Tell Me What You’re Reading

Tracy Sidesinger, a clinical psychologist and psychoanalytic psychotherapist in New York City, discusses “What My Mother and I Don't Talk About: Fifteen Writers Break the Silence”, edited by Michele Filgate. (“Some of these essays are harrowing, some heartwarming, some — like a lot of mother-child relationships — a mix of both. All of them suggest, though, that if you can talk to your mother, you should.” Tampa Bay Times)

Tracy also refers to Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty by Jacqueline Rose, and also Feminine Law: Freud, Free Speech, and the Voice of Desire by Jill Gentile with Michael Macrone. Tracy has said that all three books are along a similar theme, that is, addressing expectations of the feminine and opening up more authentic and useful discourse.

Call Me Ishmael is a New York City-based project that invites readers to call and leave a voicemail message about their favorite book. Thousands of readers have already called and over a million readers have listened to this library of stories. Steph Kent and Logan Smalley are the founders of the Call Me Ishmael project and they are privy to the reading interests of the thousands of people who have called in. To call Ishmael, call Ishmael’s number: 774.325.0503. It goes straight to voicemail. Listen to Ishmael’s short answering machine message and leave a voicemail about a book you love and a story you have lived. The Call Me Ishmael website shows the books that readers have called in to discuss. Listen to the recordings on the Call Me Ishmael Youtube channel.

While visiting the Golden Notebook bookstore in Woodstock last summer, my daughter Melanie and I met and struck up a conversation with bookseller, author and poet, Gretchen Primack. It turns out that Gretchen is also an educator in a more formal sense. Gretchen has taught and/or administrated with prison education programs (mostly college) in maximum security prisons since 2006.

Gretchen recently released a new book of poems called ”Visiting Days”, which is inspired and informed by her years of first hand experience teaching and administrating in maximum security prisons.

Visiting Days has been described as a collection of short, keen dramatic monologues, a work of advocacy as well as of poetry.

In connection with the celebration by my law firm, @Orrick, of Pride Month and the commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots, I discussed with Alvin Lee and Amy Pasacreta of Orrick The Great Believers, by Rebecca Makkai, which is a very moving, beautiful and at the same time devastating, award winning novel about the AIDs epidemic in Chicago in the 1980s, its impact on young gay men and on the survivors as well.

I’m very proud to say that Orrick has a long standing commitment to inclusiveness that enables the LGBTQ lawyers and staff of the firm to be authentic and to thrive. For 13 consecutive years, Orrick achieved a perfect score in the Human Rights Campaign Foundation’s annual Corporate Equality Index, which evaluates LGBTQ-related policies and practices, and Orrick was one of the first global law firms to offer benefits to same-sex couples and to also offer fully inclusive transgender benefits.

A discussion by a serious and thoughtful,reader of four sets of "paired" books - Song of a Captive Bird + The Age of Light/ Churchill & Orwell: The Fight for Freedom + East West Street: On the Origins of Crimes Against Humanity and Genocide/ Chefs, Drugs and Rock & Roll + Fasting and Feasting/ Golden Hill + His Bloody Project - and also Solitary; The Village: 400 Years of Beats and Bohemians, Radicals and Rogues, a History of Greenwich Village; Ninth Street Women: Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler: Five Painters and the Movement That Changed Modern Art; and The Coral Island: A Tale of the Pacific Ocean. This is one full agenda!

Kate McGloughlin is a painter and printmaker (and storyteller), and during her long career, she has exhibited in notable galleries and museums around the world. Kate is president emeritus of the Board of Directors of the Woodstock School of Art, where she teaches printmaking and landscape painting, including to Carol, and where she directs the Printmaking Studio.

Through her paintings, poetry and prose, Kate’s book, Requiem for Ashokan, The Story Told in Landscape, is her outlet to tell a personal story with universal themes of tragedy, loss, grief, confusion and rage, as well as of migration, shared resources, competition for resources, and the importance of fair treatment by the government. 

Kate lives and maintains her own studio in Olivebridge, NY, near the site of the Ashokan Reservoir, which is at the center of our discussion.

The Ashokan Reservoir and its aqueducts and tunnels were built to get water to New York City to alleviate chronic and dangerous water shortages in the rapidly growing metropolis, but the cost was borne by the thousands of residents of the Esopus Valley who were displaced from their family homes and farms and mills; taken from them and demolished to make room for the reservoir, which dammed the Esopus Creek and then flooded the valley.

Sophie McManus (master's degree in fiction writing/ teaching writing at Sarah Lawrence College; author of critically acclaimed novel, The Unfortunates) discusses The Art of Time in Fiction by Joan Silber, and a variety of books written in Classic Time, Long Time, Slowed Time, Switchback Time and Fabulous Time.

Nick Lyons is a lifelong fisherman and has also written 20 highly regarded books about his passion for the outdoors and fly fishing, has edited and published many more, and Nick also for 25 years wrote the Seasonable Angler column for “Fly Fisherman” magazine.

Nick’s memoir, Spring Creek, is a love letter to a creek in Montana. In it,  Nick writes that he aims for his writing “to be rich enough to catch some of the stillness, complexity, joy, fierce intensity, frustration, practicality, hilarity, fascination, [and] satisfaction” that he finds in fly fishing. If you read anything that Nick has written, you will enjoy that richness. 

We discuss on the podcast the Esopus Creek, the Amawalk, the East Branch of the Croton, the Odell in Montana, the Bourne in the U.K. and the rivers in New Zealand, as well as the books and authors Nick loves. We also talk about fly selection, fly tiers and solitude on the river.

Keith discusses three astounding and true tales, as well as internet privacy and manners, and audio books + Springsteen

Alexis Coe discusses Alice + Freda Forever, the book, podcast and movie; also the research and writing process + her forthcoming bio of George Washington.