The Drunken Odyssey with John King: A Podcast About the Writing Life

In this week's show, John talks with Nicholson Baker about the potential sorrows of writing, the drive to discover joy, and the need to explore other creative endeavors besides writing.

In this week's show, John talks with prose writer Michael Korda about telling the historical stories of the poets of World War I.

In this week's show, John talks with Tyler Mills about her extraordinary multimedia memoir, a poetic people's history of America's secretive relationship to the atomic bomb.

In this week's show, John talks with Jared Silvia about the 2023 film, Asteroid City, and look at how Wes Anderson and co-writer Roman Coppola counterbalances surges of emotion with layers of artifice, which is a mixed metaphor, we know.

In this week's show, John talks with Jessie Red Marshall about her extraordinary short story collection, Women! In! Peril! The topics discussed include how story collections are like mixtapes, how thematic unity occurs brilliantly by accident, and how the interesting questions to ask ourselves in writing fiction is often what about ourselves, as writers, is problematic to ourselves.

In this week's show, John and Nick Georgoudiou discuss Kenneth Patchen's surreal postmodern novel, Memoirs of a Shy Pornographer, before a small crowd gathered at the Kerouac Project of Orlando.

In this week's show, John talks to Marie Mutsuki Mockett about her exquisite new novel, The Tree Doctor, which leads us to the topics of Japanese literature, The Tale of Genji, and how the ancient world is surprisingly like our own.

On today's show, Rachael and I discuss George Saunders's discussion of seven short stories by Russian authors. Since Saunders's book is the result of teaching these stories in MFA craft courses over multiple decades, this book and today's discussion simulates an important part of the MFA experience, for those who wonder what that might be like.

The stories:

1. Anton Chekhov's "In the Cart" (1897)
2. Ivan Turgenev's "The Singers" (1852)
3. Anton Chekhov's "The Darling" (1899)
4. Leo Tolstoy's "Master and Man" (1895)
5. Nikolai Gogol's "The Nose" (1836)
6. Anton Chekhov's "Gooseberries" (1898)
7. Leo Tolstoy's "Alyosha The Pot" (1905)

This ep. features a conversation with Pulitzer prize-winning poet Diane Seuss about her latest book of verse, Modern Poetry. With bursts of internal rhyme about thorny subjects, Modern Poetry awaits the reader with a spirit of mourning and loss and self-creation, which is, for this reader anyway, joyous.

Thanks to Brian Salmons for bumpering this replay episode.