March 3, 2024
Coming Soon…
My new podcast drops tomorrow. Creating this project has been one of the most satisfying things I’ve ever done, and it’s been a strange and funny way to try to recover from a period of crippling self-consciousness. Strange and funny because listening to yourself really does make clear what a fucking idiot you truly are sometimes. Oh, but you get to EDIT. Imagine if you could do that always, especially to the conversations that wake you up at four in the morning in abject horror. And you also get to LEARN. I’ve learned so much, about listening, and asking questions, and my own weird tics (like whenever I ask a question, I freak out and then re-articulate/re-frame the question again because I’m scared of just handing it off and letting the person I’m speaking with ANSWER….) I’m proud of so many things about this show, but one that I can take almost no credit for is how it’s also a spectacular showcase of some of the best books of Spring 2024. When I came up with my list of people to interview, I hadn’t even read most of the books yet, but they turned out to all be so wonderful, rich, and interesting in their own particular ways. Rom-coms, literary fiction, popculture nonfiction, mysteries, thrillers, philosophical meditations on art, memoir, commercial fiction, and more, proving that bookishness knows no bounds in terms of genre. Ooooh, I am so excited to share it all with you!
September 7, 2022
Pop This: Obvious Child
Guess what, there was one last place on earth where I hadn’t yet talked about abortion, and that’s the awesome Pop This Podcast with Andrea Warner and Andrea Gin, who had me on a few weeks ago to talk about OBVIOUS CHILD, the Jenny Slate “abortion rom-com” I saw in the cinema in 2014, where a post-Roe America was unfathomable. I rewatched it this month in the company of my 13yo, which was such a great experience. If there had been films like this when I was a teen, I likely would have spent less time saying things like, “I’m totally pro-choice, but that’s not a decision I’d ever make myself.” (Ha ha!) Since we recorded the episode, I’ve also been thinking about what a good job this movie does showing the messy reality of human bodies, bodies that fart, pee, (and even pee-fart), poop, leak, and get pregnant unintentionally. And abortion is just as ordinary as all the rest of that, as OBVIOUS CHILD shows, and I love that.
July 23, 2019
My Favourite Podcasts
Honestly, it seems a bit perfect that a week after the New York Times publishes their “Have We Hit Peak Podcast?” article, I’d write a post about my favourite pods. After all, I’m publishing my post on a blog (from the article, “Like the blogs of yore, podcasts — with their combination of sleek high tech and cozy, retro low — are today’s de rigueur medium, seemingly adopted by every entrepreneur, freelancer, self-proclaimed marketing guru and even corporation”), a form that’s been pronounced dead so often on a regular basis for at least a decade that I kind of feel like an internet zombie as I type this.
Being timely is not my forte. Last week I joined the Patreon of one of my very favourite podcasts…just as the last episode of the season wrapped and they all went on hiatus. So maybe if Kerry Clare is rounding up a list of her favourite podcasts, we’ve hit peak podcast definitively. But on the off chance I’m not the only one who’s late to the party, I wanted to share links to the ones that I’ve been loving.
Even better, most are on a summer hiatus, so here’s your chance to get caught up!
I was referred to the Mom Rage Podcast by my pal Lindsay Zeir-Vogel (notably: a frequent caller to their Labia Hotline) and knew nothing about the podcast before I listened—I think it was the episode where they interviewed a mother who had an abortion. It was good BUT I will admit that I’d underestimated what the podcast was all about. Two blonde white ladies who live in California, I was thinking, shallow and light. But then: NO! I started listening more and realized the hosts (blonde hair notwithstanding) were both writers (Edan Lepucki and Amelia Morris), that they interrogate issue like race, sexuality, public schools and climate change, they’re both absolutely charming, funny and real, and suddenly I wanted to be their best friends. Notably, I’ve been reading books recommended on their podcast all spring—it’s all so good and interesting.
David Tennant Does a Podcast With…
Someone shared a link to this one on Twitter, and it was the episode where Tennant was interviewing Jon Hamm, which was totally weird for me because here were the two men from TV I’ve most fancied (Broadchurch and Mad Men) and they’re talking to each other. And then I listened to previous guests, including his Broadchurch co-stars Olivia Colman and Jodie Whittaker, and every instalment was just interesting and delightful, even the conversations with people I hadn’t supposed I cared about.
I think Can’t Lit was the first podcast I started listening to, and it’s been a fun and refreshing antidote to the fraughtness of so many literary conversations about community these days. Co-hosts Dina Del Buchhia and Jen Sookfong Lee deliver a generous and bullshit free approach to being readers, writers, and community members, and their conversations with Canadian writers are always genuinely interesting.
To listen to World of Stories, co-hosted by Margrit Talpalaru and Hudson Lin, is eavesdrop on two friends tackling that age-old question, “Whatcha been reading lately?” with a focus on diversity and representation. It’s a pleasure.
Another LZV recommendation (that woman’s one hell of an influencer, at least when it comes to me!), I’ve been listening avidly to Amanda Laird’s Heavy Flow podcast since the beginning of the year, and it’s taught me so much about feminism, periods, and the no-longer-mysteries of my own body. (I also reviewed Amanda’s book of the same name back in March.)
Can a podcast be an academic project? This one can, and it’s even peer reviewed, which is fascinating. And it also means that not everything on Hannah McGregor’s podcast is RIGHT up my street, but so much of it is, and her ideas about academia are applicable to other parts of life. I’ve learned a lot from this one, and really admire McGregor’s persistence and desire to learn and grown through her work.
Call Your Girlfriend and Going Through it
And…the podcasts that I am definitely so late to the party in recommending. I really like Call Your Girlfriend, co-hosted by Aminatou Sow and Ann Friedman (“We believe that friendship—particularly among women and femme-identified people—is a defining, important, and powerful relationship, and that conversations among friends can be the source of incredible social and political power”) and also the mini-podcast Going Through It, which Friedman made with Mailchimp. Good storytelling all around.
