The Beautiful and Banned Podcast
The story of our new podcast, launching this week!
Hi, all. I’m taking a quick break from my ongoing series about how to be a lifelong advocate (read part 1 and part 2 here); I’ll pick it up next week and write about “The Angel of History.”
But this week, it’s been all hands on deck as my friend Christine Renee Miller and I launched the trailer of our new podcast, The Beautiful and Banned.
(Our logo was designed by the extremely talented Kalin Siegwald.)
Christine and I met a couple of years ago at Wilkes University, when we joined the creative writing faculty at the same time. I have many qualms with academia and thought I left that part of my life behind when I moved into my journalism career. But I found almost immediately that I missed teaching and I missed that energy that comes from being in a room full of writers who all understand this weird, wild career.
In the last twenty years or so, many MFA (Masters of Fine Arts) programs in Creative Writing have embraced a low-residency model, where students come for a short period of time to learn in person, and then spend the rest of their time working on their writing at home while working and living their lives. I’m a huge fan of that model, especially as academic jobs have dried up—maybe thirty years ago, it made sense to go into debt and move to another city for a three-year degree in writing because you knew you could get a teaching job on the other side. But now those jobs are almost impossible to find as academic institutions continue to slash the humanities (a newsletter for another day).
I believe firmly that MFAs are practitioners’ degrees; like an MBA, a masters in Creative Writing should teach you the practical skills you need to actually make it in the writing world. I don’t think everyone needs an MFA, but if you take the time to get a degree, you should leave able to WRITE and navigate the publishing world well (or as well as anyone can—also a newsletter for another day).
All that to say: when I landed a job teaching Creative Nonfiction at Wilkes, I thought it was too good to be true. Another faculty member who came after me asked while she was interviewing, “Is this place a unicorn?” Because it really seems impossible. Students come for a week in January and a week in June, and we have this amazing, intense, wonderful time together filled with in-depth, pragmatic classes and conversations, followed by gorgeous readings and late night venting/laughing/crying fests. It’s like summer camp for adult writers. It’s an absolute blast. And also, these writers are good. Like, pinch yourself you get to be in the same room with them, GOOD.
But also, at Wilkes, they’re not clique-ish or back-stabby. An editor whose work I deeply admire—as in, one of the books he edited recently won the Pulitzer—comes every residency and I asked him why he’s had a longstanding relationship with this program. He told me: he’s been at other prestigious universities or writing fellowships. They invite writers and bring in all kinds of talented people. And many of these people are truly awful to one another. They elbow each other out and try to put each other down and compete for the same handful of breadcrumbs.
But the program at Wilkes, in his view—and mine—isn’t like that. The writers from faculty to students encourage and support one another. Across the board, we all believe that the more anyone succeeds, the more we all thrive. There is a warmth and a collegiality that is truly rare. When he told me this, he gestured around this bar filled with writers talking and laughing late into the night, and said “There’s no place quite like this.”
I absolutely agree. And that’s where I became friends with Christine.
Christine Renee Miller is an actress, a playwright, and the Lubriderm spokeswoman. Her skin is almost obnoxiously gorgeous. She is effortlessly cool, in a way I will never be; she’s also warm and kind and generous. When we met each other, it was both of our first residency at Wilkes. We were trying to figure out—what is this place and who are these people?
We bonded that first day and by the end of the week, we were spending all our free time together. It felt like we’d known each other all our lives. It was the kind of camp friendship you make as a teen that I have not made as an adult in my 40s in…well, decades. We talked for hours that first week about our work and our lives and our thoughts and found we had so much in common.
Christine and I both grew up in Texas and are the same age, separated only by a few months. We both have curly hair and a shared family history that is, in many ways, almost eerily similar. There are some major differences, of course; Christine’s mom is Korean and her dad is Black, and both my parents are white, which is why our constant running joke that we’re twins separated at birth is especially funny to us.
If you’re around us at all, you’re hear our schtick: It’s the curly hair—that’s how you know we’re twins.
The thing we most share in common is our level of energy. It is glorious to find someone who matches your way of being in the world, and for me—as an extravert in a career defined by introverts—incredibly rare. When Christine and I met, it was less like “Hi, it’s nice to meet you!” and more like “there you are.”
(My text to Christine last night after we launched our trailer.)
We do have a lot of energy, and we want to use it for good. We’re both artists who care deeply about the world around us. It’s complicated to be a writer right now; it’s always been a difficult, complex career, but as writers who most often focus on systemic injustice and its effects on individuals, it feels especially hard to Christine and me. It has been a true gift for both of us to have a friend in the midst of this writing life who really gets us. We’ve read each other’s work, talked through knotty passages, brainstormed and raged and cried together.
And when I came to her last fall with a wild idea, she didn’t even hesitate.
We wanted to start a podcast about banned books, plays, and films because we really don’t understand what’s going on in the world and in our nation right now. Bans are up exponentially around the country. It’s affecting authors and publishers and libraries and school boards and classrooms and booksellers. There are politicians involved from the local to the national level. This has become a ban-happy time. And we wanted to understand what in the world is going on.
For me, this is also personal: After the Last Border was challenged in some libraries around the country. And the chances that We Were Illegal—about my white family’s migration to Texas—will NOT be banned when it comes out in June are, well, zero. This is an issue I’m interested in as a scholar but care about deeply as a writer.
Plus I really like talking to my smart, fun friend.
So we decided to launch this podcast together. It’s not two people who have all the answers, but who are asking big questions together. Because we both come from families and backgrounds that are politically complicated, we want to have discussions that are nuanced and thoughtful. This is not one-sided; we care about critical thinking and compassion. We want to understand what’s actually happening, what’s at stake, what the views are on every side, and why this issue matters.
And we plan to have fun while we do it. I’m sorry to tell you that the first two episodes we’ve recorded involve me cackling embarrassingly. Also, Christine made me cry when she read aloud a paragraph about a couch by Toni Morrison. This is not a stiff, literary podcast—we’re two friends reading and talking and sharing with each other. Eventually we’ll bring in outside guests to have in-depth conversations. We’re setting out to learn more about banning now and throughout history.
The trailer is up and the first episode drops on Tuesday, February 27. We have an amazing composer/editor/producer, Rob Heath, partnering with us; he wrote an inventive original score (he thumbed a book and the pages are the rhythm, it’s so genius!!). Rob will be editing our conversations so it’s not seven hours of us cackling, crying, and saying ‘um.’ We’ll have weekly episodes available for the first season; they’re all scheduled and we’re deep into research, reading, and watching our banned works now. We cannot WAIT to share with you what we’re learning.
We’re so excited about this journey. We hope you’ll join us! Subscribe to our podcast now so you don’t miss an episode!*
*If you, like me, prefer Apple Podcasts, it takes a few days to get approved, but it’s coming! For now, you can hear our trailer on Buzzsprout. If you go there, you can subscribe on which podcast provider you prefer. The button below is for this newsletter, FYI. Thank you for your support!
Wilkes IS a unicorn! So happy to have met you both and glad you’re part of the program! Congrats on the launch!!
So excited to listen!!