GrottoPod

Can you create community and ritual without religion, raise moral and ethical children without the guiding hand of the church, find grace without God? This week, we address big questions like these when award-winning journalist Katherine Ozment joins t...

Bridget Watson Payne is the embodiment of the GrottoPod motto “read, write and just keep working.” In addition to her responsibilities as Chronicle Books' art books editor, she is an illustrator and artist and recently published two (!) books,

Oscar Villalon didn’t set out to become a literary gatekeeper, but that’s part of his job description as the managing editor of Zyzzyva, arguably the most prominent literary journal in the Bay Area. Join us this week as we welcome Oscar to the GrottoPod and discuss his career as a reader, writer and journalist and pull away some of the opaque drapery that often shrouds the publishing process.

Can you “catch” a behavior like you’d catch a cold? Lee Kravetz, co-author of Supersurvivors, thinks so. This week, he joins the GrottoPod to explain how. Kravetz (also a producer of our podcast) lays it out in his new book, Strange Contagion, which is released this week. Strange Contagion explores how social contagion -- communicable ideas, thoughts and actions -- turned volatile in Kravetz’s home of Palo Alto, California, creating a rash of teenage suicides. He also looks at how a similar kind of contagion helped the community recover from those tragedies.

Michael Frank, author of the acclaimed new memoir The Mighty Franks, grew up in an unusual, “intertwined” family. He was swept up into the world of his childless aunt and uncle, a pair of prominent Hollywood screenwriters who helped create such films as Norma Rae and The Long, Hot Summer. They taught him about art, literature and culture — and that “fitting in is death.” Things got complicated, though, when he tried to establish some boundaries as a teenager. What were the costs of his coming-of-age? Find out this week on the GrottoPod.

To retreat or not to retreat? That is the question on this week's special, guest-free episode of the GrottoPod. Join BQ and Larry as they engage in a spirited conversation about what makes writing retreats and conferences irresistible (BQ) or easily resistible and somewhat enigmatic (Larry) -- and where writers of all kinds can go to find their community. Also, in a GrottoPod first, BQ gets bleeped.

How does a “typical Nigerian-Norse American girl” get from rural Washington State to Harvard, Thailand and then San Francisco? Faith Adiele, the product of Sunnyside, Washington’s “only mixed-race, Marxist anti-war family," who became Thailand’s first black Buddhist nun, joins the GrottoPod this week to share the fantastical twists, turns and happy accidents that led her to become a celebrated memoirist (Finding Faith), filmmaker (My Journey Home), teacher and speaker.

You may not find working with inmates at San Quentin uplifting, but prominent tech journalist Yukari Kane does. This week Kane, a one-time Wall Street Journal reporter who wrote the definitive book on Apple after Steve Jobs, fills the GrottoPod with tales of health challenges, snap career decisions, suspicious sources, world tours and the genesis of her decision to teach at one of California’s most infamous prisons.

Todd Oppenheimer was an actor, a mime and a successful journalist who published in all the major magazines and won a National Magazine Award for Public Interest Reporting. But it wasn’t until he started his own publication, Craftsmanship Quarterly, that he found his life’s work. This week, Todd joins us in the GrottoPod to talk about his magazine, the Craftsmanship Initiative, his passion for craft and “working with your hands,” and the challenges of doing mime in Central Park with a young, untamable Robin Williams.

Some writers take unorthodox paths to success; for Joe Loya, author of The Man Who Outgrew His Prison Cell, that path includes a childhood full of spiritual, sometimes violent and tragic, twists and turns, followed by a stint as a bank robber known as “The Beirut Bandit." He spent seven years in federal prison, where a months-long stint in solitary confinement led to the epiphany that began his writing career. A born storyteller, Loya covers all of it -- and sets a GrottoPod record for colorful language -- on this week’s show.