In the wake of two of the worst mass shootings ever in the United States, occurring just over a month apart, I scrapped my plan for an episode of the podcast dealing with fairy tales to talk about guns and gun violence. But this isn't any old plea for disarmament. I want you to shoot a gun. And here's why.

I'm joined this month on the team by audio magician Sultan Ridwan. Thanks for taking the sound of JFRRS!pod to the next level!

This is another "edition addition," this time for episode 1.5, Sweet Dreams. . . Don't Have To Rhyme. As promised, it's a couple of poems I wrote while I was entirely asleep! And wrote down when I woke up, much as Mr. Samuel Taylor Coleridge ALMOST managed. ;)

This is another "edition addition," this time for episode 1.5, Sweet Dreams. . . Don't Have To Rhyme. As promised, it's a couple of poems I wrote while I was entirely asleep! And wrote down when I woke up, much as Mr. Samuel Taylor Coleridge ALMOST managed. ;)

Have you ever woken up in the morning with an irresistible urge to write down your dreams? I've been doing it for a long, long time, and mining those dreams for ideas for my fiction.

Music in this episode is, as usual, by my musical alter ego Xenofranka including the JFRRS! theme, Saturday Afternoon Self-Portrait from the album SANS VOCCE except the following:

Rossini String Concertos: Royalty Free from MusOpen.org

Egmont Overture & Under the Hall of the Mountain King by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

In this special edition of the JFRRS! Podcast, I bring you another selection of poems from my collection "Politics as Life," inspired both by the current state of current affairs and just how darned much fun I had recording the previous full episode. Please enjoy responsibly, especially the piece dating back to my pre-teen years!

Selections from my poetry collection Politics as Life, presented in the context of the current American presidency and its attendant scandals. Warning: keep an open mind for the sake of compassion!

Read more at www.jenfrankel.com/books or at Wattpad under the username Jen Frankel. I welcome your comments and questions!

In Episode 3, journey with me to the far reaches of creation as a woman discovers just what it means to grow entirely out of your own life. A literary musing on fitting into the universe: A Small World. Read the story in my collection FERAL TALES, available at www.jenfrankel.com/books

In Episode 2 of the JFRRS! Podcast, I bring you a selection of sonnets, all on the ineffable subject of love. Indefinable, indescribable, wonderful, terrible, and weird, to love is to enter territory that, no matter how many times charted, remains one of life's undiscovered countries.

Welcome to the JFRRS! Podcast, aka Jen Frankel Reads Random S#it! I'm as much a random writer as a random reader, and here I'll be sharing with you my writings on such diverse subjects as time travel and the Titanic. In this first episode, I delve into the magical approach of Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa to sound and music in films like Rashomon and The Seven Samurai.