Is this episode about neuroscience? Philosophy of mind? What is freewill? What is reality? What are corners? Do holes even exist? Poet Mason McClay shocks people for a living. Literally. To study fear. Listen to Mason discuss these things and how the happenstance of life influences everything poetic.

Twice removed from your local pond's turtle family, much of what Mason writes is an attempt to communicate with shelled reptiles. That inevitably fails, however, and he returns to a generic psychonautic trajectory of personal and experimental consciousness research. When he's not mound-sitting, Mason is usually designing ways to probe the brain or exploring new media poetics concerned with agency, locale, and the self-referentially negative nature of language.

Mason is the Event Coordinator for the Austin based literary non-profit Chicon Street Poets and works as a neuroscience researcher at UT Austin. You can check out his work at mas----clay.com (site coming soon).