An episode from 8/4/22: Tonight, listen to my four-part episode on the atomic bomb, from its development, to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and after. I draw almost entirely from the words of those who were there. The full text of the quotations used here can be found ⁠in the blog versions of these podcasts⁠.

The books, documentaries, and poems used to make these episodes are:

Any comments, or suggestions for readings I should make in later episodes, can be emailed to ⁠[email protected]⁠.

Don’t forget to support Human Voices Wake Us on Substack, where you can also get our newsletter and other extras. You can also support the podcast by ordering any of my books: Notes from the Grid, To the House of the Sun, The Lonely Young & the Lonely Old, and Bone Antler Stone.

Any comments, or suggestions for readings I should make in later episodes, can be emailed to [email protected].

An episode from 7/19/22: Sometimes it’s worth just reveling in the way a great historian tells a story, or details and invention, or brings us face-to-face with a familiar topic. Tonight, I read three sections from Jacques Barzun’s book ⁠From Dawn to Decadence⁠, where we hear about:

Don’t forget to support Human Voices Wake Us on Substack, where you can also get our newsletter and other extras. You can also support the podcast by ordering any of my books: Notes from the Grid, To the House of the Sun, The Lonely Young & the Lonely Old, and Bone Antler Stone.

Any comments, or suggestions for readings I should make in later episodes, can be emailed to [email protected].

An episode from 7/11/22: How do we find our way past the image of Emily Dickinson as a distant, unapproachable, recluse? One way is to read a book like Brenda Wineapple’s ⁠White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson⁠, and tonight I share my favorite passages from it. Dickinson and Higginson were both powerful personalities in their own right, and allowing them to share space in this beautiful and brief book saves Dickinson from the clichés, and mountains of scholarship.

Don’t forget to support Human Voices Wake Us on Substack, where you can also get our newsletter and other extras. You can also support the podcast by ordering any of my books: Notes from the Grid, To the House of the Sun, The Lonely Young & the Lonely Old, and Bone Antler Stone.

Any comments, or suggestions for readings I should make in later episodes, can be emailed to [email protected].

An episode from 6/26/22: We are incredibly lucky that, in the novelist Toni Morrison (1931-2019), we had that rare thing: a great writer who also achieved great popularity with the general public. This meant that she was interviewed about her life, her books, and about creativity and the news of the day, hundreds of times. Tonight, I’ve gone through my favorite interviews with her and gathered the best parts into these segments:

The interviews I’ve drawn from are these:

Don’t forget to support Human Voices Wake Us on Substack, where you can also get our newsletter and other extras. You can also support the podcast by ordering any of my books: Notes from the Grid, To the House of the Sun, The Lonely Young & the Lonely Old, and Bone Antler Stone.

Any comments, or suggestions for readings I should make in later episodes, can be emailed to [email protected].

An episode from 6/19/22: We’re lucky that all things Celtic are embedded so deeply into popular culture. Yet every now and then it’s worth sweeping away the kitsch and the clip art knots and the New Age stuff to ask what a good scholarly summation of Celtic myth—the archeology and the literature—has to say. Mark Williams’s ⁠Ireland’s Immortals: A History of the Gods of Irish Myth⁠ does more than enough to supply an answer (the book is worth buying for its bibliography alone) and tonight I read some favorite sections from it.

Previous episodes on Celtic Myth can be found here.

Don’t forget to support Human Voices Wake Us on Substack, where you can also get our newsletter and other extras. You can also support the podcast by ordering any of my books: Notes from the Grid, To the House of the Sun, The Lonely Young & the Lonely Old, and Bone Antler Stone.

Any comments, or suggestions for readings I should make in later episodes, can be emailed to [email protected].

An episode from 6/8/22: Tonight, we hear from two of the greatest twentieth century Irish writers. In the first half of the episode, I read from Dennis O’Driscoll’s interviews with Seamus Heaney. Here, Heaney talks about his methods, his inspiration, his favorite time of day to write.

In the second part (beginning around 35:15) I read ⁠James Joyce’s great short story of disappointed young love, “Araby.”⁠ The reading is prefaced by a few personal thoughts on Joyce, and includes an excerpt from ⁠Gabriel’s Yared’s score for the film The English Patient⁠, which I describe as being inextricably linked to my earliest experiences of reading Joyce. (One of the earliest episodes of this podcast goes further into my debt to The English Patient).

Don’t forget to support Human Voices Wake Us on Substack, where you can also get our newsletter and other extras. You can also support the podcast by ordering any of my books: Notes from the Grid, To the House of the Sun, The Lonely Young & the Lonely Old, and Bone Antler Stone.

Any comments, or suggestions for readings I should make in later episodes, can be emailed to [email protected].

Tonight, I replay two of my favorite episodes from Human Voices Wake Us: from September of 2021, I talk for a moment about loneliness and creativity. The next segment (beginning at 36:00) is from July of 2021, where we hear more about creativity and living in the world, this time from Beethoven, Joseph Campbell, W. S. Merwin, and W. D. Snodgrass.

Any comments, or suggestions for readings I should make in later episodes, can be emailed to [email protected].

Consider supporting Human Voices Wake us by clicking here: https://anchor.fm/humanvoiceswakeus/support

I assume that the small amount of work presented in each episode constitutes fair use. Publishers, authors, or other copyright holders who would prefer to not have their work presented here can also email me at [email protected], and I will remove the episode immediately.

An episode from 5/25/22: Tonight, I conclude with the last in a five-part series called Notes from the Grid. (A ⁠print version⁠ of NFTG has since been published.) The first section, "Simple Awareness," is followed by "The Uncomfortable, Unsolvable Middle" (begins at 20:30).The series concludes with "All Its Ways" (starts at 48:40)

Taken together, these last three sections ask why it is, in the world that we've made, it is always easier to be selfish rather than selfless, and what can we do about it? Rather than putting forth some kind of program of political or social reform, I return to the transformative importance of those hidden moments in our private lives. If we are willing to live in the world and not dismiss it with cynicism, or literally go off the grid, the key to our own fulfillment seems to be in seeing the eternal and the everyday as inextricably intertwined. No specific cultural or religious pose is required, except the pursuit and search and finding of meaning, the joy, the bittersweetness, the perpetual learning.

Don’t forget to support Human Voices Wake Us on Substack, where you can also get our newsletter and other extras. You can also support the podcast by ordering any of my books: Notes from the Grid, To the House of the Sun, The Lonely Young & the Lonely Old, and Bone Antler Stone.

Any comments, or suggestions for readings I should make in later episodes, can be emailed to [email protected].

An episode from 5/2/22: Tonight, I continue my five-part series called Notes from the Grid. (A print version of NFTG has since been published.) It asks why we grant so much authority and influence to reviewers and criticism—is it because so few of us will ever create a lasting work of art, but all of us find it easy to give our opinions on everything?

In the second half of the episode (beginning at about 27:02), a chance remark from the actor Richard Burton prompts a handful of important questions on creativity. What is it about the public face of creativity that demands a prolific output, or finishing anything at all? Why do we expect our most powerful creators to also be able to talk fluently, like some scripted newscaster, about what they’ve done? Why do we demand manifestos, rallying cries, and the certainty of split-off schools, groups, and tribes?

The excerpt I play from an interview with George Steiner ⁠comes from a 1996 episode of Desert Island Discs⁠.

Don’t forget to support Human Voices Wake Us on Substack, where you can also get our newsletter and other extras. You can also support the podcast by ordering any of my books: Notes from the Grid, To the House of the Sun, The Lonely Young & the Lonely Old, and Bone Antler Stone.

Any comments, or suggestions for readings I should make in later episodes, can be emailed to [email protected].

An episode from 4/14/22: “Has any one supposed it lucky to be born?” Walt Whitman asks. “I hasten to inform him or her it is just as lucky to die, and I know it.” Long after so many aspects of his poems have ceased to shock us, Whitman’s attitude towards death remains perhaps the most challenging in all of his poetry. Tonight, I read from my favorite of those poems: the youthful bits from “Song of Myself,” his meditations over the Civil War, and the poems that came from old age. They can all be found in ⁠The Selected Short Poems of Walt Whitman⁠, and ⁠The Selected Long Poems of Walt Whitman⁠.

Short Poems:

Long Poems:

Don’t forget to support Human Voices Wake Us on Substack, where you can also get our newsletter and other extras. You can also support the podcast by ordering any of my books: Notes from the Grid, To the House of the Sun, The Lonely Young & the Lonely Old, and Bone Antler Stone.

Any comments, or suggestions for readings I should make in later episodes, can be emailed to [email protected].