Rachel Zucker speaks with poet, musician and Jewish educator Alicia Jo Rabins about her new book, Fruit Geode, and her lifelong passion for writing. In an episode rich with music, Alicia Jo describes falling in love with Jewish learning, being a classically-trained violinist, learning American fiddle music from a busker, playing in a klezmer punk band, recording three albums of Girls in Trouble songs (written in the voices of female biblical figures), her one-woman rock opera about Bernie Madoff and the collapse of the financial market, the inevitability of cycles, writing a spiritual memoir, the non-binary divine, the Jewish priestess movement, the importance of stopping writing, a hunger for integration, shame, performance, and so much more.

A live reading featuring past Commonplace guests Jericho Brown, Janine Joseph, Erika Meitner, Morgan Parker, Tommy Pico, TC Tolbert, and Yanyi, held in Passages Bookstore in Portland, OR, on March 30, 2019.

Live reading featuring Gabrielle Calvocoressi, Adam Falkner, Ross Gay and Sabrina Orah Mark hosted by Rachel Zucker at the Association of Writing Programs Conference in Portland, OR, on March 29, 2019. Includes a brief update on the state of the podcast and an invitation to leave a message on (347) 762-3405 with your comment, question, suggestion or friendly provocation about Commonplace.

Rachel Zucker speaks with public radio reporter and documentarian John Biewen about his work at the Center for Documentary Studies, especially his two series Seeing White and MEN, which investigate the history and reach of whiteness and masculinity. Rachel and John talk about how John decided to make these series, about the format of Seeing White and MEN, how and why it was important and effective to have a recurring conversational partner or official co-host, the value of white people examining whiteness and men examining toxic masculinity, virtue signaling, problems with imaginative empathy and how to not just think about oppression but begin to do something about changing it.

Rachel Zucker speaks with poet, professor and co-founder of Kundiman Sarah Gambito about writing after the 2016 election, their shared love of cooking, experiments in non-traditional teaching, going back to the ancients and redefining the goals of the creative writing workshop to include: care (of self and other), nourishment, joy and abundance. Gambito describes the loneliness she felt moving to New York in her mid-twenties, how and why she and Joseph Legaspi co-founded Kundiman (“a national nonprofit organization dedicated to nurturing generations of writers and readers of Asian American literature”) and how sometimes you need to buy a snow-cone machine.