READ TO ME with Becky Karush

READ TO ME is the Gateless Writing-inspired podcast that trains us to listen for what we love. In this episode, we read from the first novel from Suzanne Kingsbury, the founder of Gateless Writing. We sink into the heat of a Mississippi summer. We get to hear the final notes of the symphony of a novel — the terrible and tender resolution of a dark and passionate story.

READ TO ME is the Gateless Writing-inspired podcast that trains us to listen for what we love. In this episode, we splash around in the intersection of magic, music, and luscious language. Poet Blake Edwards found the podcast through a Goodreads.com board and asked if we’d like to read his melodic, mythic work. Yes! Being loving and discerning readers for each other — what an honor and mutual gift.

READ TO ME is the Gateless Writing-inspired podcast that trains us to listen for what we love. In this episode, holy moley. We read one of the most intimate, transformative passages from AN AMERICAN MARRIAGE by Tayari Jones. How do you write about two people in bed? How do you bring in their pasts and their desires and their fears? How do you do all that and make it both sexy and safe (and sad and unknowable)? You learn from Tayari Jones.

READ TO ME is the Gateless Writing-inspired podcast to listen for what we love. In this episode, we get to learn craft from an email by Laura Belgray, professional writer, coach, and co-founder of Talking Shrimp and co-creator with Marie Forleo of The Copy Cure. Her emails to her list* are expertly structured, generous, smart, full of teaching and jokes, iconoclastic, unexpected, funny. Every one, a masterclass. Here, we read one about her dad.

READ TO ME is the podcast to listen for what we love. In this episode, we land in London, 1988, in THE MUSIC SHOP by Rachel Joyce. We meet on a ragged street, at a vinyl record shop owned by Frank, who can match a person with the music she most needs to hear. Frank and his old, good friend Father Anthony eat eggs and listen to jazz, and Frank wavers into in love. To fall in love in this book! What a lark! What a terrible thing!

READ TO ME is the podcast to listen for what we love. In this episode, we go through the portal that is SOMEWHERE IN A TOWN YOU NEVER KNEW EXISTED SOMEWHERE by Nina Hart. We come into a world of witches, dolls rising from the grave, firebombs, and popcorn. We see a masterful writing craft that can hold sexual violence and passionate, blessedly bubbling-ly funny reclamation and wild divine feminine rising.

READ TO ME is the podcast to listen for what we love. In this episode, we fall into poetry with “Majorca, May 1936” from A HISTORY OF THE CETACEAN AMERICAN DIASPORA by Jenna Le. Falling is what it feels like to meet a poem for the first time, and to listen for its power: you have to surrender to and embrace the work at the same time. In this headiest of Gateless listening, we meet the poet Yeats, and we meet Margo Ruddock, and a woman becomes the earth.

READ TO ME is the podcast to listen for what we love. In this episode, we read three pages from TO A MOUNTAIN IN TIBET by Colin Thubron. We drop into the narrator on the trail of Mount Kailas, the world’s holiest mountain, knowing nothing about what happened before this moment, or what is to come. Into our open minds, the craft and the power of just these three pages rise with odd freedom. We see a shape of grief, we lurch backwards into lost history, we stop on the side of a mountain, far away from home.

READ TO ME is the podcast to listen for what we love. In this episode, we read the lyrics of WEDDING SONG, from the musical HADESTOWN by Anais Mitchell. We get to discover a question, a dare, a seduction, a reckless hope, promises, love. It’s an experiment of an episode, our own small Gateless Writing-inspired dare — a live studio audience, reading words meant for music, not knowing how it’ll turn out or what happens next. (But now we know, and it was fun.)

READ TO ME is the podcast to listen for what we love. Each week, we read something wonderful, and then talk about the power and beauty in the work (which helps us surface it in our own). In this episode, we read two pages in SONNY’S BLUES, an iconic short story by James Baldwin. We meet three characters — the narrator, his brother Sonny, and the bandleader Creole — and we hear Sonny and his bandmates play. I love this writing.