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The Drunken Odyssey

~ A Podcast About the Writing Life

The Drunken Odyssey

Category Archives: Memoir

Episode 368: Mitchell S. Jackson!

26 Sunday May 2019

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Craft of Fiction Writing, Episode, Memoir

≈ Leave a comment

Episode 368 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.

In this week’s episode, I talk to Mitchell S. Jackson about finding joy in voice while dwelling on painful material in a memoir and novel.

Jackson_Mitchell_Photocredit_John+Ricard

Mitchell S. Jackson by John Ricard.

TEXTS DISCUSSED

Survival MathThe Residue Years

NOTES

This episode is sponsored by Scribophile.

Scribophile

TDO Listeners can get 20% of a premium subscription to Scribophile. After using the above link to register for a basic account, go here while still logged in to upgrade the account with the discount.


Episode 368 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.

Episode 359: Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman!

23 Saturday Mar 2019

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Episode, Memoir, Music

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman, Memoir, Sounds Like Titanic

Episode 359 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.

In this week’s episode, I talk to Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman about classical music, social class, memoir, and authenticity.

Jessica Hindman

Photo by Vanessa Borer.

TEXT DISCUSSED

Sounds Like Titanic.jpg

NOTES

TDO will be sharing a table with Black Fox Literary Magazine at AWP at table T14104, plus I am moderating a panel on life-balance, which I clearly know nothing about.

AWP PanelAlso, my novel has a release date of April 16, 2019.

Guy Psycho and the Ziggurat of Shame.jpg


Episode 359 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.

 

Episode #342: Linda Buckmaster!

24 Saturday Nov 2018

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Episode, Florida Literature, Literature of Florida, Memoir

≈ Leave a comment

Episode 342 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.

In this week’s episode, I talk to poet and memoirist Linda Buckmaster about how our subjects sometimes choose us, the wondrous weirdness of Florida, and how the find form in the flux of composition.

Linda Buckmaster

TEXT DISCUSSED

space heart


Episode 342 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.

Episode 334: Ben Gwin & Jared Silvia!

29 Saturday Sep 2018

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Episode, Memoir, Music, Postmodernism

≈ Leave a comment

Episode 334 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.

In this week’s episode, I talk to novelist Ben Gwin about postmodern satire, addiction, whether MFAs ruin or sustain writers, and for some reason I insist that he needs to write poetry,

Ben Gwin 2_photo credit Jared Alan Smith

Photo by Jared Alan Smith.

plus I talk to Jared Silvia about synth music, Woody Guthrie, the vagaries of how folk music gets recorded, and Jared’s annual recording project every Labor Day.

jaredbio

TEXT DISCUSSED

Clean Time by Ben Gwin


Episode 334 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.

Episode 295: Charles Simic & Richard Blanco!

06 Saturday Jan 2018

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Episode, Memoir, Poetry

≈ Leave a comment

Episode 295 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.

On this week’s program, I talk to Charles Simic about James Tate, Kansas surrealism, humor in poetry, and embracing the unconscious,

SIMIC

Photo by Richard Drew.

plus I talk to Richard Blanco about the accidents that turn us into artists, the grind of editing, and the joys of finding new forms and challenges.

Blanco_press_327-Edit

TEXTS DISCUSSED

scribbled-in-the-darkThe Prince of los Cocuyos

NOTES

Be sure to check out the music of David Rego, whose songs “Rings Ring” and “Sapphire Showers” appear on this episode.

Dave Rego

Dave Rego

Episode 295 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.

Episode 277: Jaimal Yogis!

09 Saturday Sep 2017

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Buddhism, Episode, Memoir

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

All Our Waves Are Water, Jaimal Yogis, Saltwater Buddha

Episode 277 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.

On this week’s show, I have a fun conversation with the journalist, surfer, and Buddhist Jaimal Yogis about the provisionality of our knowledge, philosophy, zen, surfing, writing, avoiding preciousness, and the lunacy of the ego.

Jaimal Yogis

TEXTS DISCUSSED

All our Waves are Water

NOTES

Please consider donating to The Drunken Odyssey’s indiegogo fundraiser here.

Check out Carlton Melton, whose songs “Photos of Photos” and “March of the Cicadas” appear in this show.


Please let us know what you thought of this episode down below. How does your approach to spirituality influence your writing?

Episode 274: Litlando Memoir Panel with Lisa Roney & Kristen Arnett

19 Saturday Aug 2017

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Episode, Memoir

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Episode 274 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.

Kristen Arnett & Lisa Roney

Kristen Arnett & Lisa Roney at Litlando 2017, at The Gallery at Avalon Island.

NOTES

Consider donating to The Drunken Odyssey’s indiegogo fundraiser here.

Learn more about the nonprofit Page 15 here.

Follow Kristen Arnett on twitter here, or check out her website.

Check out The Florida Review here.

Go here for details on the 60th anniversary party for On the Road at the Kerouac House.

On the Road

Go here for details about Functionally Literate’s next event with SJ Sindu and Kristen Arnett on September 23rd at the Blue Bamboo Center for the Arts.


Episode 274 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.

Episode 272: Henry Hughes!

05 Saturday Aug 2017

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Episode, Memoir, Poetry

≈ 2 Comments

Episode 272 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.

Henry Hughes

On this week’s show, I talk to the poet and memoirist Henry Hughes about how to get over rejection, poetry, the freedom of ekphrastic work, memoirs, and fishing,

Plus Todd Boss reads his poem, “One of the Joys of Dry Fly Fishing.”

Todd Boss

TEXTS DISCUSSED

Hughes 3

Hughes 1

Hughes 2Tough Luck


Episode 272 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.

Buzzed Books # 53: Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood, and History

11 Tuesday Jul 2017

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Buzzed Books, Memoir

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Buzzed Books # 53 by Amy Watkins

Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood, and History

Near the end of my MFA, a new writer friend asked the topic of my critical thesis. I launched into a long and not particularly coherent description of the 20 or so ideas–all inextricably related in my mind–that had almost coalesced into a workable subject after four months and 30-odd pages of writing. The other writer laughed and said, “You must be a poet.” All good art is about more than one thing, but we poets seem especially inclined to the mental leaps that link ideas, cross disciplines, and complicate our elevator pitches.

Camille T. Dungy is best known as a poet and editor of the anthology Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry. We often say that poets bring a poetic eye or ear to their prose, but I would argue that Dungy brings a poetic mind to her collection of essays. Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood, and History (Norton, 2017) includes some beautiful, lyrical moments, but it is most poetic in the way it interweaves experience, history, family stories, scientific research, and naturalist lore.

Guidebook to Relative Strangers

On the surface, the book is about Dungy traveling to speaking engagements around the country with her baby daughter, but that subject quickly becomes more complicated as Dungy brings her full poetic intellect to bear on each situation. A conversation about movies, a hike through unfamiliar terrain, a layover at a small airport with a restless baby, a walk through her own neighborhood prove equally promising starting points for reflections on race, American history, conservation, and academic life, as well as more personal concerns. Or, perhaps, it would be more accurate to say that Dungy’s essays remind us that all these subjects are simultaneously scholarly and personal.

In “Bounds,” a multi-part essay near the middle of the book, Dungy tells a story about her daughter learning to sing “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” With scientific attention to detail, Dungy observes how the toddler develops her new skill in stages–humming the tune then singing nonsense words then losing the tune temporarily as she acquires each word of the lyrics then, finally, combining language and melody. An essay that meticulously charts the development of the writer’s child could easily become sentimental, boring, or both, but Dungy brings all her intellect, knowledge, and curiosity to the subject. She weaves in research on neurological development and linguistics, memories of her own childhood, and lyrical musings on the nature and purpose of language to create an essay at once intimate and intellectual.

Besides enhancing individual essays, this richness of ideas in a book about and by a new mother directly contradicts the obnoxious notion that parents–mothers in particular–become so narrowly focused on their children that they lose their intellectual curiosity or drive. As Dungy puts it in “Bounds”:

When I seem to be focused on a narrative about my daughter’s childhood, I might shift to a memory of an event that happened years before I was born because we live through multiple domains of relation at once….once a domain of relation is available, there is no guarantee that it will ever fully cease to influence us.

This complexity is what makes Guidebook so engaging. It’s also a main point of the collection. The domains of race, history, and nature are available to Dungy, even as she explores the new “domain” of motherhood. Hers is a poetic intelligence at work at masterful prose.


amy-watkins

Amy Watkins (Episodes 124, 161, 164, 192, and 209) grew up in the Central Florida scrub, surrounded by armadillos and palmetto brush and a big, loud, oddly religious family, a situation that’s produced generations of Southern writers. She married her high school sweetheart, had a baby girl and earned her MFA in poetry from Spalding University. She is the author of Milk & Water (Yellow Flag Press, 2014) and the art editor for Animal: A Beast of a Literary Magazine.

Episode 245: Tom McAllister!

04 Saturday Feb 2017

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Craft of Fiction Writing, Creative Nonfiction, Episode, Memoir

≈ Leave a comment

Episode 245 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.

In this week’s episode, I talk to the novelist and memoirist Tom McAllister about structuring long-form fiction, the mystery of love, the addictive horrors of football, and other important matters.

Tom McAllister

TEXTS DISCUSSED

Young Widowers Handbookbury-me-in-my-jerseycommercial-fictionan-exact-replica-of-a-figment-of-my-imaginationout-of-sheer-rage

NOTES

Bookmark It

Follow Bookmark It on Facebook to learn more about Brave New Book Club, which is led  by Vanessa Blakeslee.


Episode 245 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.

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