Lunch Box Podcast

In this, the second episode recorded before a live audience in Missoula, Montana, Ed and John chat with Seattle writer, teacher, and baker Kate Lebo, author of A Commonplace Book of Pie, and fiction writer and essayist Robert Stubblefield. Ed wonders what it would be like to have money, John recalls writing entire novels during other people's smoke breaks, and Robert finally did bring us the pears the following day.

In the first of two episodes taped before a live audience in Missoula, Montana, Ed and John are joined by novelist Andrew Sean Greer, then discuss the precursor of internet pornography, what money should look like, the greatest natural line break ever spoken, field roast, and a variety of simultaneously metaphysical and scatalogical topics.

This week, Ed and John express amused dismay at Canadian novelist David Gilmour's awful interview on the Random House blog. They also discuss the effect a single ten-minute saxophone note has on a poetry reading, the brutal murder of the Chipwich, the soysage deception, and their respective weekend trips to Seattle and New York.

Ed and John are back from Seattle with a plan to spread the good news about YouTube's viral non-hit "What Kind of Eggs You Like?" They also talk about the relationship, if any, among pop Oceans, whether "Christian" and "Out-and-Proud" are moods, angry Quakers, and the perils of defending poetry.

This week, Ed and John do it live in front of a double-digit crowd at Seattle's Bumbershoot music festival. Guests include pedal steel guitarist Abilene Slim, poet Matthew Dickman, and poet and food writer Sarah Galvin. Featuring many dirty jokes, reviews of festival food, funny and disturbing poems, English lords, and musical excursions. We apologize for the massively overloaded recording here—the talking sounds good but the music, sadly, is distorted. We'll try to get it right in Missoula next month.

John's mad because some guy is exhibiting excessive fussiness about something John sold him over the internet. Ed is having a lovely time writing poems that make sense. Both are very, very clear on what they intend to wear during their live podcast in Seattle this weekend.

This week, Ed and John come clean about their impending live-on-stage recording of Lunch Box at Bumbershoot, Seattle's annual arts festival. They also discuss the USPS plot to divest themselves of unwanted obsolete packaging, the New Orleans real estate system, the poetry of Larry King, and the eating of goat.

John's feeling frisky and Ed is totally over his fire evacuation. So they liken John's career to a stationary train of cabooses, discuss humiliating themselves in order to sell books, recontextualize fleeting experience as a work of art, and read some poems out loud.

Ed tries and fails to curb the goofy as john tries and fails to stop sweating. They talk about the horrors of Las Vegas (which means "The Ladies"), the difference between a flaneur and a frotteur, stupid hashtags, and babyproofing, and they come up with not one but two million-dollar ideas.

After a month-long breather, Ed and John are back with tales of the brats of Yellowstone, the anthill of shame, missing shoestrings, near-drownings, kitchenware that has lived outdoors, and birthday cake.