The Drum: A Literary Magazine For Your Ears

Episode 5 of Safe & Sound features a magical bird, a hypnotist and two writers with work perfectly suited to our current crisis. Tune in to meet debut novelist Jennifer Rosner and memoirist Sue William Silverman as they read from their new books and discuss creativity, survival and the importance of gallows humor.

Mysterious dreams, red tulips and a suspicious car on a snowy Moscow night—all this can be found in Episode 4 of Safe & Sound. Listen in to meet writers Ann Lewinson and Carrie Callaghan as they introduce their brand-new books.

Liven up your couch-to-kitchen commute with tales of mug shots, animal companions, unexpected heirlooms and facing the worst-case scenario with Emily Dickinson. Tune in to meet memoirist Alia Volz and poet Lesley Wheeler on Episode 3 of Safe & Sound.

No trips to the bookstore this weekend, but you can tune in to Episode 2 of Safe & Sound to discover brand new books by writers Vanessa Hua and Gila Green. Listen in as they share stories about breaking and entering, elephant poaching and baking bread.

Though you may be hunkered down indoors, you can still reach out and connect to fresh voices and new stories. Check out the first episode of our “mini-cast,” Safe & Sound, where you’ll meet memoirist Helen Fremont, poet Jacob Strautmann, a West Virginia mining town and a "lightly used" cat.

Elizabeth Knapp reads her poems "Capital I," "Is That a Gun in Your Pocket" and "Self-Portrait as Kurt Cobain Wrestling with the Angel" and speaks with Poetry Editor Kirun Kapur about topics ranging from American politics to her advice to young poets.

"Yvonne" by Ciera Burch is the 2019 One City One Story all-city read selection for the city of Boston. One City One Story is an annual project of the Boston Book Festival, which prints and distributes 20,000 copies of the selected story for free throughout Greater Boston. Ciera Burch will appear at the Boston Book Festival for town hall discussions on both October 19 and October 20, in Copley Square and Dudley Square. For more information about the Boston Book Festival and One City One Story, please visit bostonbookfest.org. The story is read aloud by Henriette Lazaridis.

Cattle auctions, pastures, and an old horse. These make up the world of Janisse Ray's essay "Cheyenne", about an old horse taken in by Ray's family. Ray's piece explores the nature of love, the connections between love and pity, and the discovery of grace.

The repetitive work of a tree-planting camp, the complexity of the forest, and above all, the sounds of that world--these are the subjects of Geoff Martin's essay "Burning Silence". Tasked with tending a loud generator, Martin contemplates how noise and stillness fuel our creativity.

Maya Detwiller's short story "Toads" explores the pains and rewards of adolescence through a child's habit of collecting toads. A giant supervising and creating miniature worlds, the story's narrator finds herself looking for a place--a place to fit, to belong, to grow in and away from.