourage curiosity. Michael Hingson  15:36 Yeah, we don't probably do that nearly as much as we ought to, well, so you mentioned you got married at 19. Well, I guess that's a little young, but, but you did that, huh? Speaker 1  15:48 I did. Yes, I did. I married young. Michael Hingson  15:54 How did that work out? Speaker 1  15:56 Well, it, it worked out for a little, well, it worked out for a while. I stayed married a really long time, but I eventually divorced 30 years later, and part of that had to do with I was, I did marry young, but my ex-husband also had some addictions that you know in time just became too hard to manage, so that ended the thing, and he Michael Hingson  16:29 wouldn't, and he wouldn't deal with them Speaker 1  16:31 well. At one point, I mean, we'll ask a lot of times in relationship with addicts, you kind of, there are times when they deal with them, and then times when they don't, Michael Hingson  16:39 right? Speaker 1  16:40 Yeah, so ultimately it dissolved. Michael Hingson  16:44 It's too bad when things happen. Speaker 1  16:47 That's right, yeah, but I'm grateful for the the union, because it produced my two great kids. Michael Hingson  16:56 And what, what else did being married for 30 years teach you? Speaker 1  17:01 Well, wow, that's a great question. I think probably it taught me most of all it's a lesson learned, sort of, that you really need to be true to yourself and listen to yourself, because I think deep down we know, and my I was always trying, like, to try harder, if I just try harder, you know, things will get better, but there's part of me deep down that knew I was sort of trying harder for everybody else but myself. And when I left New York, I had given up everything I'd worked on, and in, you know, in hindsight, when I look back, I, it was in a way I sort of abandon all my dreams and hopes, and ultimately I don't think that's a good thing when you give up yourself for someone else. Michael Hingson  17:50 So, after you got married, what did you do? Where did you go? Speaker 1  17:54 Well, my ex-husband was a professional soccer player, so we ended up going around the United States, he played for a couple different teams, and I went to college, and I finished my degree at the University of Texas, and then I, I did a couple things, I was a flight attendant, and I eventually fell into real estate, and worked in real estate for a long, long time, but along the way, I, there was a, there was a point where I kind of really missed that young creative person that I had started out my life as, and I'd always loved books and lacher, and my undergraduate degree was in literary studies, and I started writing stories, and then at midlife went back to graduate school for a master's of fine arts in creative writing, and and started writing. So I was, I was always doing a bunch of things. I was a real estate broker, I was managing a company, and then I was, I was writing, and began writing novels on the side. Michael Hingson  18:58 What was your bachelor's degree in Speaker 1  19:00 literary studies. Michael Hingson  19:02 Oh, okay, Speaker 1  19:03 yeah. Michael Hingson  19:04 So, you never did get degrees in what either of your parents did. Speaker 1  19:09 No, no, no, Michael Hingson  19:10 you weren't that into math. Speaker 1  19:12 No, not at all. No, I always liked words, words. Michael Hingson  19:16 Yeah, I understand. I do pretty well with math, but by the same token, I've been learning more about words, having now written three books, and appreciate it. I also like to collaborate, so when I write, I generally write with someone. I think that the team approach works, at least it does for me, and there are a lot of people who don't use a second person on their team, other than their publishers, editors, and so on, but for me the collaborative way works, which is fine. Speaker 1  19:49 I've had a little bit more experience later now in my creative career, because I've, and maybe we'll talk about this in a little bit, but I've started producing storytelling shows, so I. Work with the storytellers in helping them in their stories, so that's a much more collaborative exercise, and one one I really enjoy. Michael Hingson  20:09 Yeah, well, well, let's, let's, you know, we could talk about it now. What the heck, we don't have to do this in a linear way. Tell me about storytelling. What you think about storytelling. Why is it so important, and so on. Speaker 1  20:25 Well, for me, so the storytelling that I do, I'm working on this project called Love Notes, which real stories by real people about real love, and that came to me during the darkest, loneliest period of my life. It was, you know, after the disillusion of this 30 year marriage, and I was really despondent and, and disillusioned, and thinking, you know, like, does love even exist, and what does it look like, and I just, I just really didn't even believe in love anymore, and being in the storytelling community, I produced some storytelling shows, stories about motherhood. I put out a call to writers and actors and just regular people to share their true love stories, and so from that, people started sending me all these true stories, they had to be 1000 words or fewer, and so to answer your question, like, what does storytelling do in, in this case, I think story, storytelling, it's different than other mediums, like the personal essay or the novel, it's, it's a, it's a testament, it's a first person testament, and what's really great when you see the different storytelling communities around the country is anybody can do it, and so that's part of the beauty of storytelling. Michael Hingson  22:00 I think the key is, though, it has to be a genuine story. Making it up isn't the same thing, Speaker 1  22:06 right? And that's the difference, right? Because people will write a short story or story thing, but in storytelling, you're exactly right, Michael. It needs to be a true story, and that's what makes it so compelling, and I think so relatable, is that people can see themselves in other people's stories, so like in my case it was a way, it was like the evidence, the proof of love, like what it really looks like as it walks around in the world, Michael Hingson  22:36 so that's it, sounds like changed your view of love, and that you believe in love again. I Speaker 1  22:46 do, I do, and it's it, and even like during the first season of Love Notes, because we do an off-Broadway show here in Manhattan, and we have an anthology, a companion anthology. I remember that first year, like some I'd wake up in the morning and just like be not despondent but upset, like, oh, like this doesn't happen. And then literally there was like a little voice in my head that would say, oh well, don't you remember Stacey's story or Sarah's story? And it was like just like the the universe providing this evidence and this this proof and just hearing enough stories and story after story, yeah, it really did fortify my belief in love, and that love is for everyone, and it comes like from all these different angles, and when you least expect it, and it shows up in so many different forms. Michael Hingson  23:43 Yeah, well, and I think there's there's a lot of merit to that. I know when I was writing this last book that I wrote, which is entitled Live Like a Guide Dog: True Stories from a Blind Man and His Dogs, about being brave, overcoming adversity, and moving forward in faith, I spent a lot of time talking about each of the eight guide dogs that I've had and the lessons I learned from them, and also using those lessons in the book to show the importance of different aspects of what happens in our lives, but I have maintained for years I've learned a lot more about life and learned about leadership and teamwork. I've learned a lot more from these dogs than I ever learned from all the experts in the world, and that's primarily because we'll have some interesting observations. One, I allow my dogs to express themselves, but they also learn what the rules are. Because dogs really want to hear from humans, they want humans to set the rules, they want humans to be the pack leaders, by and large, and they want humans to be the ones to say this is what I expect, but when. That relationship forms, and it forms well. There's it's second to none, and you learn so much. Dogs love unconditionally, but they don't trust unconditionally, but they're open to trust, and we're not. And we really should learn to be more open to trust, and just so many different kinds of things. It has really given me a lot of pause to think over the past several years, while we were writing the book, and, and I, and I think about it now. There are a lot of neat stories in there that really ultimately are love stories in one way or another, and I think that makes a lot of sense. Speaker 1  25:36 Oh, that's so.. I'm actually a new dog owner, well, not too new, I.. I'm for the first time in my adult life have a dog, and I just.. it's such a wonderful, like, experience, and it's opened me up to, yeah, like so many different levels of love. Michael Hingson  25:53 Yeah, dogs want to establish a relationship, but as I said, I don't think that they are open to just trusting they do pretty much love unconditionally, unless something just totally traumatizes them. But trusting is a different story, and that's a trust that has to be earned both ways. It's not just us earning their trust, but they're earning our trust, and the people who really take that to heart and develop that relationship and think about it, find that they have a bond that's really second to none. It's as close to knit a team as you could ever find. Speaker 1  26:35 That's beautiful. Michael Hingson  26:37 So, it's a lot of fun. What kind of dog do you have? Speaker 1  26:40 I have, well, because remember I'm in a small New York City. I have a teacup poodle. Michael Hingson  26:46 Oh, so it isn't a Saint Bernard, okay? Speaker 1  26:49 And she's, she's an eye, she's a, she's a character. She, she acts like she's a cross between a teacup and a pit bull when she's in the, when she's out on the street. She does not like she's a scaredy cat on the street. She would prefer to be carried when we're on the street, so she's got sort of a split personality, but she, and she doesn't take too many people. So, just like you were saying, I can identify with that, like the whole trust element, and she's, she only trusts a few people. Michael Hingson  27:25 Yeah, well, trust isn't something that happens overnight. I've maintained for a long time. I think it takes a good year for me when I am meeting a new guide dog. I think it takes a good year for the trust to become so seamless that we really know what each other is thinking, and I think that we really do understand each other. There's a lot of empathy there, Speaker 1  27:52 that's really great. So, Michael Hingson  27:53 I think it's, it is kind of cool. Well, so, but going back to you getting married and all that, so you gave up for a while a lot of your dreams, that that must have, whether it was conscious or not, been a little bit frustrating. Speaker 1  28:08 Yeah, and I didn't realize it at the time. It was only later, like when my younger self sort of came calling, and I had given up a lot for this marriage that didn't really turn out the way I had hoped, and yeah, so writing was a way for me to find myself again, was not only a refuge during that time in my life when I wasn't really happy, but it also really opened up that whole creative part of myself, which felt really good, and it's, you know, it's been something now I've been working on for the last decade and a half, Michael Hingson  28:57 but it sounds like you didn't really, or at least consciously you didn't really know that you were unhappy. Speaker 1  29:03 No, I didn't, and that's a really interesting observation that that you make, because you know, I had my children, I loved my children, and I loved being a mom, and I had a really fulfilling career, but there was something missing, you know, and I wasn't really able to put my finger on that until I started writing, and then it became more and more obvious that, yeah, this is the part that was missing, this, you know, who you had thought you were going to be a creative, you, you had denied that, and you're right, so it wasn't really conscious, but, like, once I sort of, it started to become more noticeable to me, then it sort of came back with a vengeance. Michael Hingson  29:49 How much writing did you do before you got married? Speaker 1  29:53 Before.. well, I really didn't, because I was more in the.. I read a lot. Lot, and, but I was more into that, the acting, so I didn't really, I mean, I would write some really bad poetry, but not anything. I know some writers will say they were writing from the time they were six years old, but I, it didn't come to me till much later. Michael Hingson  30:16 So, what got you started back writing after your marriage ended, what was the trigger that made that happen? Speaker 1  30:25 Writing and the marriage, it was like the last 10 years of, of my marriage, I was writing, and it's, I sort of wrote my, my way out of the marriage in a way, but what was the trigger, and I do remember there wasn't an absolute trigger. I had a friend who had self-published a book. Michael Hingson  30:45 Okay, Speaker 1  30:46 I was like a friend of a friend. And one afternoon, it was a summer afternoon, we were over at her house because she had been hired to go to an elementary school and do a presentation, and so we were brainstorming and about what she could do at this presentation, and I went home from that, and I was like, I felt like so energized again. I was like, wow, well, I could do this, I could write a children's book, and so I sat down, and I wrote this book called Beatrice Bumblebee is busy. I didn't know anything about publishing, and I thought to myself, okay, well, now I'll just write it, and I'll send it to publishers, and I'll get it published. Well, it was promptly rejected by every single publisher, and I knew nothing about the publishing that point, but it was enough of a spark. And then I did start just sort of playing around, and I had this scene in my head of a girl, like a young girl who's been in a car accident, and she's on the side of the road losing consciousness, and she has this terrible secret that she wants to tell her boyfriend, and this, the scene, it was like a dark, wet Pennsylvania night, and it was an autumn, and like, I could see the mist, and so I had written this scene, and I remember giving it to my father, who was a huge reader, and he's like, well, Heather, this is really good. Why don't you keep trying to work on it? And, and so I did, and I love school, so I was like, well, I don't know how to write, like, how can I learn how to write? And then I sort of discovered, oh, well, there's these MFA programs, and so I ended up applying, and and going back to school, and then it was in my MFA program, where I wrote the first draft of my first novel, but yeah, so the actual trigger was a friend who had published a self-published a book, and it really kind of triggered something in me. Michael Hingson  32:38 Whatever happened to Beatrice Bumblebee is busy, Speaker 1  32:41 she is in a drawer, but I do keep.. I have here on my bulletin board. I'll pull it down if we're on camera. I have this little bumblebee, it's like a rhinestone bumblebee that I keep stuck on my bulletin board as just a reminder that the address in my life. Michael Hingson  33:07 Well, are you ever going to publish it? Speaker 1  33:10 Oh, I don't think it's very good, Michael. Michael Hingson  33:12 Okay, well, maybe you should go back and rewrite it, but Speaker 1  33:16 then, and maybe if I have grandchildren someday, maybe I'll, I'll be, yeah, that's kind of interesting that you say that. Maybe I will go back and just look at it. It would be fun to look at it all these years later. Michael Hingson  33:32 Yeah, well, so you got rejected a whole bunch, which is a pretty common story. What did you learn from that? Speaker 1  33:42 Well, and I do, I do talks at different places, and one of the talks I say is I started with the, you know, Calvin Coolidge said most of humanity's problems can be solved with two simple words, press on, and and that's what I learned through the process. My first book was on submission for like 520 weeks before it finally found a publisher, and it was every degree of rejection that you can get when you're publishing, you know, I'm, and for people who understand the publishing hierarchy, you know, the coveted placement is to land a book deal with one of the big five traditional publishers, and then from there it works its way way down, and we had gotten close on some of the big fives and other places where we'd made it to acquisitions, and we finally ended up with a small indie publisher, but it took so long, and it was so soul crushing in a way, and not so much the first book, and the first book I was still like super, super hopeful, and then once it was published, it did go on, and it won the new. National Indy Excellence Award, and I kind of was always thinking of it as a, you know, a stepping stone, a stepping stone, and that the second book would, would land the big publishing deal, and the second book took just as long, and it ended up right back with the same publisher, so the rejection taught me, yeah, that you just need to keep going. I mean, sometimes people hit really easily, or you know, the way the wind's blowing that day, whatever's on trend or top of mind, and, and sometimes it doesn't, but you have to do it because you, you love it, and you're called to do it. Michael Hingson  35:46 When you were getting rejected, did you get any substantive feedback that helped, or do do publishers do much of that? Speaker 1  35:54 Well, actually, I did, especially on my second book, and on the first book, too, it depends how interested they are in the book, and I did have a couple that were pretty interested and gave what's called like an editorial letter, and oftentimes they won't even do that unless you're under contract, but I did have a couple that had liked it enough, so on my second book, especially my agent and I then took that information and did some like hard edits and rewrites, but that's not always the case. I mean, and I have a lot of friends who are also in the business, sometimes you don't get any, any feedback. Michael Hingson  36:39 So now all together, how many books have you written? Speaker 1  36:42 Well, I've written two, and then I've edited and curated the anthology, the Love Notes anthology, Michael Hingson  36:48 right? Speaker 1  36:49 Which, and I've written a small bit of that. Um, yeah, so I'd like to say three books. Michael Hingson  36:54 Are there more books in you? Okay, Speaker 1  36:58 for sure. We have, you know, we'll. well, first, the second, the second Love Notes edition, I'm definitely editing and curating the stories for that, and that's through a small publisher. And then I have been really sort of toying around with, like, what's my next book, and my first two books were young adult romance, mystery, and thriller, and I kind of think I'm done with that genre, so I have talked about an adult, adult fiction, or even a that would go kind of hand in hand with Love Notes, the my story type of book, you know, rebuilding after divorce and being on, you know, what the space that love notes came out of, and going on, you know, hundreds of dates, and what that, that looked like, but that's in a very sort of nebulous state. It Michael Hingson  37:54 will be fun to see what happens. You'll have to keep us all posted, Speaker 1  37:58 yeah, for sure. Michael Hingson  38:00 But you've, you've described your creative journey, your whole creative journey is basically transforming heartbreak into healing. Tell me more about that. Speaker 1  38:14 Yeah, like I touched on earlier, Love Notes came out as sort of this really dark, lonely time in my life. My 30 year marriage had ended. My children had both left for college, and I'd relocated to New York City. So I was living alone for the first time in my adult lifetime. I was 19 years old, and New York can be a really.. for as many people who live here, it can be a really lonely place. I was really, really starting over, and I started dating at midlife, is, you know, it's not for the faint of heart, and I was going on a lot of dates, and just really discouraged by the whole process, and, like, I had sort of mentioned earlier, that's where I kind of was like almost indignant, like you know, I want proof, like show me proof that that love is real, and and that's where this this call to like look for people's love stories came from, so I do say it, it truly came out of a place of of loneliness and darkness, and then hope, though, too. You know, I was hoping I wanted to, I wanted, I wanted the stories to give me proof. I wanted them to be the evidence, and then, and then that sort of became a calling that, well, then I want to share that with other people and give other people hope, and that's been the most gratifying part for me is when somebody like they come to the show and the shows are really great, these storytelling shows, and now I've started to franchise them, so we have them popping up in some other cities, and I've gone around to some of the other cities, in fact, if you have any listeners who. When I produce a love note show, but the audience members, they're like, "Oh, wow, this, this was.. they don't expect it, first of all, coming into it, and everybody walks out feeling good, and that is like so gratifying to me, that, like, you know, in this, in these like divisive times, that they can come to a show, they can recognize part of the human experience, and they can walk out feeling uplifted and Speaker 2  40:25 hopeful, and that some readers, Speaker 1  40:27 you know, in the book do that too, like having read the book, and someone will reach out and say, "Oh, well, that just really gave me hope. So, hope that answers the question a little bit. Michael Hingson  40:40 Does it? Does it? Does get so the two books that you've written are what the Valley Knows and The Lying Season. Tell me more about those. What the interesting titles, to say the least. Speaker 1  40:52 Yeah, okay, so the both books are they're not ones, they're not a sequel and a prequel, but I would call them a series, because they're both in this fictional town of Millington Valley, which is much like the small town I grew up in, the Oley Valley, and it's all set around this high school, so the peripheral characters in the book stay the same, like the English teacher and the principal, but the kids, you know, because kids are only in high school for four years at a time, so different kids kind of like move through both of the books, they're both mysteries or are thrillers, and they both have like a big kind of like moral question at their center, both sent it set in this Millington Valley, which is a small Pennsylvania town, Michael Hingson  41:45 right? And they're, they're for juveniles, primarily. You said, I think, right. Speaker 1  41:52 Well, they are. They'd be considered young adults. What the valley knows, that's told from three point of views: two kids, and then one of the kids' mothers, so it has a lot of crossover appeal. So you and that book originally started at six point of views, and that was when I was in graduate school, and I remember my professor saying to me, Well, Heather, that's that's just too ambitious to try to do for your first book, you need to cut it down, and, and just whoever's story has to be there, that's the point of view you, you include, and so it kind of fell into the young adult category by accident, but I have a lot of adult readers who, who it really resonates as well, Michael Hingson  42:43 yeah. You know, I know a lot of people say, especially the early ones, the Harry Potter books are for more young adults, and so on, but I certainly had no problem enjoying them as a full-fledged, real-life middle-aged adult. So I think there's a lot that we can learn by stretching and not necessarily just falling into the trap of reading one kind or, or one sort of book that's, oh, this is for more adults or this is more for for children. Think there's a lot to be learned all the way around. Speaker 1  43:17 I think you're, you're right, Michael, and that's it's kind of like a modern thing that we do, like classifying books as adult fiction, like when we think about Catcher in the Rye, like what would that be considered now? Because the protagonist is a young adult, would it be considered a young adult book? But yeah, that's a really great point that you're making. Michael Hingson  43:40 Well, so you, you wrote these books, and you said that, so they've been published, and I assume they're out there. Do you know if they're audio books also? Speaker 1  43:52 Well, yes, and but here's the thing, I, because I didn't get to pick the publisher, I mean, the, you know, I didn't get to pick the narrator, so the what they both, okay, so what the bally knows is narrated. Yes, I don't like the narrator's voice. I know that's a terrible thing to say, because I would love for people to go and listen to the audio book, but I don't know, and maybe it's just me. And then the second book the publisher actually used like an AI kind of, I don't know exactly how it works, and I didn't really even know it happened till I went on Amazon one day, I was like, oh, they made an audio book of this, and it was in like an AI voice, so, so the answer is yes. Both of them are on audiobook. Love Notes is not the other bar. Michael Hingson  44:49 It's interesting, I'm on several lists that deal with audio books, and so on, and I hear people talking or. Emailing on the list all the time, and what people have often said is nonfiction books that are not what they're necessarily as much into as fiction books, they don't mind it being an AI voice, but when they're reading good fiction, where they really want to be absorbed, AI and synthetic voices text to speech just doesn't do it, and in fact I buy into that. I agree with that. I don't think that we have yet gotten computer synthesized voices to really take the place of human readers, and I don't know that we ever totally will, because we're so used to what people sound like, but it is an interesting thing that does come up. Speaker 1  45:47 Yeah, I agree with you. Michael Hingson  45:50 So, I prefer human readers in general. I've never been as great a fan of having a synthetic voice. Nothing against computers, but they just don't talk as well as humans do. Speaker 1  46:03 No, I agree with you too. I much prefer the human voice. Michael Hingson  46:09 Well, so you, when did you start writing love notes? When did that really start coming to fruition? Speaker 1  46:17 Well, love notes. We're coming into our third off-Broadway season this Valentine's Day, so it started that would, so it was started in 22 Michael Hingson  46:27 Oh, yeah. Okay, Speaker 1  46:29 so it's a relatively young project. We're going into our third year, but I'm super excited. We just cast the show for this upcoming performance, and that's really exciting. We have, you know, a bunch of local New Yorkers, but then we also have about the cast is 12 members, and six of them are from other parts of the country, so it's, it's got a, you know, flavor from from from all over. Michael Hingson  46:57 Now, is Love Notes available in any way online, or is it strictly just the shows, and they're not recorded and disseminated in any way. The Speaker 1  47:06 the all-star show, which is Valentine's Day at Symphony Space in New York City, the APM show is live streamed. Yeah, so it can be enjoyed from anywhere in the world. Michael Hingson  47:19 Okay, but outside of that one being live streamed, are there recordings of any of the shows that are out there for people to hear? Speaker 1  47:28 There are on my website, actually. Both the 2023 show and the 2024 show are available for resale. I think it's like $15 and you can, you can watch it's like it's a great, like date night kind of thing to watch the Love Notes show. Michael Hingson  47:48 Okay. Well, so from all that you have heard and seen and interacted with in doing Love Notes, how do you define real love today? Speaker 1  48:01 Oh that's it. Oh, Michael Hingson  48:03 that for a question out of left field. Yeah, Speaker 1  48:06 that's a great question. How do I define real love? So, I think real love shows up in a lot of different ways, and it.. and what's interesting in love notes, is I've seen all sorts of examples of it. I've seen the type of real love that ignites people when they're young, you know. Speaker 3  48:31 We'll love Speaker 1  48:31 that's the other thing people will say, "Oh, well, you were too young, that's why it didn't work out. But I don't think that's necessarily true. I think I think a little bit sometimes is luck of the draw, but the I've seen examples of people who met when they were 20 years old, and they've stayed together their entire lives, and that shows up in commitment and the ability to grow up together and to grow and evolve together, so I think real love shows up like that, but I've also seen real love, like the second time around type of love, and that sort of love, where people really need to be able to integrate their past and understand they're both two people carrying bags, and now they're going to carry those bags together, and so that shows up in a different way. Real love, and I've even seen it love showing up for people like in their 80s, third time around, or having never had partnered, and finding a partner very late in life, and that shows up in a whole different way, that's absolutely real too, but I think at the core of all types of real love is one, the ability to both people have to want the relationship, and they have. To be willing to work for the relationship, it's not just like what I want or you want, but it's oftentimes if they can ask the question, like what's the problem, and how is are we a team against the problem, or to be able to solve the problem, and I think that's sort of like the realist type of love that's out there, Michael Hingson  50:26 and I would, would also say it goes back to something we talked about earlier with, with dogs, dogs are are very much open to and do love unconditionally, and when we develop that kind of a relationship, it's as strong as any other kind of relationship that we can develop. When both sides of that relationship sense it and know it, it creates a bond that's, as I said earlier, second to none. Speaker 1  50:58 Yeah, that's a really great way of putting Michael Hingson  51:02 it. I would, I would not want to do anything to betray my guide dog or any of the guide dogs that I've had, but I've learned how to create those teams, and I think that's very important. One thing that that sticks in my mind dealing with dogs is when I lived in Northern California, we were very close to the Marin Humane Society, which is one of the more famous organizations of that type in the world. We were talking to one of the people at the Marin Humane Society one day, and they were talking about the fact that they're growing in class sizes and growing in the number of classes that they have to offer, but what they also point out is that 90% of the training isn't training the dog, it's training the human, which is really true. There's so much that humans don't really work to develop the relationship that they should, and that if they really truly understood it, it would, it would be a whole lot different relationship that they would experience, Speaker 1  52:05 yeah, that's a really nice way of looking at it. Michael Hingson  52:10 Well, so you have love notes that are growing by loops and bounds in a lot of ways, and you have, how many different places are doing the shows now? Speaker 1  52:24 Well, so far we have Indianapolis, Chicago, Redding, Pennsylvania, and then we have another Pennsylvania city, Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and we're in talks right now with Atlanta, Georgia, and Tampa, Florida. Michael Hingson  52:42 Wow, so it's growing, Speaker 1  52:45 it's growing, it's starting to spread. We're starting to spread some love. Michael Hingson  52:51 I get it. What do you think about that? Speaker 1  52:54 I think it's great. Like, I hope I'd love to see one in every city. Such a nice event that really brings the community together. Michael Hingson  53:04 So, how often do the shows run? Is it just like on Valentine's Day, or do they go throughout the whole year? Speaker 1  53:10 It can be any time of year, and it's usually just a one-day event. Sometimes there's multiple shows on one day, but yeah, it's just a one day. Oftentimes the local producer will partner with a local charity, so we try to give back in that way too, and they can choose the charity they want, or, or sometimes they're trying to fund like a scholarship fund, or or something like that. I do encourage that, and and we have like a mastermind group among the producers just trying to support each other as creative entrepreneurs. Michael Hingson  53:46 Well, you're you're seeing a lot of success with it. What kind of surprises have you experienced? This must be kind of a thrill, and a lot of, a lot of surprises for you. Speaker 1  53:58 Well, one of the surprises. well, I'm not surprised by it anymore, but I, I can, I'm certain, always surprised when I have a cast member who, at the very last minute, you know, they've gone through all the rehearsals, all the prep work, all the editing, and then at the very last second they pull out of the show, I've had that happen each show, so now I know how to plan for it, and know how to prepare, you know, producers for it. But yeah, that, that's always surprising to me. Michael Hingson  54:34 It's an adventure, isn't it? Speaker 1  54:35 Sure is. Yeah, gotta sing quickly on your feet. Michael Hingson  54:39 Yeah, you definitely have to do that. Tell us a little bit about Socroc, the company you and your brother formed, and what that's all about. Speaker 1  54:47 Sure, well, my brother was a professional soccer player, and he, when he retired, he moved to Manhattan, thinking he was going to be an actor, and as most actors. Oh, they need a second job to support themselves. Yeah, so became a personal trainer, and he was personal training, and some of his clients got word that he'd been a professional soccer player, and they begged him, they're like, can you teach our kids soccer? So it kind of happened by accident, and just a few balls and cones in Central Park, teaching soccer to little kids, and over the years it's grown and grown and grown and grown. We're in our like 20th year, and so during it was like maybe five years ago, he, it just got out of hand, like it was getting too big, and he needed help, and that was when I had gone through the divorce, and I like explained I'd been in business before, and I wanted a change, so he offered me, you know, a position to come and help him and run, so I run the business side of the soccer, and he runs the soccer side, and we're all throughout Manhattan, we, we do public classes in the parks and playgrounds, and then, like, now in the winter time, we rent space all around the city, and then we also partner with private schools and public schools throughout the city, and we do birthday parties and personal training, and we're starting a kids of all abilities program, and that's that's like our new initiative right now, and and then the spring we're expanding into actually into basketball too, BB Rock, we're calling Michael Hingson  56:29 it. Oh, that's cool. Well, you're doing a lot of different things, you speak, you're an author, you're an educator. We haven't talked about, I guess it's you work with Speaker 1  56:39 SUNY. I teach at the City University of New York, which is part of SUNY, and that work I really love. Yeah, Michael Hingson  56:47 tell, tell me about that. Then, Speaker 1  56:49 so they have an initiative, it's through the Manhattan Educational Opportunity Center, and SUNY provides grants for adult students returning who need to get their high school epilepticy, their GED. So I teach writing the writing section of the GED, and this I - these are the students I like the most, and I've taught at all levels, from freshman comp all the way up to graduate level MFA, and it's the GED adult student that I enjoy the most. So, I'll, when I, when I'm done with you, I actually will zoom up to Harlem, and I'll be teaching GED time tonight. Michael Hingson  57:35 Okay. Well, you're doing all of these different things. How do you keep yourself grounded, and how do you keep the creative juices going? Speaker 1  57:44 Well, that can sometimes be a challenge. Michael Hingson  57:46 I bet, Speaker 1  57:47 but I do. I exercise. That's one thing I really, I love to exercise, and I'm getting better at just taking time for myself, but I also feel like what I do isn't work, like I enjoy what I do, so I always try to bring a sense of gratitude to each day in that way. Michael Hingson  58:13 Yeah, well, and taking time for yourself is is important to do, and and now you have a teacup poodle to share it with, and I'll bet you guys have some interesting conversations. Speaker 1  58:26 Yeah, we sure do. She's a cutie, she's just lying on the little chair right over here. Michael Hingson  58:33 Yeah, my, my dog is over here on his bed, so he, he, he monitors me. Speaker 1  58:41 Yeah, she's been really good, because sometimes when I'm on the Zoom like this, she, she'll start to bark. She doesn't like paying attention to somebody else. Michael Hingson  58:48 Well, one of these days we'll have to end up in Manhattan and come and meet her. Speaker 1  58:54 That sounds Michael Hingson  58:55 be kind of fun. Speaker 1  58:57 That sure would. Michael Hingson  58:58 Well, so tell me, what's next for you? What do you envision going forward from here? Speaker 1  59:04 Well, my hope is actually, I would love, because there have so much fodder now, all these different stories, love stories. My hope is to launch a podcast, a Love Notes podcast that would feature the storyteller and their story, and then I would do an interview of the story behind the story, because people always have questions. They'll hear a story, or they'll read the story, and it's really short. It's like 700 or 1000 words, and they'll always want to know, like, well, what happened to them, or how did that end up. So I envisioned this podcast of love notes, real stories by real people about real love, and that would be like the the meat of it, and then they're at the end of each one, there'd be like a love letter, and people could write love letters that would be shared on the podcast, and tell Michael Hingson  59:55 me, Speaker 1  59:56 you know, like, dear Michael, this is why I love you, and then it would be a. Letter, so that's that's I'd like to see more satellite cities. I'd like to get the next edition of the book out, and then launch the podcast by Trifecta. Michael Hingson  1:00:13 Lots going on, needless to say. Well, if people want to reach out to you, talk about creating their own love notes, or as you said, you'd love to find people who want to help produce in various cities. How do they do that? Speaker 1  1:00:27 Well, probably the easiest thing to do is first, if they just want to learn more about the project in general, would just be to check out the website, and that's at www dot Love Notes worldwide.com and from there, then you can, you can get a hold of me, but I'll give my email address also, it's Heather at Heather Christy, C H R I s t i e books.com so either just hit the website or send me an email directly, and I, yeah, I'd love to talk to anybody who's got a story they want to share, or anyone who's thinking like maybe they'd love to bring a love notes to their community. Michael Hingson  1:01:19 Cool. Well, I hope people will reach out and that you'll get lots of interest from our podcast. It's a, it's a fun thing, and I hope that people will respond. So, all of you out there, email Heather. Speaker 1  1:01:34 That sounds great. And my last little plug: if anybody would love to watch the Love Notes show on January, february 14 for Valentine's Day. You can find that information on the website too. Michael Hingson  1:01:48 What I'm trying to remember, what day of the week february 14 is going to be in 2026 Speaker 1  1:01:53 It's a Michael Hingson  1:01:54 Saturday, great day to Speaker 1  1:01:57 do it. So you can watch it, and actually the live stream will stay live for a week, so if you're not able to watch it that night, you can watch it during the week. Michael Hingson  1:02:05 Oh, cool. Well, I hope people will do that, and I want to thank you for being here. But I want to thank all of you out there for being a part of this today. Heather has had a lot of interesting things to say, and I hope that you'll help her and help yourself by helping her to be more successful. I'd love to hear from you. We'd love to hear your thoughts. Please feel free to email me at Michael H i@accessibe.com that's M I C H A E L H I at Accessi B A C C E S S I B e.com We'd love it and would greatly appreciate it if wherever you are listening or watching the podcast, if you'll give us a five star review, but also, or a rating, but also give us a review. We love reviews, we appreciate reviews, and we really value all the people who have done it so far, and we ask that you do it again, or you do it for the first time. So, please let us know what you think by writing reviews. If you know anyone who ought to be a guest, we'd love it if you'd let us know. Heather, you as well. Anyone that you think ought to be a guest on Unstoppable Mindset, we would really love to be introduced. My belief is everyone has stories to tell, so don't be shy. We'd love to hear from you. But Heather, once again, I want to thank you for being here. This has been absolutely wonderful. Speaker 1  1:03:26 Thank you so much, Michael. It's been so much fun to talk to you this afternoon. Michael Hingson  1:03:32 What if the biggest thing holding you back isn't what's in front of you, but rather what you believe? Welcome to Unstoppable Mindset, where inclusion, diversity, and the unexpected meet. I'm your host, Michael Hingson, speaker, author, and advocate for inclusion and possibilities. This podcast explores how the beliefs we carry shape the way we live, lead, and connect with others each week. I talk with people who challenge assumptions, face adversity head on, and show what's possible when we choose curiosity over fear. Together, we focus on mindset, resilience, and the small shifts that lead to meaningful change. Let's get started, 1:04:24 I.

In this episode of the Project Narrative Podcast, Jim Phelan and Maria Mäkelä discuss a short story by Julio Cortázar, “Axolotl,” published in Spanish in 1956. Mäkelä will be reading the English translation by Paul Blackburn, published in  Cortázar’s translated collection End of the Game and Other Stories, published in 1978. Mäkelä is Senior Lecturer in Comparative Literature and Head of the degree program in Literary Studies at the University of Tampere, Finland. Mäkelä’s work in narrative theory has ranged widely across fictional and non-fictional narratives, literary narratives, non-literary narratives, and many other things. With Paul Dawson, Mäkelä co-edited The Routledge Companion to Narrative Theory. Currently, Mäkelä is the Consortium Principal Investigator for a project funded by the Research Council of Finland, Authors of the Story Economy: Narrative and Digital Capital in the 21st Century Literary Field. Mäkelä is also a stalwart member of the International Society for the Study of Narrative, and served as the society’s President in 2019.

 A brief take on subfields in African American literary studies, showing how areas like the Harlem Renaissance, Richard Wright studies, the Black Arts Movement, and Toni Morrison Studies emerged over time to organize research, debates, and scholarly communities. Script by Howard Rambsy IIRead by Kassnadra Timm

J.J. and Dr. Vivian Liska border on the sublime in their discussion of the life and thought of this German-Jewish thinker. If you or your business are interested in sponsoring an episode or mini-series, please reach out at  podcasts@torahinmotion.org Follow us on Bluesky @jewishideaspod.bsky.social for updates and insights!Please rate and review the the show in the podcast app of your choice.We welcome all complaints and compliments at podcasts@torahinmotion.org  For more information visit torahinmotion.org/podcastsVivian Liska is a Professor of German literature and Director of the Institute of Jewish Studies at the University of Antwerp, Belgium. She has published extensively on literary theory, German modernism, and German-Jewish authors and thinkers. Liska's recent books include Giorgio Agamben's Empty Messianism (2008), in German, translated into Hebrew (Resling 2010), When Kafka Says We. Uncommon Communities in German-Jewish Literature (2008) and Fremde Gemeinschaft. Deutsch-jüdische Literatur der Moderne (2011). A Hebrew translation of this book is in the making with Hakibbutz Hameuchad. In 2012, she was awarded the Cross of Honor for Sciences and the Arts from the Republic of Austria. She is the (co-)editor of numerous books, among them the two-volume ICLA publication Modernism (2007), which was awarded the Prize of the Modernist Studies Association in 2008; Contemporary Jewish Writing in Europe: A Guide (2007); Theodor Herzl between Europe and Zion (2007); What does the Veil Know? (2009); The German-Jewish Experience Revisited (2015); and Kafka and the Universal (2016). She is the editor of the book series “Perspectives on Jewish Texts and Contexts” (De Gruyter, Berlin), co-editor of the Yearbook of the Society for European-Jewish Literature, and arcadia. International Journal of Literary Studies. Her most recent book German-Jewish Thought and its Afterlife (Indiana University Press) was published in 2017. 

In this episode, producer Maia Harris and co-host Emily Stuchbery say goodbye to The SpokenWeb Podcast and introduce the all new Literary Listening Podcast.With contributions from past team members, a sneak peak at VOLUME!: Sonic Scholarship in Literary Studies, this episode celebrates the 6 seasons of The SpokenWeb Podcast and ushers listeners into the new project on the same RSS feed, Literary Listening.Special thanks to those who contributed their voice to this special episode:Jason CamlotKatherine McLeodHannah McGregorStacey CopelandKelly CubonMiranda EastwoodKate MoffattJudith Burr Thank you to TJ MacPherson and Lou Raskin for help in the booth.

The work of Maria Janion, one of Eastern Europe's most profound intellectuals, who witnessed the rise of authoritarian nationalism in Poland, German occupation during World War II, Soviet control, and Poland's uneasy integration into the West, explores this fine line. Janion's writings have been gathered by Marta Figlerowicz into the recently published volume The Bad Child: A Maria Janion Reader, and Figlerowicz is joined here in conversation with Noah Feldman to talk about Janion's writing, which offers sharp insights into how societies develop and assert their identities and histories—often at the cost of the people. There are clear parallels here to current conditions and events. Please note that this episode was recorded in October 2025.Maria Janion (1926–2020) was the greatest Polish leftist intellectual of her generation. The author of twenty-three books and hundreds of articles and essays, she mentored and inspired several generations of Eastern European scholars and political activists. During her life, Janion held appointments at several Polish academic institutions, including the University of Gdańsk and the Institute of Literary Studies in Warsaw.Marta Figlerowicz is professor of comparative literature at Yale University. She is a Guggenheim Fellow and author of Flat Protagonists and Spaces of Feeling as well as more than a hundred articles, reviews, and essays. Her translations from Polish have appeared in PMLA and The Paris Review.Noah Feldman is the Arthur Kingsley Porter University Professor at Harvard University. Feldman is author of ten books, including To Be a Jew Today, and host of the podcast Deep Background with Noah Feldman.Episode references:Adam MickiewiczOlga TokarczukEdward SaidIsaiah BerlinPraise for the book:“Maria Janion's writing is foundational to so many currents of contemporary Central European thought—around nations and nationalism, gender and genre, everyday politics and the political writ large—that her invisibility in English has long struck those of us privileged to know her work as a tragedy, if not a crime. This book belongs on the shelf of every humanist.”—Benjamin Paloff, author of Worlds Apart“The remarkable creativity, energy, and erudition of Maria Janion shine forth in these essays.”—Sianne Ngai, University of ChicagoThe Bad Child: A Maria Janion Reader, edited by Marta Figlerowicz, available from University of Minnesota Press. Thank you for listening.

Joseph Turner is a PhD student in the English Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, specializing in the dialogue between continental and Japanese philosophical traditions. His dissertation explores the development of a political ontology that bridges Nishitani Keiji's concept of emptiness with Jean-Luc Nancy's shared ontology of "being-with."He holds an MA in Literary Studies from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and has published on Jean Baudrillard's work. Joseph has presented at numerous academic conferences on philosophers, including Baudrillard, Giorgio Agamben, Nishitani Keiji, and Jean-Luc Nancy. His research contributes to cross-cultural philosophical dialogue and offers new perspectives on political ontology that transcend frameworks of predetermined political antagonisms. Based in Madison, Wisconsin, Joseph works at the intersection of Eastern and Western philosophical traditions, bringing attention to underexplored thinkers and fostering promising theoretical frameworks.He also works with Incite Seminars, where he is currently co-teaching a seminar on cybernetics with his friend and colleague Matthew Stanley and will be organizing a class on an introduction to political ontologies soon after.---Become part of the Hermitix community:Hermitix Twitter - ⁠⁠ / hermitixpodcast⁠⁠ Hermitix Discord - ⁠⁠ / discord Support Hermitix:Hermitix Subscription - ⁠⁠https://hermitix.net/subscribe/⁠⁠ Patreon - ⁠⁠ www.patreon.com/hermitix⁠⁠ Donations: - ⁠⁠https://www.paypal.me/hermitixpod⁠⁠Hermitix Merchandise - ⁠⁠http://teespring.com/stores/hermitix-2⁠⁠Bitcoin Donation Address: 3LAGEKBXEuE2pgc4oubExGTWtrKPuXDDLKEthereum Donation Address: 0xfd2bbe86d6070004b9Cbf682aB2F25170046A996

A brief take on how African American literary knowledge has long circulated through sound as well as print, showing how Remarkable Receptions extends that oral tradition by calling listeners into an audio archive of Black literary history.Written by Howard Rambsy IIRead by Kassandra Timm

Ellen returns to talk about her book “The Bitch Slap of Truth”, maintaining attention in the rise of AI, maximizing LinkedIn, and much more! Ellen Melko Moore is a social selling expert who has worked with hundreds of service-minded entrepreneurs to create compelling and powerful brands through remarkable content. She got her B.A. and M.A. in Literary Studies from Northwestern University in Chicago, then taught creative and persuasive writing at the University of Denver.

 A brief take on how recent efforts to dismantle diversity, equity, and inclusion programs threaten the institutional support and long-term viability of African American literary studies. Script by Howard Rambsy IIRead by Kassandra Timm

In this episode, we delve into the environmental toll of the ongoing war in Ukraine. Comparing the impacts with our multiple climate disasters, we have witnessed how environmental destruction has dramatically altered our understanding of home, place, and belonging. To trace ways in which ecological grief is echoed and reckoned with across these different contexts, EcoJustice Radio shares the Thomas Mann House presentation of a conversation between Darya Tsymbalyuk (University of Chicago) and Ursula K. Heise (UCLA). Support the Podcast via PayPal https://www.paypal.com/donate/?hosted_button_id=LBGXTRM292TFC&source=url Tsymbalyuk's recent book, ‘Ecocide in Ukraine', highlights the devastating impact of the conflict on Ukraine's ecosystems and landscapes. From pollution and destruction of habitats to the emotional connections of locals to their environment, this episode sheds light on the often-overlooked ecological consequences of war. Drawing connections between Ukrainian experiences, the scarred lands of the Pacific Palisades, and beyond, Tsymbalyuk and Heise discuss the loss of cherished places and species to examine the role of storytelling and the cultural imaginations in ways of inhabiting the damaged Earth. For an extended interview and other benefits, become an EcoJustice Radio patron at https://www.patreon.com/ecojusticeradio Ecocide in Ukraine Book: https://www.politybooks.com/bookdetail?book_slug=ecocide-in-ukraine-the-environmental-cost-of-russias-war--9781509562497 Darya Tsymbalyuk [https://daryatsymbalyuk.com/] is an interdisciplinary scholar, and her practice includes writing and image-making. Most of Darya's work lies at the intersection of environmental humanities and artistic research. She is a recipient of the Mary Zirin Prize from the Association of Women in Slavic Studies (2023), and the author of multiple articles in environmental humanities. Her book “Ecocide in Ukraine: The Environmental Cost of Russia's War” from Polity Press was published in 2025. Darya serves as an Assistant Professor at the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and the Committee on Environment, Geography, and Urbanization (CEGU), University of Chicago. Ursula K. Heise [https://english.ucla.edu/people-faculty/heise-ursula-k/] holds the Marcia H. Howard Term Chair in Literary Studies in the Department of English and the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at UCLA. She is co-founder and current Director of the Lab for Environmental Narrative Strategies (LENS). Her books include, among others, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (Oxford University Press, 2008) and Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species (University of Chicago Press, 2016). Jack Eidt is an urban planner, environmental journalist, and climate organizer, as well as award-winning fiction writer. He is Co-Founder of SoCal 350 Climate Action and Executive Producer of EcoJustice Radio. He writes a column on PBS SoCal called High & Dry [https://www.pbssocal.org/people/high-dry]. He is also Founder and Publisher of WilderUtopia [https://wilderutopia.com], a website dedicated to the question of Earth sustainability, finding society-level solutions to environmental, community, economic, transportation and energy needs. Podcast Website: http://ecojusticeradio.org/ Podcast Blog: https://www.wilderutopia.com/category/ecojustice-radio/ Support the Podcast: Patreon https://www.patreon.com/ecojusticeradio PayPal https://www.paypal.com/donate/?hosted_button_id=LBGXTRM292TFC&source=url Executive Producer and Host: Jack Eidt Engineer and Original Music: Blake Quake Beats Episode 264

As part of Classics Week, Professor of Literary Studies at Goucher College and co-curator Juliette Wells talks about "A Lively Mind: Jane Austen at 250", the new exhibit at The Morgan Library & Museum celebrating the beloved author's life and legacy. The show brings together rare manuscripts, personal letters, and objects from Austen's home in Chawton, England, along with items from collections around the world. Wells reflects on Austen's enduring cultural influence and why her novels continue to resonate with readers today. The exhibit is on view through September 14.

Rostyslav Semkiv is Associate Professor, Department of Literary Studies, National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy. Since 2004, Director of the Smoloskyp Publishing House. His scientific articles have been published in professional periodicals, the Krytyka journal and the Dzerkalo Tyzhnia newspaper, and his reviews are published on the LitAccent literary portal and in The Ukrainian Week magazine. Semkiv has translated fiction and non-fiction books, and is the author of several non-fiction books. Member of the Ukrainian PEN Centre. At the 10th International Book Arsenal Festival, he curated the focus theme—OPTIMISTS SKEPTICS.----------LINKS:https://x.com/rsemkivhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/rostyslav-semkiv-120a2517/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2kPcBJ6ZL0https://artarsenal.in.ua/en/knyzhkovij-arsenal/chlen-komandy/tanya-rodionova-2/----------DESCRIPTION:The Evolution of Ukrainian Identity and Literature: An Interview with Rostyslav Semkiv Literary CriticIn this episode, we delve into an insightful discussion with Rostyslav Semkiv, a distinguished Ukrainian literary critic. Hosted in Odesa, the conversation traverses the complexities of Ukrainian literature, the formation of Ukrainian identity, and the weaponization of literature by Russia. Sim sheds light on his extensive career as an associate professor at Kyiv Mohyla Academy and his role as a director of a small publishing house focusing on historical memoirs. They explore pivotal themes in Ukrainian literature, the impact of Soviet and Russian propaganda, the significance of literary freedom, and the resilience and identity of the Ukrainian people, especially amidst current geopolitical tensions. This episode offers a rich perspective on the battle between democracy and totalitarianism as reflected in literature and culture.----------CHAPTERS:00:00 Introduction and Guest Background02:18 The Role of Literature in Ukrainian Identity06:43 Russian Propaganda and Historical Narratives09:53 The Evolution of Literature in Post-Soviet States15:37 The Impact of War on Literature and Identity18:28 Comparing Ukrainian and Russian Literature29:08 Themes in Ukrainian Literature35:30 European Influence and Aspirations39:53 Conclusion and Final Thoughts----------SUPPORT THE CHANNEL:https://www.buymeacoffee.com/siliconcurtainhttps://www.patreon.com/siliconcurtain----------TRUCK FUNDRAISER - GET A SILICON CURTAIN NAFO PATCH:Together with our friends at LIFT99 Kyiv Hub (the NAFO 69th Sniffing Brigade), we are teaming up to provide 2nd Battalion of 5th SAB with a pickup truck that they need for their missions. With your donation, you're not just sending a truck — you're standing with Ukraine.https://www.help99.co/patches/nafo-silicon-curtain-communityWhy NAFO Trucks Matter: Ukrainian soldiers know the immense value of our NAFO trucks and buses. These vehicles are carefully selected, produced between 2010 and 2017, ensuring reliability for harsh frontline terrain. Each truck is capable of driving at least 20,000 km (12,500 miles) without major technical issues, making them a lifeline for soldiers in combat zones.https://www.help99.co/patches/nafo-silicon-curtain-community----------TRUSTED CHARITIES ON THE GROUND:Save Ukrainehttps://www.saveukraineua.org/Superhumans - Hospital for war traumashttps://superhumans.com/en/UNBROKEN - Treatment. Prosthesis. Rehabilitation for Ukrainians in Ukrainehttps://unbroken.org.ua/Come Back Alivehttps://savelife.in.ua/en/Chefs For Ukraine - World Central Kitchenhttps://wck.org/relief/activation-chefs-for-ukraineUNITED24 - An initiative of President Zelenskyyhttps://u24.gov.ua/Serhiy Prytula Charity Foundationhttps://prytulafoundation.orgNGO “Herojam Slava”https://heroiamslava.org/kharpp - Reconstruction project supporting communities in Kharkiv and Przemyślhttps://kharpp.com/NOR DOG Animal Rescuehttps://www.nor-dog.org/home/----------

SummaryThis "farewell" podcast episode was recorded live at the SpokenWeb Institute on May 17, 2025, at the University of British Columbia Okanagan campus, Kelowna, BC. Producers Nick Beauchesne and Chelsea Miya, with host Maia Harris, lead an audio-visual journey exploring the roots and evolution of SpokenWeb's Symposia and Institutes from 2019 through 2025."The SpokenWeb Symposia Retrospective: Celebrating Sound Studies Since 2013" presents original voice, sound, and music from SpokenWeb collaborators (including Ali Barillaro, Nix Nihil, and Jason Camlot); clips from past Symposia manifestos; live panel guests (including Jason Camlot, Katherine McLeod, Karis Shearer, and Klara du Plessis); pre-recorded interview segments (including Jordan Abel, Oana Avasilichioaei, Annie Murray, Jason Wiens, Cole Mash, and Erin Scott); and a ShortCuts interlude featuring an "unarchiving" of Phyllis Webb combined with live flamenco dancing from Katherine McLeod--yes, you can dance in a podcast!Join us as we "re-sound" some memorable moments from the Symposia and Institutes of SpokenWeb's past. We will also look to the future, as our guests speculate on the legacies and possibilities of our research, creative performances, archives, and community. TopicsIn this episode, producers Nick Beauchesne and Chelsea Miya interview various SpokenWeb members and reminisce about past Symposia and Institutes.IntroductionPre-Recorded Interview with Annie Murray and Jason WiensLive Panel with Jason Camlot and Katherine McLeodPre-Recorded Interviews and Soundscapes with Jordan Abel and Oana AvasilichioaeiShortCuts Interlude with Katherine McLeodPre-Recorded Interview with Cole Mash and Erin ScottLive Panel with Karis Shearer and Klara du PlessisConclusionCredits Show NotesThe SpokenWeb theme music was composed by Jason Camlot, with vocals performed by Ali Barillaro. She recorded a new version for this live show Redux, over a beat produced by Nix Nihil. In the ShortCuts interlude, Katherine McLeod danced to a remix by Jason Camlot of Phyllis Webb reading “Rilke” in Montreal in 1966.Myron Campbell hosted the “Draw by Night” event on the first night of the SpokenWeb 2025 Institute. UBC Okanagan student Evan Berg designed the SpokenWeb Logo. The design work and branding package for the Re-Sounding Poetries Conference is by Mikah Assaly. Conference illustration is by artist Reuban Scott, whose work you can find on Instagram at @roobtoons.Camlot, Jason, and Katherine McLeod, editors. CanLit Across Media: Unarchiving the Literary Event. McGill-Queen's University Press, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780773559813.Camlot, Jason and Katherine McLeod. "Introduction: New Sonic Approaches in Literary Studies." ESC: English Studies in Canada, vol. 46 no. 2, 2020, p. 1-18. Project MUSE, https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/esc.2020.a903552.Camlot, Jason. “Listening Practice Guided by Jason Camlot – Disciplinary Listening: Does Literature have an Audile Technique?” The SpokenWeb [website], September 18, 2019, https://spokenweb.ca/events/listening-practice/.McFarland, Joe. “Schulich Professor Says Municipalities around the World Are Learning Lessons from Calgary's 2024 Water Feeder Main Break.” UCalgary News, January 7, 2025. https://ucalgary.ca/news/schulich-professor-says-municipalities-around-world-are-learning-lessons-calgarys-2024-water-feeder.McLeod, Katherine. “SpokenWeb Concordia Has Launched Ghost Reading Series” [blog post]. SpokenWeb Concordia, December 1, 2018, https://spokenweb.ca/spokenweb-concordia-has-launched-ghost-reading-series/. Murray, Annie, and Jared Wiercinski. “A Design Methodology for Web-based Sound Archives.” Digital Humanities Quarterly, vol. 8, no. 2 (2014), https://dhq.digitalhumanities.org/vol/8/2/000173/000173.html. Music and Sound Effects“Sounding Out!” by Jordan Abel, Conyer Clayton, Manahil Bandukwala, Liam Burke, and Nathanael Larochette, performed and recorded live at the SpokenWeb Symposium 2023 at the University of Alberta, May 2, 2024.“Operator” by Oana Avasilichioaei, performed and recorded live at the 2019 SpokenWeb Sound Institute at Simon Fraser University.Chalice by Blue Dot Sessions.“Culpable Tranquility” by Nix Nihil and Psyoptic. Used with permission from the artist.“Canadian Cicada (Okanagana canadensis)” by Wil Hershberger, Songs of Insects, https://songsofinsects.com/.“Sunwaves” by Nix Nihil and Psyoptic. Used with permission from the artist.Soundfx from freesound.org:“Creek Swimming,” by JazzyBay, (https://freesound.org/people/JazzyBay/sounds/435055/), licensed under Creative Commons. AcknowledgementsWe would like to thank our live and pre-recorded guests for sharing their stories and memories of the SpokenWeb: Annie Murray, Jason Wiens, Jason Camlot, Katherine McLeod, Jordan Abel, Oana Avasilichioaei, Cole Mash, Erin Scott, Karis Shearer, and Klara du Plessis.We are grateful for the support of the talented 2025 SpokenWeb Institute organizing committee and tech team: in particular, Erin Scott, Garth Evans, and Kailee Fawcett, who helped in countless ways behind the scenes to make the live show possible.

Joseph Turner is a PhD student in the English Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, specializing in the dialogue between continental and Japanese philosophical traditions. His dissertation explores the development of a political ontology that bridges Nishitani Keiji's concept of emptiness with Jean-Luc Nancy's shared ontology of "being-with."He holds an MA in Literary Studies from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and has published on Jean Baudrillard's work. Joseph has presented at numerous academic conferences on philosophers, including Baudrillard, Giorgio Agamben, Nishitani Keiji, and Jean-Luc Nancy. His research contributes to cross-cultural philosophical dialogue and offers new perspectives on political ontology that transcend frameworks of predetermined political antagonisms. Based in Madison, Wisconsin, Joseph works at the intersection of Eastern and Western philosophical traditions, bringing attention to underexplored thinkers and fostering promising theoretical frameworks.He also works with Incite Seminars, where he is currently co-teaching a seminar on cybernetics with his friend and colleague Matthew Stanley and will be organizing a class on an introduction to political ontologies soon after.---Become part of the Hermitix community:Hermitix Twitter - ⁠⁠ / hermitixpodcast⁠⁠ Hermitix Discord - ⁠⁠ / discord Support Hermitix:Hermitix Subscription - ⁠⁠https://hermitix.net/subscribe/⁠⁠ Patreon - ⁠⁠ www.patreon.com/hermitix⁠⁠ Donations: - ⁠⁠https://www.paypal.me/hermitixpod⁠⁠Hermitix Merchandise - ⁠⁠http://teespring.com/stores/hermitix-2⁠⁠Bitcoin Donation Address: 3LAGEKBXEuE2pgc4oubExGTWtrKPuXDDLKEthereum Donation Address: 0xfd2bbe86d6070004b9Cbf682aB2F25170046A996

How do actors convincingly switch accents, and what happens when singing enters the mix? Voice teacher, researcher and spoken voice expert Louisa Morgan returns to explore the rich world of accents and dialects—from phonetics and oral posture to emotional authenticity and ethical considerations. Louisa dives into the challenges singers face when shifting from speech to song in character, how to manage biases, and why understanding your own “home” sounds is key.WHAT'S IN THIS PODCAST 2:35 What actually are accents and dialects?7:37 What makes an accent easier vs difficult to learn?15:05 How can we understand accent mapping?22:51 Speaking Vs Singing in an accent30:58 What are the challenges of teaching a singer who has a different accent to you?36:09 What ethical considerations are required?41:16 Getting to grips with IPA46:32 Louisa's favourite resources48:29 Live accent and dialect coachingAbout the presenter click HERERELEVANT MENTIONS & LINKS Singing Teachers Talk Podcast Ep.109 Mastering ‘Acting Through Song' Techniques to Elevate Musical Theatre PerformanceVoice Study CentreGuildford School of ActingIPASinging Teachers Talk Ep.151 How to Sing with TwangSinging Teachers Talk Ep.194 From Jersey to Bali: Relocating a Singing Teaching BusinessHow to Do Accents by Edda Sharpe and Jan Hayden RowlesKnight ThompsonPhonetics by J D O'ConnorThe Experiencing Accents Book Knight ThompsonPhonetics by Peter RoachAccents and Dialects for Stage and Screen by Paul MeierInternational Dialects of English ArchiveKilling EveEstillVASTA Conference ABOUT THE GUESTLouisa Morgan is a lecturer, voice teacher, and researcher specialising in spoken and sung emotion. She teaches with the Voice Study Centre (as Spoken Voice Lead) and she is also completing a PhD in emotion in Acting Through Song with Guildford School of Acting. Louisa has taught at institutions including Italia Conti and the Cygnet Training Theatre, alongside 15 years of private coaching. She holds an MA in Vocal Pedagogy, a diploma in Acting with Directing, and a BA in English and Literary Studies. Louisa is a Vocal Process accredited teacher and former editor of AOTOS. She has presented at PEVoC and will speak at the 2025 VASTA conference. SEE FULL BIO HERE WebsiteInstagram:Contact Louisa DirectlyBook a place on one of Louisa's courses BAST Training helps singers gain the confidence, knowledge, skills & understanding required to be a successful singing teacher. "The course was everything I hoped it would be and so much more. It's an investment with so much return. I would recommend this course to any teacher wanting to up-skill, refresh or start up." Kelly Taylor, NZ ...morebasttraining.com | Subscribe | Email Us | FB Group

Today's episode features guest host Michael Upshall (guest editor, Charleston Briefings) who talks with Liam Bullingham, Assistant Director of Academic and Research Services, University of Essex. Liam is a Trustee and a conference organizer of UKSG, serves on the Library Advisory Group for Open Research Europe, co-organizes 'Open Research Week' with colleagues in Liverpool and Lancashire, and is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. Liam earned a Master's in Literary Studies at the University of Glasgow and later earned a Master's in Librarianship from the University of Sheffield.  He has worked in various roles in institutions across the UK and Scotland during his library career ranging from library shelver to Knowledge Management Resources Assistant to Information Advisor to Liaison Librarian, Research Support Librarian, Head of Research Support Services and now to his current role as Assistant Director of Academic and Research Services. Liam believes being a librarian isn't just about books, but also about fairness, inclusivity, innovation and collections as a service. The video of this podcast can be found here: https://youtu.be/1LlizrOThK8 Social Media: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mupshall/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/liambullingham/ Twitter: Keywords: #InformationServices, #DigitalLiteracy #HigherEducation #ResearchSupport #OpenResearch #AcademicResearch #LibraryManagement #Innovation #Inclusivity #LibraryDiversity #LibraryJobs #career #collaboration #scholcomm #ScholarlyCommunication #libraries #librarianship #LibraryNeeds #LibraryLove #ScholarlyPublishing #AcademicPublishing #publishing #LibrariesAndPublishers #podcasts

Sonic Lit: A SpokenWeb Radio Show is a bi-weekly radio show on CJLO, the campus radio station of Concordia University (Tiohtià:ke/Montreal, Canada). On air since September 2024, the show features “sound recordings from 1888 to the present that document times when people have whispered, spoken, howled and screamed literature out loud” (“Sonic Lit”). Co-hosted by us – Jason Camlot and Katherine McLeod – the radio show is an extension of our collaborative and creative research about “new sonic approaches in literary studies” (McLeod and Camlot). Prior to stepping into the booth, we had imagined the show as a curation of audio recordings as catalogued by SpokenWeb researchers working with various community and institutional holdings of literary audio across the network. However, as the show began, we had to sort out how the definition of “spoken word” as understood by regulatory bodies in Canadian radio intersects with “spoken word” as understood by poets and scholars of poetry recordings. Making audio for radio turned out to be a vastly different experience than making audio for podcasts such as this podcast, The SpokenWeb Podcast. We soon realized that our radio show was a performative exploration of a set of research questions relating to the affordances of radio for “literary listening” (Camlot). For example, what are the affordances of radio as compared to a podcast when it comes to sharing and discussing literary audio? How does spoken word poetry register in relation to other discursive forms on the radio? How do we as hosts perform "talk radio" in talking about poetry? And what is our sense of audience when on air? What does listening sound like on the radio? We produced this audio, "Listening on the Radio," as a radio-show-as-podcast-episode to answer these questions and others – out loud. ReferencesCamlot, Jason. “Toward a History of Literary Listening.” ESC: English Studies in Canada, vol. 46 271.2, 2020 (published in 2023), p. 263-271. https://ojs.lib.uwo.ca/index.php/esc/article/view/17421Camlot, Jason and Katherine McLeod. "Introduction: New Sonic Approaches in Literary Studies."ESC: English Studies in Canada, vol. 46 no. 2, 2020 (published in 2023), p. 1-18. https://ojs.lib.uwo.ca/index.php/esc/article/view/17412“Sonic Lit: A SpokenWeb Radio Show.” CJLO 1690 AM, http://www.cjlo.com/shows/sonic-lit-spokenweb-radio-showSHOW NOTESThe audio of "Listening on the Radio" is currently presented as part of the digital gallery of Poetry Off the Page, Around the Globe (University of Vienna) in June 2025. Listen to the radio show Sonic Lit: A SpokenWeb Radio Show, on CJLO 1690 AM in Montreal on Mondays at 2pm EST, or check out past episodes online at cjlo.com.Recordings played during “Listening on the Radio” include the voices of poets Tawhida Tanya Evanson (Cyano Sun Suite), Maxine Gadd (from SGW Poetry Series), David Antin (The Principle of Fit, II”), FYEAR (FYEAR), A.M Klein (Five Montreal Poets), bpNichol (Ear Rational: Sound Poems 1970 - 1980), Allen Ginsberg (from SGW Poetry Series), and P.K. Page (The Filled Pen).Main narration audio recorded by Jason Camlot and Katherine McLeod at the AMP Lab, Concordia University. Audio excerpts from Sonic Lit: A SpokenWeb Radio Show, The Tommy John Show, and 514-Core were recorded on air at CJLO's studio at the Loyola Campus of Concordia University. Mixing, mastering, and musical composition by Jason CamlotProduced by Jason Camlot and Katherine McLeod

The fifth edition of London Gallery Weekend takes place this weekend, and opens as the global art market is at a low ebb. So what can it do to change the mood? Ben Luke speaks to Ananya Mukhopadhyay, the managing director of Ames Yavuz, which is opening a new London gallery to coincide with the weekend events, and Jeremy Epstein, co-director of the Edel Assanti gallery, who is the co-founder and co-director of London Gallery Weekend. In 2018, a devastating electrical fire tore through the National Museum of Brazil in Rio de Janeiro with catastrophic consequences. This week, it will temporarily reopen some of its galleries. The museum's director, Alexander Kellner, tells The Art Newspaper's digital editor Alexander Morrison about its steady rise from the ashes. And this episode's Work of the Week is a miniature portrait of Jane Austen by an anonymous 19th-century artist. The work belongs to the Morgan Library & Museum in New York, which this week opens the exhibition A Lively Mind: Jane Austen at 250. The show is co-organised by Juliette Wells, Professor of Literary Studies at Goucher College in Baltimore, and she speaks to Alexander Morrison about the portrait.London Gallery Weekend, 6-8 June. Simon Lehner: Of Peasants & Basterds, Edel Assanti, 6 June-22 August; Polyphonies, Ames Yavuz, London, 6-26 June.The temporary reopening of the National Museum of Brazil continues until the end of July.A Lively Mind: Jane Austen at 250, Morgan Library & Museum, New York, 6 June-14 SeptemberSummer subscription offer: get up to 50% off an annual print & digital subscription to The Art Newspaper. Link here: https://www.theartnewspaper.com/subscriptions-SUMMER25P&D?promocode=SUMMER25&utm_source=special+offer+banner&utm_campaign=SUMMER25 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jane Austen has had devoted American admirers since her works were first published. In fact, several Americans played a crucial role in preserving and promoting her legacy. Joining us to explore Austen's reputation and reception in America is Professor Juliette Wells, a leading expert on the subject, who will also share the story of avid Austen collector Alberta H. Burke and preview some of the Austen treasures set to be displayed at the Morgan Library's upcoming exhibit A Lively Mind: Jane Austen at 250, for which she is guest co-curator.Juliette Wells, Professor of Literary Studies at Goucher College, is the author of Reading Austen in America (2017), Everybody's Jane: Austen in the Popular Imagination (2011), and most recently, A New Jane Austen: How Americans Brought Us the World's Greatest Novelist (2023). She has edited the 200th-anniversary editions of Persuasion and Emma for Penguin Classics, with a new edition of Mansfield Park slated for release later this year. A former JASNA Traveling Lecturer, Dr. Wells is a regular speaker at the society's Annual General Meetings. She is also the guest co-curator for the upcoming exhibition A Lively Mind: Jane Austen at 250 at the Morgan Library and Museum, which will run from June 6 to September 14, 2025, in celebration of Austen's milestone birthday.For a transcript and show notes, visit https://jasna.org/austen/podcast/ep23/.*********Visit our website: www.jasna.orgFollow us on Instagram and FacebookSubscribe to the podcast on our YouTube channelEmail: podcast@jasna.org

Episode SummaryThis podcast episode performs a sound-media meditation on a live event based on a collection of printed scholarly articles. In May 2023 a triple-issue of English Studies in Canada (ESC) was published on the topic of “New Sonic Approaches in Literary Studies.” Edited by Jason Camlot and Katherine McLeod. The issue, designed to explore how sound, literature, and critical methodologies intersect, included thirteen scholarly articles, and an interdisciplinary forum on the place of listening as a methodology in a wide range of scholarly and artistic fields.As the editors considered what kind of “launch” would be best suited to this issue, they felt it should build on the printed scholarship, but also take it further – respond to it,  sound it, and perform it. They asked, “What would this journal issue sound like as a chorus or collage of voices?” They proceeded to organize an event to enact the idea of sounding and performing a scholarly collection as a kind of poetic reading of criticism. Each contributor was invited to select an excerpt to perform, and the performances unfolded in sequence within the 4th Space research showcase venue at Concordia University, and through the virtual participation of some contributors on Zoom. The performance event was also the object of an experiment in the multi-track recording of a spoken word event, with microphones of different kinds situated throughout 4th Space, and even outside the venue itself.The eight tracks of audio resulting from that recording session serve as the raw material, the bed tracks, for a podcast that playfully explores the affordances of sound design for the presentation of scholarly research about literary audio. Some of the simple yet profound possibilities of working in sound to think and argue about sound that are explored here are those of amplitude (playing with the relative loudness of sounds), temporality (the movement and mixing of historically-situated times), speed (the movement of sounds in time), space (the relationship of sounds to the places they happened), noise (the sounds we are supposed not to want to hear), intelligibility (the intention of sounding for meaning), positionality (from where and to whom one is sounding), timbre (the textural quality of sounds and what they do), among many others. The goal of this production has not been to deliver the content of the journal as one might grasp it from the print journal (read the special issue for that!), but to emphasize the possibilities and features of sound, sometimes apposite and sometimes in opposition to the intention and circumstances of the intended message. Archival voices and sounds haunt, taunt and disrupt the planned “Sounding New Sonic Approaches” event. Parallel temporal situations compete with each other. Time is sped and stretched. Speech and vocal timbre are mimicked and mutated by an occasional soundtrack scored for monotonic analogue synths. One mode of meaning is lost, while the potential for new kinds of meaning and feeling-making in sonic scholarly production are amplified for the listener's consideration and pleasure.In-person and online performers: Jason Camlot, Katherine McLeod, Annie Murray, Michael O'Discoll, Mathieu Aubin, Julia Polyck-O'Neill, Jason Wiens, Klara du Plessis, Kandice Sharren, Kelly Baron, Nina Sun Eidsheim, Juliette Bellocq, Kim Fox, Reem Elmaghraby, Daniel Martin, Kristen Smith, Kristin Moriah, Mara Mills, Andy Slater, and Ellen Waterman.Live Recording Event produced by Jason Camlot, Katherine McLeod, James Healey, and Douglas Moffat.Podcast and Sound Design by Jason Camlot.

Jean Mills, Associate Professor and chairperson in the English Dept. at John Jay College, and Ria Banerjee, Professor of English and Honors Program Coordinator at Guttman Community College and the Graduate Center, discuss Dr. Banerjee's book Drafty Houses in Forster, Eliot, and Woolf: Spatiality and Cultural Politics and related topics. Visit IndoorVoicesPodcast.com for more.

Recorded February 13th, 2025. Pay Attention!: Literary Studies, Neurohumanities and the ‘Distraction Economy' Trinity Long Room Hub Visiting Research Fellow Prof Ronan McDonald (University of Melbourne, Australia) in conversation with Prof Christopher Morash (School of English, TCD) and Prof Shane O'Mara (TCIN, TCD). ‘Attention studies' is burgeoning in academic and popular fora, not least because there is a common perception that we live in an era of digital distraction. Drawing on insights from neuroscience, this project considers the relationship between reading and attention in literary studies. It considers how reading orientates our mind, between various affective states that compel or distract: between willed concentration, raptured enchantment or receptive, wide-minded noticing. Opening up a cross-disciplinary conversation between literary studies, psychology and neuroscience,  it seeks to provide new purpose and direction for literary studies. ​​​​​​​ About Ronan McDonald: Ronan McDonald holds the Gerry Higgins Chair in Irish Studies at the University of Melbourne. He is widely published in Irish literary studies, with a particular interest in Irish modernism and Irish-Australian literature. He also has a research interest in the history of criticism and the value of the humanities. His books include Tragedy and Irish Literature (2002), The Cambridge Introduction to Samuel Beckett (2007) and The Death of the Critic (2008). Recent edited collections include The Values of Literary Studies: Critical Institutions, Scholarly Agendas (Cambridge University Press, 2015) and Flann O'Brien and Modernism (2014). He is series editor of Cambridge Themes in Irish Literature and Culture. Current projects include an ARC Discovery Project with Prof Katherine Bode and Maggie Nolan, ‘Close Relations: Irishness in Australian Literature'. and a ARC Discovery Project, with Professor Simon During, on 'English: The History of a Discipline, 1920-70'. He is currently working on a book on ‘attention' in literary studies. Learn more at www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub

How does our excavation of ancestral history shape our understanding of ourselves and how can writing guide us through this process? On this episode, Derek Chan discusses the role of family stories in his poetry and life, the magic of bewilderment in art, and the dissonance between our external language and our internal being. Plus, as a first-generation and international student, he offers advice for others moving to the United States to pursue higher education.Derek Chan is a writer and educator from Melbourne, Australia. He holds a First-Class Honours in Literary Studies from Monash University, where he received the Arthur Brown Thesis Prize. His writing has appeared in journals and anthologies such asBest of Australian Poems,Australian Poetry Anthology,Cordite Poetry Review,Meanjin,The Margins,Juked, and elsewhere. He has been a finalist for awards by Frontier Poetry and Palette Poetry. He is currently an MFA candidate at Cornell University, where he is an Editorial Associate for EPOCH and a university fellow. Find him at his websitederekchanarts.com and on Instagram@derek_chan_.MFA Writers is hosted by Jared McCormack and produced by Jared McCormack and Hanamori Skoblow. New episodes are released every two weeks. You can find more MFA Writers atMFAwriters.com.BE PART OF THE SHOWDonate to the show at Buy Me a Coffee.Leave a rating and review onApple Podcasts.Submit an episode request. If there's a program you'd like to learn more about, contact us and we'll do our very best to find a guest who can speak to their experience.Apply to be a guest on the show by filling outour application.STAY CONNECTEDTwitter:@MFAwriterspodInstagram:@MFAwriterspodcastFacebook:MFA WritersEmail:mfawriterspodcast@gmail.com

Romance Fandom in 21st-Century Pakistan: Reading the Regency (Bloomsbury, 2024) offers the first major study of English-speaking romance fandom in South Asia, providing a new reader-centric model that engages with romance readers as genre experts. Here, she investigates the popular Anglophone romance reading community in Pakistan and develops a model for analysing genre romance novels through the lens of the readers' perspective and preferences. Using focus-group interviews and close textual analysis, her book explores where and how readers access books of their choice, and explains why the detailed descriptions of dresses, food and spaces in historical romance novels of the Regency era exemplify good taste for this distinctive readership. Sitting at the intersection of literary studies, genre studies, and fan studies, this book considers the reception of Anglophone romance fiction by reading communities of colour. About the author: Javaria Farooqui is Assistant Professor of English and Literary Studies at COMSATS University Islamabad, Lahore Campus, Pakistan. Dr. Farooqui's research interests fall across multiple disciplines and topic areas in the humanities and social sciences, including fan studies, book history, women's writing and histories, digital humanities, language acquisition, popular romance studies, and reader response studies. She has published research that explores the reception and materiality of texts, the ramifications of colonization and its aftermath on a nation's literary culture, gender-based violence, and the problematic reception of Anglophone movies in Pakistan. Priyam Sinha recently graduated with a PhD from the National University of Singapore and has been awarded the Alexander Von Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellowship, starting 2025. She has interdisciplinary academic interests that lie at the intersection of film studies, critical new media industry studies, disability studies, affect studies, gender studies, and cultural studies. She can be reached at https://twitter.com/PriyamSinha Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Romance Fandom in 21st-Century Pakistan: Reading the Regency (Bloomsbury, 2024) offers the first major study of English-speaking romance fandom in South Asia, providing a new reader-centric model that engages with romance readers as genre experts. Here, she investigates the popular Anglophone romance reading community in Pakistan and develops a model for analysing genre romance novels through the lens of the readers' perspective and preferences. Using focus-group interviews and close textual analysis, her book explores where and how readers access books of their choice, and explains why the detailed descriptions of dresses, food and spaces in historical romance novels of the Regency era exemplify good taste for this distinctive readership. Sitting at the intersection of literary studies, genre studies, and fan studies, this book considers the reception of Anglophone romance fiction by reading communities of colour. About the author: Javaria Farooqui is Assistant Professor of English and Literary Studies at COMSATS University Islamabad, Lahore Campus, Pakistan. Dr. Farooqui's research interests fall across multiple disciplines and topic areas in the humanities and social sciences, including fan studies, book history, women's writing and histories, digital humanities, language acquisition, popular romance studies, and reader response studies. She has published research that explores the reception and materiality of texts, the ramifications of colonization and its aftermath on a nation's literary culture, gender-based violence, and the problematic reception of Anglophone movies in Pakistan. Priyam Sinha recently graduated with a PhD from the National University of Singapore and has been awarded the Alexander Von Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellowship, starting 2025. She has interdisciplinary academic interests that lie at the intersection of film studies, critical new media industry studies, disability studies, affect studies, gender studies, and cultural studies. She can be reached at https://twitter.com/PriyamSinha Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Romance Fandom in 21st-Century Pakistan: Reading the Regency (Bloomsbury, 2024) offers the first major study of English-speaking romance fandom in South Asia, providing a new reader-centric model that engages with romance readers as genre experts. Here, she investigates the popular Anglophone romance reading community in Pakistan and develops a model for analysing genre romance novels through the lens of the readers' perspective and preferences. Using focus-group interviews and close textual analysis, her book explores where and how readers access books of their choice, and explains why the detailed descriptions of dresses, food and spaces in historical romance novels of the Regency era exemplify good taste for this distinctive readership. Sitting at the intersection of literary studies, genre studies, and fan studies, this book considers the reception of Anglophone romance fiction by reading communities of colour. About the author: Javaria Farooqui is Assistant Professor of English and Literary Studies at COMSATS University Islamabad, Lahore Campus, Pakistan. Dr. Farooqui's research interests fall across multiple disciplines and topic areas in the humanities and social sciences, including fan studies, book history, women's writing and histories, digital humanities, language acquisition, popular romance studies, and reader response studies. She has published research that explores the reception and materiality of texts, the ramifications of colonization and its aftermath on a nation's literary culture, gender-based violence, and the problematic reception of Anglophone movies in Pakistan. Priyam Sinha recently graduated with a PhD from the National University of Singapore and has been awarded the Alexander Von Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellowship, starting 2025. She has interdisciplinary academic interests that lie at the intersection of film studies, critical new media industry studies, disability studies, affect studies, gender studies, and cultural studies. She can be reached at https://twitter.com/PriyamSinha Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

Romance Fandom in 21st-Century Pakistan: Reading the Regency (Bloomsbury, 2024) offers the first major study of English-speaking romance fandom in South Asia, providing a new reader-centric model that engages with romance readers as genre experts. Here, she investigates the popular Anglophone romance reading community in Pakistan and develops a model for analysing genre romance novels through the lens of the readers' perspective and preferences. Using focus-group interviews and close textual analysis, her book explores where and how readers access books of their choice, and explains why the detailed descriptions of dresses, food and spaces in historical romance novels of the Regency era exemplify good taste for this distinctive readership. Sitting at the intersection of literary studies, genre studies, and fan studies, this book considers the reception of Anglophone romance fiction by reading communities of colour. About the author: Javaria Farooqui is Assistant Professor of English and Literary Studies at COMSATS University Islamabad, Lahore Campus, Pakistan. Dr. Farooqui's research interests fall across multiple disciplines and topic areas in the humanities and social sciences, including fan studies, book history, women's writing and histories, digital humanities, language acquisition, popular romance studies, and reader response studies. She has published research that explores the reception and materiality of texts, the ramifications of colonization and its aftermath on a nation's literary culture, gender-based violence, and the problematic reception of Anglophone movies in Pakistan. Priyam Sinha recently graduated with a PhD from the National University of Singapore and has been awarded the Alexander Von Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellowship, starting 2025. She has interdisciplinary academic interests that lie at the intersection of film studies, critical new media industry studies, disability studies, affect studies, gender studies, and cultural studies. She can be reached at https://twitter.com/PriyamSinha Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

Romance Fandom in 21st-Century Pakistan: Reading the Regency (Bloomsbury, 2024) offers the first major study of English-speaking romance fandom in South Asia, providing a new reader-centric model that engages with romance readers as genre experts. Here, she investigates the popular Anglophone romance reading community in Pakistan and develops a model for analysing genre romance novels through the lens of the readers' perspective and preferences. Using focus-group interviews and close textual analysis, her book explores where and how readers access books of their choice, and explains why the detailed descriptions of dresses, food and spaces in historical romance novels of the Regency era exemplify good taste for this distinctive readership. Sitting at the intersection of literary studies, genre studies, and fan studies, this book considers the reception of Anglophone romance fiction by reading communities of colour. About the author: Javaria Farooqui is Assistant Professor of English and Literary Studies at COMSATS University Islamabad, Lahore Campus, Pakistan. Dr. Farooqui's research interests fall across multiple disciplines and topic areas in the humanities and social sciences, including fan studies, book history, women's writing and histories, digital humanities, language acquisition, popular romance studies, and reader response studies. She has published research that explores the reception and materiality of texts, the ramifications of colonization and its aftermath on a nation's literary culture, gender-based violence, and the problematic reception of Anglophone movies in Pakistan. Priyam Sinha recently graduated with a PhD from the National University of Singapore and has been awarded the Alexander Von Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellowship, starting 2025. She has interdisciplinary academic interests that lie at the intersection of film studies, critical new media industry studies, disability studies, affect studies, gender studies, and cultural studies. She can be reached at https://twitter.com/PriyamSinha Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Romance Fandom in 21st-Century Pakistan: Reading the Regency (Bloomsbury, 2024) offers the first major study of English-speaking romance fandom in South Asia, providing a new reader-centric model that engages with romance readers as genre experts. Here, she investigates the popular Anglophone romance reading community in Pakistan and develops a model for analysing genre romance novels through the lens of the readers' perspective and preferences. Using focus-group interviews and close textual analysis, her book explores where and how readers access books of their choice, and explains why the detailed descriptions of dresses, food and spaces in historical romance novels of the Regency era exemplify good taste for this distinctive readership. Sitting at the intersection of literary studies, genre studies, and fan studies, this book considers the reception of Anglophone romance fiction by reading communities of colour. About the author: Javaria Farooqui is Assistant Professor of English and Literary Studies at COMSATS University Islamabad, Lahore Campus, Pakistan. Dr. Farooqui's research interests fall across multiple disciplines and topic areas in the humanities and social sciences, including fan studies, book history, women's writing and histories, digital humanities, language acquisition, popular romance studies, and reader response studies. She has published research that explores the reception and materiality of texts, the ramifications of colonization and its aftermath on a nation's literary culture, gender-based violence, and the problematic reception of Anglophone movies in Pakistan. Priyam Sinha recently graduated with a PhD from the National University of Singapore and has been awarded the Alexander Von Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellowship, starting 2025. She has interdisciplinary academic interests that lie at the intersection of film studies, critical new media industry studies, disability studies, affect studies, gender studies, and cultural studies. She can be reached at https://twitter.com/PriyamSinha Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

They say urban legends aren't real and are only cautionary tales to keep unruly children at bay, but there are elements underlying these stories that are far more terrifying than any monster or ghoul. The biggest horror? We, as Black people, have learned to fear ourselves. In 2022, Jay sat down with Dr. Kinitra Brooks to guide this conversation. Beyond being a horror scholar, she is a horror fan. She's authored two books: Searching for Sycorax: Black Women's Hauntings of Contemporary Horror and Sycorax's Daughters, and is working on her next work about Conjure Women. She is also the Audrey and John Leslie Endowed Chair in Literary Studies in the Department of English at Michigan State University. __________________________ Black History Year (BHY) is produced by PushBlack, the nation's largest non-profit Black media company. PushBlack exists to amplify the stories of Black history you didn't learn in school and explore pathways to liberation with people leading the way. You make PushBlack happen with your contributions at BlackHistoryYear.com — most people donate $10 a month, but every dollar makes a difference. If this episode moved you, share it with your people! Thanks for supporting the work. Hosting BHY is Jay (2020-2023) and Darren Wallace (2024). Our producers are Cydney Smith and Len Webb. BHY's executive producers are Julian Walker and Lilly Workneh. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Amalia Andrade es una autora e ilustradora colombiana, nacida en Cali, Valle del Cauca. Desde pequeña, siempre estuvo atraída por los libros y la escritura. Aún recuerda el momento en su infancia cuando se dio cuenta de que podía convertir esa pasión en una profesión, y desde entonces no ha mirado atrás. Amalia estudió Literatura en la Pontificia Universidad Javeriana de Bogotá y comenzó su carrera colaborando con varios medios colombianos e internacionales, como Vive.in, Fucsia, SoHo, Shock y Girls Like Us.En 2015, publicó su libro debut, Uno siempre cambia al amor de su vida (por otro amor o por otra vida), que se convirtió en un éxito instantáneo en Colombia e internacionalmente. El libro alcanzó tres ediciones y fue traducido al inglés. Desde entonces, ha lanzado tres obras adicionales: Cosas que piensas cuando te muerdes las uñas (2017), Tarot magicomístico de estrellas pop (2018) y su más reciente, No sé cómo mostrar dónde me duele (2023).En este episodio, Amalia comparte la inspiración detrás de sus libros profundamente personales y conmovedores. Habla sobre cómo ha superado el síndrome del impostor y el perfeccionismo a través de su arte, sus experiencias como mujer abiertamente queer y mucho más.Este episodio es presentado por Cartier, que celebra 100 años de la icónica colección Trinity, un símbolo perdurable de amor, amistad y fidelidad. En esta serie, exploramos las historias de tres creativos extraordinarios cuyas obras y vidas encarnan estos valores.Para más historias de creativos latinoamericanos, visita www.latinness.com y @latinness__.-------AMALIA ANDRADE: "It all started with a very broken heart"Amalia Andrade is a Colombian author and illustrator, born in Cali, Valle del Cauca. Drawn to books and writing from a young age, she can still recall the moment when, as a child, she realized she could turn this passion into a profession, and since then, hasn't looked back. Amalia studied Literary Studies at the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Bogota and began her career contributing to various Colombian and international media outlets, including Vive.in, Fucsia, SoHo, Shock, and Girls Like Us.In 2015, she published her debut book, You Always Change the Love of Your Life (for Another Love or Another Life), which became an instant bestseller in Colombia and internationally. The book saw three editions and was translated into English. Since then, she has released three additional works: Things You Think About When You Bite Your Nails, Tarot magicomístico de estrellas (The Magic Mystic Tarot of (Pop) Stars), and her most recent No sé cómo mostrar dónde me duele (I Don't Know How to Show You Where It Hurts).In this episode, Amalia shares the inspiration behind her deeply personal and relatable books. She discusses overcoming imposter syndrome and perfectionism through her art, her experiences as an openly queer woman, and much more.This episode is brought to you by Cartier, celebrating 100 years of the iconic Trinity collection—an enduring symbol of love, friendship and fidelity. In this series, we delve into the stories of three extraordinary creatives whose work and lives embrace these values.For more stories with Latin American creatives, visit www.latinness.com and follow @latinness__.

To begin with, Ginger and I want to thank Elsa Schieder, PhD for her interview with us. In it, she brilliantly told the story of attorney Reiner Fuellmich's ongoing martyrdom by the German government. I am deeply indebted to her for inspiring me to write this introduction in defense of this great man and to honor him.1   On October 13, 2023, international attorney Dr. Reiner Fuellmich was apprehended at the German consulate in Tijuana, Mexico, where he was seized by Mexican officials, flown to Germany against his will, and then arrested. He has been in jail since then. Reiner was on his way to hoped-for freedom in the United States, where he is a licensed lawyer and where he owns a home. Reiner's passport had been either lost or misplaced, causing him to arrange for a new passport at the German consulate, which then kidnapped him.   Since then, as described by Elsa Schieder, Reiner has been treated with the brutality associated with Communist dictatorships and, ironically, with the Nazi regimes that originated in Germany. He was denied a trial for many months, and now, more than one year later, he is still in a bizarrely manipulated trial. He has been denied the most ordinary rights once accepted in the West, which are now being eroded everywhere. He comes to court in shackles, and he is not permitted to speak.   It is hard to get information because these neo-Nazi globalist Germans have cut him off from the world, but according to Elsa Schieder, it appears that an entirely illegal solitary confinement continues. It has been going on for months, and when that did not break him, a madman was put in a nearby cell who shrieks and screams through much of the night.    What are Reiner Fuellmich's alleged crimes for which he is being so brutally treated? Mass murder? Assassination attempts? Insurrection? Resurrecting the Nazi Party?   He is on trial for “breach of trust” in financial transactions involving an associate who looks to me like a government plant assigned to disrupt his work on the Corona Committee. The Corona Committee is an independent group that, under Reiner, was carrying on a lengthy investigation of COVID-19 on the model of the Nuremberg Trial investigations of Nazi war criminals. Reiner had told me personally that the courts in Europe were so intractably controlled from above that he had lost hope and was anticipating greater success in the United States.   Here is a succinct description of what's so frightening to the authorities about Reiner Fuellmich:   Dr Reiner Fuellmich is an international trial lawyer who has successfully sued large fraudulent corporations like Volkswagen and Deutsche Bank. In 1993, he has been an attorney in Germany and was also admitted to the Bar in California in 1994.   In July 2020, he co-founded the Berlin Corona Investigative Committee, which investigated the legitimacy and global response to the COVID-19 pandemic. They have collected undeniable evidence that the COVID-19 pandemic is, in fact, a planned criminal operation. According to Dr. Fuellmich, a second Nuremberg trial may be needed to prosecute all who are complicit in this unprecedented crime against humanity.2   Reiner and I have a similar background in regard to our professional activities and histories of taking on powerful cooperations, myself in the role of a medical expert. I have written about, consulted, and testified as a medical expert in legal actions involving Eli Lilly, Johnson and Johnson, Janssen, Pfizer, Novartis, Hoffmann-La Roche and many others, often resulting in counter-attacks against me.   Reiner conducted one of the most interesting interviews in which I have been involved, with participation by Professor Dr. Sucharit Bhakdi, Professor Dr. Karina Reiss, Dr. Naomi Wolf and myself. On the cutting edge, we talked about permanent brain injury from the COVID jabs causing personality changes in the population, making people less engaged with each other and with life—and more docile. Reiner was not afraid to deal with controversial issues that threatened all of humanity.   Confronting One of Reiner Fuellmich's Worst Betrayers   On 7.28.21, I was interviewed by Reiner and simultaneously by one of his most devious current accusers, attorney Viviane Fischer, who became a mastermind behind the accusations made against him.3 It was long-distance video testimony at Reiner's request for his Corona Committee.4 He had previously interviewed me about our book, COVID-19 and the Global Predators: We Are the Prey, and we shared an amazingly similar vision of the disaster befalling the world. Reiner asked me to present my criticism of Mattias Desmet's concept of mass formation and Robert Malone's closely related derivative concept of mass psychosis.   I was met with open hostility by Fischer who kept interrupting me, so that Reiner had to confront her, insisting that I be allowed to talk. She was deeply committed to Desmet and seemed to know him personally. I ventured to invite her to bring Desmet onto one of the committee hearings, along with me, to debate our differing viewpoints.  It would be an unusually fair platform with Reiner supporting me and herself supporting Desmet. Of course, she never arranged it.   My Critique of Desmet, Shared by Reiner   My critique, about which I've written in considerable detail,5 focuses on how these concepts blame the victims of abuse by declaring the “masses” or the people themselves cause their own distress and bring totalitarianism down upon themselves by becoming spontaneously “psychotic” and vulnerable to totalitarians. Desmet writes that the “elite” are not to be blamed. Indeed, in his own critique of my criticism of him, he seemed to issue me a warning. The theory, which ridicules conspiracies, was even applied by Desmet and Malone, in separate writings, to Nazi Germany, where it most obviously does not apply.   German citizens suffered from mass formations or mass psychoses that made them rally around themselves to create, induce, or enable Hitler. Hitler grossly conspired with his political gangs and with elites in government and industry, with antisemites and predators of all kinds, to take over political control of Germany. He rearmed the nation with international funding from banks and industries. Then he controlled “the masses” with a combination of enormously powerful propaganda spouted through new radios widely distributed in homes, socialist projects, promises of economic recovery, inflaming German humiliations from the First World War, bolstering racial Aryan pride, and blaming everything bad on the Jews. Then, he overwhelmed the “masses” in his own nation and throughout Europe with the most organized, violent, and horrific attacks ever made by a dictator on his own population and all of Europe.   No, Desmet and Malone are not Hitler apologists, but their views enable powerful villains of every ilk to go unblamed while the people are led to blame themselves instead.   Ironically, it is the Germans themselves, now tools of globalism, who are among the leaders of totalitarianism on a global scale, including offering great support to the WHO and the UN in their support of “global governance.” In that process, they are putting on their puppet horror show of a trial against Reiner Fuellmich to make sure no others dare confront them as he has been doing so successfully, with incomparable courage, enormous intelligence, and great effectiveness.   Is America As Bad as Germany in Legal Attacks on  Dissenters?   The attacks on Reiner are not unprecedented in America. In the United States, untold numbers of innocent people were arrested during the so-called insurrection of January 6, 2021, in Washington, DC. Many of the January Sixers are still falsely imprisoned, their rights trampled upon, and at least until recently, the government was still searching archived videos to falsely charge even more of them. Then there are the political arrests and jailings of Donald Trump's supporters, including General Flynn, Roger Stone, Steve Bannon, and Peter Navaro. And equally egregious — the worst in American history — have been the unrelenting lawfare, impeachments, and government-enabled assassination attempts against Donald Trump. All of this is driven by the global elite we call the global predators who have infiltrated our governments in a long-term strategy to bring us all under the control of what the United Nations now openly proclaims as “the global governance.”   We also should not ignore the many lesser-known victims of government abuse, including Ed Wackerman, who Elsa Schieder describes in her interview with us as a gentle, retired senior, falsely charged with setting the giant Oak Fire, who has been brutalized by the police and largely abandoned.      What's So Dangerous about Reiner Fuellmich?   Why is there much strategic planning and hatred organized against Reiner Fuellmich? Why would the German neo-Nazis, these predatory globalists, do such extremist strategic planning on an international level to kidnap him in Mexico before he could cross the border into the United States, where he is a licensed attorney and owns his own home?   Why? Like many of us, Reiner Fuellmich has been fighting against global predators who are seeking to devour the world. More than most of us, he has been enormously successful in globalist Europe in shining a blinding light on these evil perpetrators and that has brought the wrath of the devil upon him. Now may God rescue this brave man!   1 Elsa Schieder has a Ph.D. in combined Psychology, Sociology, and Literary Studies. Her work can be found at truthsummit.substack.com, https://truthsummit.info, https://elsathoughtcreativitypassionlife.com and https://fullflourishing.com    2 Dr Reiner Fuellmich | Totality of Evidence   3 Judicial Scandal in Germany: The Fuellmich Case – Truth Comes to Light   4 Dr. Peter Breggin Interviewed by International Lawyer Reiner Fuellmich – Brighteon.com   5 Critiques of Desmet and Malone by Dr. Breggin and others can be found at: Breggin.com | Critiques of Malone, Desmet and Their Colleagues and for my detailed analysis of Desmet's theory see Breggin.com | Article Detail       Learn more about Dr. Peter Breggin's work: https://breggin.com/   See more from Dr. Breggin's long history of being a reformer in psychiatry: https://breggin.com/Psychiatry-as-an-Instrument-of-Social-and-Political-Control   Psychiatric Drug Withdrawal, the how-to manual @ https://breggin.com/a-guide-for-prescribers-therapists-patients-and-their-families/   Get a copy of Dr. Breggin's latest book: WHO ARE THE “THEY” - THESE GLOBAL PREDATORS? WHAT ARE THEIR MOTIVES AND THEIR PLANS FOR US? HOW CAN WE DEFEND AGAINST THEM? Covid-19 and the Global Predators: We are the Prey Get a copy: https://www.wearetheprey.com/   “No other book so comprehensively covers the details of COVID-19 criminal conduct as well as its origins in a network of global predators seeking wealth and power at the expense of human freedom and prosperity, under cover of false public health policies.”   ~ Robert F Kennedy, Jr Author of #1 bestseller The Real Anthony Fauci and Founder, Chairman and Chief Legal Counsel for Children's Health Defense.

Episode 186: Old Marvels, New Approaches: The Revitalization of Balāgha in Moroccan Literary Studies The science of balāgha is an Arabic scholarly discipline dealing with poetics and rhetoric, one that dates back to at least the 10th century C.E. Scholars of balāgha have long studied how poets convey intellectual and emotional content to listeners by using tools such as vivid imagery, sound play, and stylistic variation. Meanwhile, the relationship between Arabic balāgha and the Greek rhetorical tradition beginning with Aristotle has always been complicated, with some thinkers seeing the Greek emphasis on persuasive oratory as a welcome addition to Arabic-Islamic ideas about the power of language and speech, and others attempting to defend the Arabic language sciences against external influence. In the 19th and 20th centuries, balāgha was often viewed by progressive writers and thinkers as anachronistic. Its study thus tended to be confined to traditional Islamic institutions and seen as relevant only to particular “premodern” Arabic-Islamic texts. But recent decades have seen a renewed dedication to the continued vitality and value of a type of balāgha study called “The New Balāgha” that draws on Greek, Arabic, and hybrid conceptual tools. For those involved in this movement, balāgha comes to name a set of ideas about how people connect through language: how they become open to new ideas, empathetic to the struggles of those around them, and sensitive to the powers of linguistic beauty and subtlety. This scholarly movement has come to be particularly associated with Morocco, and especially with Abdelmalek Essaadi University in Tetouan, where its best-known practitioner and advocate, Dr. Mohamed Mechbal, teaches. Betty Rosen is a final-year PhD candidate in the Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures and the Designated Emphasis Program in Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley. Originally from Cleveland, OH, she earned her A.B. in Comparative Literature Magna Cum Laude from Harvard College in 2012, as well as completing an MA in Arabic Literature at SOAS (University of London) in 2013. She was also a CASA Fellow at the American University of Cairo during the 2017-18 academic year. Betty specializes in Arabic and Hebrew poetics and theories of language, both medieval and modern. Her dissertation, entitled Language Marvels: Al-Badī‘ In and Beyond Arabic-Islamic Poetics, focuses primarily on the conceptions of al-badī‘—the “marvelous creativity of language”—developed in writings by Muslim and Jewish Arabophone writers in Egypt during the Mamluk Period (13th-15th centuries). The dissertation also asks how certain 19th-century thinkers mobilized Mamluk-era ideas about language, poetics, and creativity to envision alternative forms of Arab “modernity.” Betty's research interests also extend into the 20th and 21st centuries, particularly the ways in which contemporary Arab scholars mobilize and reimagine older ideas about the Arabic linguistic and poetic tradition. In her free time, she plays viola, writes creatively, and works on an ongoing Arabic-to-English fiction translation project. This episode was recorded on June 22, 2023 at the Tangier American Legation Institute for Moroccan Studies (TALIM).  Recorded and edited by: Abdelbaar Mounadi Idrissi, Outreach Director, TALIM

Considerations of Toni Morrison and scholarly discourse.Written by Howard Rambsy IIRead by Kassandra Timm

What two scholars of African American literature indicate about the range of a scholarly fieldWritten by Howard Rambsy IIRead by Kassandra Timm

Charting the rise of African American literary resources.Written by Howard Rambsy II Read by Kassandra Timm

A short take on the advancement of a literary field during the late 1980s onward.Script by Howard Rambsy IIRead by Kassandra Timm

Is Trump really like Hitler? Last month, we did a show with the Hitler scholar, Peter Range, who argued that the Adolf Hitler of 1924 had much in common with the Donald Trump of 2024. And now we are back on the Trump-Hitler comparison train with Henk de Berg, author of the new Trump and Hitler: A Comparative Study in Lying. What ties Trump and Hitler together, de Berg argues, is their ability to fabricate reality (ie: lie). Both men, de Berg explains, are masterful performers on a political stage. Both, he insists, are supremely skilled in operating in a society in extreme flux. Henk de Berg is Professor of German at the University of Sheffield, UK. His previous books include Freud's Theory and Its Use in Literary Studies, which received a Choice Outstanding Academic Title Award.Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.Keen On is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

A brief take on the Modern Language Association's “Report on English Majors' Career Preparation and Outcomes.” Script by Howard Rambsy IIRead by Kassandra Timm

In this episode of High Theory, Jonathan Kramnick talks about Close Reading. Contrary to the name, it is less a form of slow or focused reading than an immersive practice of writing. The classic methodology of New Criticism has become, in Kramnick's estimation, the shared foundation of literary studies in the university. Our conversation was inspired by Jonathan's new book, Criticism and Truth: On Method in Literary Studies (Chicago, 2023). In the book he aims to “present a view of literary criticism as it is practiced across the academy in order to defend its standing as a contribution to knowledge” (vii). His defense of this foundational critical method joins a slate of recent metacritical books on the discipline of literary study, and the state of the humanities today. Jonathan Kramnick is the Maynard Mack Professor of English at Yale University. His research and teaching are in eighteenth-century literature and philosophy, foundations of literary theory and criticism, and interdisciplinary approaches to the arts. His prior publications include Paper Minds: Literature and the Ecology of Consciousness (Chicago, 2018), Actions and Objects from Hobbes to Richardson (Stanford, 2010), and Making the English Canon: Print Capitalism and the Cultural Past, 1700-1770 (Cambridge, 1999). His current book project on Alexander Pope, William Cowper, and the poetics of designed environments is titled Earthworks: Two Before Romanticism. He is also director of the Lewis Walpole Library and the editor (with Steven Pincus) of the Lewis Walpole Series in Eighteenth-Century Culture and History for Yale University Press. The image accompanying this episode was drawn by Saronik Bosu in 2024. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In this episode of High Theory, Matt Seybold tells us about Criticism, the glue that holds the bricks of culture together. Cultural critics are a necessary component of the intellectual ecosystem, who have the power to analyze both the material conditions and the myths that make up our world. Matt is the host of the American Vandal Podcast at the Center for Mark Twain Studies at Elmira College. In his recent podcast series, Criticism, LTD, Matt investigated the state of criticism in the academy and the public sphere. There is a nifty substack newsletter with the transcripts from Criticism, LTD, if you're keen. Kim and Saronik were among the many podcasters, public intellectuals, and critics that Matt interviewed for the series, and we're excited to have him back on High Theory to tell us about his investigations. In the episode he offers a recuperative reading of Mark Twain's acerbic take on critics in his late notebooks: “The critic's symbol should be the tumble-bug; he deposits his egg in somebody else's dung, otherwise he could not hatch it.” (see p. 392 of this Harper & Brothers, 1935 edition of Twain's Collected Works, on archive.org). He references Jacques Derrida's book, Limited Inc (Northwestern UP, 1988), which contains the *famous* essay “Signature, Event, Context” and a critical debate about Apartheid. And he also discusses Jed Esty's Future of Decline: Anglo-American Culture at Its Limits (Stanford UP, 2022) and our episode with Jed on the Rhetoric of Decline. You can also take a listen back to Matt's earlier episode with us on Economics. Matt Seybold is Associate Professor of American Literature & Mark Twain Studies at Elmira College, as well as Resident Scholar at the Center For Mark Twain Studies. He is the executive producer and host of the American Vandal Podcast, and founding editor of MarkTwainStudies.org. He is co-editor (with Michelle Chihara) of of the Routledge Companion to Literature & Economics (2018)and (with Gordon Hutner) a 2019 special issue of American Literary History on “Economics & Literary Studies in The New Gilded Age.” Recent articles can be found in the Mark Twain Annual, American Studies, Reception, and Los Angeles Review of Books. He tweets (or exes?) @MEASeybold. The image for this episode was made by Saronik Bosu in 2024. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

In this episode of High Theory, Matt Seybold tells us about Criticism, the glue that holds the bricks of culture together. Cultural critics are a necessary component of the intellectual ecosystem, who have the power to analyze both the material conditions and the myths that make up our world. Matt is the host of the American Vandal Podcast at the Center for Mark Twain Studies at Elmira College. In his recent podcast series, Criticism, LTD, Matt investigated the state of criticism in the academy and the public sphere. There is a nifty substack newsletter with the transcripts from Criticism, LTD, if you're keen. Kim and Saronik were among the many podcasters, public intellectuals, and critics that Matt interviewed for the series, and we're excited to have him back on High Theory to tell us about his investigations. In the episode he offers a recuperative reading of Mark Twain's acerbic take on critics in his late notebooks: “The critic's symbol should be the tumble-bug; he deposits his egg in somebody else's dung, otherwise he could not hatch it.” (see p. 392 of this Harper & Brothers, 1935 edition of Twain's Collected Works, on archive.org). He references Jacques Derrida's book, Limited Inc (Northwestern UP, 1988), which contains the *famous* essay “Signature, Event, Context” and a critical debate about Apartheid. And he also discusses Jed Esty's Future of Decline: Anglo-American Culture at Its Limits (Stanford UP, 2022) and our episode with Jed on the Rhetoric of Decline. You can also take a listen back to Matt's earlier episode with us on Economics. Matt Seybold is Associate Professor of American Literature & Mark Twain Studies at Elmira College, as well as Resident Scholar at the Center For Mark Twain Studies. He is the executive producer and host of the American Vandal Podcast, and founding editor of MarkTwainStudies.org. He is co-editor (with Michelle Chihara) of of the Routledge Companion to Literature & Economics (2018)and (with Gordon Hutner) a 2019 special issue of American Literary History on “Economics & Literary Studies in The New Gilded Age.” Recent articles can be found in the Mark Twain Annual, American Studies, Reception, and Los Angeles Review of Books. He tweets (or exes?) @MEASeybold. The image for this episode was made by Saronik Bosu in 2024. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode of High Theory, Matt Seybold tells us about Criticism, the glue that holds the bricks of culture together. Cultural critics are a necessary component of the intellectual ecosystem, who have the power to analyze both the material conditions and the myths that make up our world. Matt is the host of the American Vandal Podcast at the Center for Mark Twain Studies at Elmira College. In his recent podcast series, Criticism, LTD, Matt investigated the state of criticism in the academy and the public sphere. There is a nifty substack newsletter with the transcripts from Criticism, LTD, if you're keen. Kim and Saronik were among the many podcasters, public intellectuals, and critics that Matt interviewed for the series, and we're excited to have him back on High Theory to tell us about his investigations. In the episode he offers a recuperative reading of Mark Twain's acerbic take on critics in his late notebooks: “The critic's symbol should be the tumble-bug; he deposits his egg in somebody else's dung, otherwise he could not hatch it.” (see p. 392 of this Harper & Brothers, 1935 edition of Twain's Collected Works, on archive.org). He references Jacques Derrida's book, Limited Inc (Northwestern UP, 1988), which contains the *famous* essay “Signature, Event, Context” and a critical debate about Apartheid. And he also discusses Jed Esty's Future of Decline: Anglo-American Culture at Its Limits (Stanford UP, 2022) and our episode with Jed on the Rhetoric of Decline. You can also take a listen back to Matt's earlier episode with us on Economics. Matt Seybold is Associate Professor of American Literature & Mark Twain Studies at Elmira College, as well as Resident Scholar at the Center For Mark Twain Studies. He is the executive producer and host of the American Vandal Podcast, and founding editor of MarkTwainStudies.org. He is co-editor (with Michelle Chihara) of of the Routledge Companion to Literature & Economics (2018)and (with Gordon Hutner) a 2019 special issue of American Literary History on “Economics & Literary Studies in The New Gilded Age.” Recent articles can be found in the Mark Twain Annual, American Studies, Reception, and Los Angeles Review of Books. He tweets (or exes?) @MEASeybold. The image for this episode was made by Saronik Bosu in 2024. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

For anyone who's been tuned into Conceptually Speaking for a while, you know I love finding new approaches, perspectives, and frames to tackle complex issues. Despite the fact that's a staple on the show, my guest for this episode, Dr. Sheena Mason, takes things to the next level. Dr. Mason is an author, professor, and creator of the theory of racelenss. A theory that, in her words, is a creative and forward-thinking approach that helps people stop the underlying causes and effects of racism—the existence of race itself. Unlike naturalists, who see race as biological, or constructionists, who regard race as a social construction, Dr. Mason invites readers to become race skeptics—in other words—to understand that what traits we attribute to race, can be more accurately described by terms like ethnicity, culture, social class, and economic class. For, as she argues in her upcoming book, The Raceless Antiracist, fighting racism by reifying the idea of race is like trying to stop a flood by dousing it with water. In short, Dr. Mason envisions a future that transcends race in ways that allow us to celebrate our shared humanity AND value our many differences. Building on sociologists like Karen and Barba Fields, authors like Toni Morrison and James Baldwin, as well as a bevy of literary scholars and critics, Dr. Mason's work is paradigm-shifting work. So! Hold onto your brains, listen with an open mind, and brace yourself for a very different look at antiracism work. Note: The introduction contains some direct verbiage from the "Racelessness: The Final Frontier" graphic essay.https://www.theoryofracelessness.org/https://twitter.com/SheenaMasonPhDThe core rules of the theory of racelessness or raceless antiracism are as follows: Our belief in “race” and practice of racialization are not meaningless, because racism and valuable aspects of humanity hide behind what we call “race.” “Race” does not exist in nature for humans or as a social construction. Although we are all racialized by ourselves and others, we are raceless. Race/ism (i.e., racism) is a system of economic and social oppression that requires the belief in “race” and the practice of racialization to subsequently reinforce various power imbalances. Racialization is the process of applying an inescapable social hierarchy—race/ism—along with its attendant power imbalances. Racism does not exist everywhere in the same way and can be overcome.Support the show

George MacLeod's book Mediating Violence from Africa: Francophone Literature, Film, and Testimony After the Cold War (U Nebraska Press, 2023) explores how African and non-African Francophone authors, filmmakers, editors, and scholars have packaged, interpreted, and filmed the violent histories of post–Cold War Francophone Africa. This violence, much of which unfolded in front of Western television cameras, included the use of child soldiers facilitated by the Soviet Union's castoff Kalashnikov rifles, the rise of Islamist terrorism in West Africa, and the horrific genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda. Through close readings of fictionalized child-soldier narratives, cinematic representations of Islamist militants, genocide survivor testimony, and Western scholarship, George S. MacLeod analyzes the ways Francophone African authors and filmmakers, as well as their editors and scholarly critics, negotiate the aesthetic, political, cultural, and ethical implications of making these traumatic stories visible. MacLeod argues for the need to periodize these productions within a “post–Cold War” framework to emphasize how shifts in post-1989 political discourse are echoed, contested, or subverted by contemporary Francophone authors, filmmakers, and Western scholars. The questions raised in Mediating Violence from Africa are of vital importance today. How the world engages with and responds to stories of recent violence and loss from Africa has profound implications for the affected communities and individuals. More broadly, in an era in which stories and images of violence, from terror attacks to school shootings to police brutality, are disseminated almost instantly and with minimal context, these theoretical questions have implications for debates surrounding the ethics of representing trauma, the politicization of memory, and Africa's place in a global (as opposed to a postcolonial or Euro-African) economic and political landscape. Annie deSaussure holds a Ph.D. in French from Yale University and is an Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies in the Department of Languages and Literary Studies at Lafayette College. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Today's guest is Jonathan Kramnick, the author of a new book, Criticism and Truth: On Method in Literary Studies (University of Chicago Press, 2023). Criticism and Truth offers a formal analysis of the particular practices and habits of academic literary criticism, within the context of the transformations brought on by the Great Recession of 2008 and the Covid-19 pandemic. In this book, Jonathan describes close reading as a “creative, immersive, and transformative writing practice that fosters a unique kind of engagement with the world.” The case for literary study is made not through an appeal to contemporary relevance or intellectual abstraction—but in the material specificity of how literary criticism is done. Though it may share its objects of study with linguistics or history, as a scholarly discipline, literary criticism gains insight from an intimacy with and even mimicry of its object of study. Jonathan Kramnick is Professor of English at Yale University. Previously, he has published the monographs Paper Minds: Literature and the Ecology of Consciousness (Chicago, 2018), Actions and Objects from Hobbes to Richardson (Stanford, 2010), and Making the English Canon: Print Capitalism and the Cultural Past, 1700-1770 (Cambridge, 1999). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

To read is human. Even as literacy rates or the quality of that literacy make us nervous for the future, the act of reading looks like it's somewhere near the essence of what it means to be human. Because reading doesn't end, or even start, with books. Reading is this search for meaning. A turning and tuning of our senses outward. Looking for symbols, looking for signs of life. It's the longing for a message in a bottle, in hopes of discovering, making, and living in a shared meaning together. Jessica Hooten Wilson (Pepperdine University) and Matthew J Smith (Hildegard College) join Evan Rosa to discuss the joys and perils of reading, how to make young readers, how to teach and cultivate mature readers in the university context, and the significance of reading as a Christian spiritual practice.Help the Yale Center for Faith & Culture meet a $10,000 matching challenge for podcast production; visit faith.yale.edu/give to donate today.About Jessica Hooten WilsonJessica Hooten Wilson is the Fletcher Jones Endowed Chair of Great Books at Pepperdine University and formerly Louise Cowan Scholar in Residence at the University of Dallas. She is the author of several books, most recently Reading for the Love of God. Her book Giving the Devil his Due: Flannery O'Connor and The Brothers Karamazov received a 2018 Christianity Today book of the year in arts and culture award  and The Scandal of Holiness received a 2022 Award of Merit. In 2019 she received the Hiett Prize for Humanities from the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture. Other awards include a Fulbright Fellowship to Prague, an NEH to study Dante in Florence, a Biola University sabbatical fellowship funded by the John Templeton Foundation, and the 2017 Emerging Public Intellectual Award. She is a Senior Fellow at The Trinity Forum.About Matthew J. SmithMatthew J. Smith is Founder and President of Hildgard College in Southern California. He holds a Ph.D. in Literature from the University of Southern California, an M.A. from the University of Connecticut, and a B.A. from Biola University. He taught for ten years at Azusa Pacific University before founding Hildegard College. His scholarship is on medieval and renaissance literature and especially the works of Shakespeare, Milton, Herbert, Donne, and late medieval drama. Dr. Smith is the author and editor of four books: Performance and Religion in Early Modern England: Stage, Cathedral, Wagon, Street (Notre Dame), Face to Face in Shakespearean Drama: Ethics, Performance, Philosophy (Edinburgh), Literature and Religious Experience: Beyond Belief and Unbelief (Bloomsbury), and a recently finished manuscript: Shakespearean Recognitions: Philosophies of the Post-Tragic. He is also an editor of the journal Christianity & Literature and has guest-edited three special issues: The Sacramental Text Reconsidered, Sincerity, a Literary History, and The Future of Christianity and Literature in Literary Studies.Dr. Smith founded Hildegard College in 2022 with the conviction that higher education needs a reset. Where typical universities are growing ever larger into multi-versities, abandoning the traditional liberal arts and giving students a predominantly anonymous learning experience, Dr. Smith argues that the future of quality education, especially Christian education, is focused, tight-knit, rigorous, and recommitted to the classics of the liberal arts tradition. His vision for Hildegard College is to create an environment where young people can explore the riches of the classical tradition while also exploring and gaining experience in different areas of work—part monastery and part startup incubator. Mentorship, deep learning, and personal formation are the bedrock of a classical education.Matt Smith lives in Fullerton, CA with his wife and three children. He serves on the boards of Veritas Classical Academy and of the Classic Learning Test. When he isn't teaching, he cooks, plays soccer, trains in jiu jitsu, mountain bikes, plays with his dog, and writes.Show NotesHelp the Yale Center for Faith & Culture meet a $10,000 matching challenge for podcast production; visit faith.yale.edu/give to donate today.Production NotesThis podcast featured Jessica Hooten Wilson and Matthew J SmithEdited and Produced by Evan RosaHosted by Evan RosaProduction Assistance by Macie BridgeA Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/aboutSupport For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give

Imagine having an indie bookstore all to yourself for an entire night. Join me in this episode as I chat with fellow book lover and  Bookstagrammer, Dr. Stefanie Caeners, a Literary Studies lecturer who had just that experience. We talk about indie bookshops,  books we love, Edinburgh, and reading. Stefanie's journey is a fascinating one. From discovering her love for Southern California at the tender age of 16, choosing an office job over college, to her apprenticeship in the media business, and finally, her transition into studying literature, it's a story worth hearing. Stefanie's passion for British literature will captivate you, as will her insights on the topic of her PhD thesis and the freedom she found in studying something she adored.Dr. Sefanie CaenersStefanie on InstagramThe Wishing Game, Meg ShafferBooks by Stephen KingA Quiet Life, Ethan JoellaYellowface, Rebecca F. KuangFarrell Covington and the Limits of Style, Paul RudnickJames FahyThe Displacements, Bruce HolsingerThe House in the Cerulean Sea, TJ KluneDays at the Morisaki Bookshop, Satoshi YagisawaJames Fahy The Bookshop PodcastPaul Rudnick the Bookshop PodcastTJ Klune The Bookshop Podcast Support the showThe Bookshop PodcastMandy Jackson-BeverlySocial Media Links

Halloween is upon us — and it's the season for horror movies. Host Brittany Luse is a HUGE horror girlie, but loving horror also means critiquing it. Today, we're breaking down two major figures in horror: the final girl and the horny hag. First, Brittany chats with Dr. Kinitra Brooks, Audrey and John Leslie Endowed Chair of Literary Studies at Michigan State University, about what it means when the final girl is a Black woman. And later, Brittany is joined by horror author and film critic Gretchen Felker-Martin to discuss what's behind the horny hags in movies like X and Barbarian — and what that trope tells us about how we feel about older women in our society.