What's Kraken with Jo Szewczyk

Mark Steven Porro was a carefree LA bachelor — never married, no kids — when his mother stopped eating at 89 and hospice was called in. He moved from Los Angeles into the New Jersey house he grew up in and became a first-time parent at 50, to his own mother. A Cup of Tea on the Commode came out of that, and he's now eighty percent through a second book about his father. Jo and Mark get into the rituals he invented to give her back her dignity, what an actor's training is actually good for, and the trip to a 200-person village in southern Italy that started the whole thing.

Key Moments

- Day of Beauty — the wardrobe, the nails, and parking her in front of the mirror to ask 'Who is this pretty girl?'

- She forgot his name, so he taped it to the ceiling in block letters where she'd look up and find it

- The night he lost his temper, turned off the light, and came back to a clean plate

- Sixteen days in Italy with his dying father, and a photograph of a man knocking on his own father's door

The Takeaway

It sounds like he went back and rescued his mother. Looking at it again, he thinks she rescued him — one last teaching moment, handing him the most important thing he'd ever do.

Guest Links

cupofteaonthecommode.org

YouTube, Facebook, and TikTok — search 'A Cup of Tea on the Commode'

Paperback, large print, ebook, and the audiobook Mark narrated himself

Jo's crime mystery Scarlet Shadows, book one of the Scarlet Mysteries: https://amzn.to/4wJk4cc

As an Amazon Associate, Empty Hell earns from qualifying purchases. Buying through our links costs you nothing extra and helps keep the show running.

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Dr. Rob Yonover is a volcanologist who rode a submersible two miles down, and an inventor whose See/Rescue Streamer has been saving lives for over 40 years. It's 40 feet of orange plastic with no batteries, no chemicals, and nothing to break — you deploy it in the water and it makes you visible from the air. He pitched it on Shark Tank and walked away without a deal. Jo and Rob get into where the invention actually came from, what the simplest solution buys you when everything else has failed, and the 19 years he spent as his wife's caregiver while running an invention company.

Key Moments

- Riding a submersible two miles down, and what a volcanologist actually does for a living

- No batteries, no chemicals, nothing to break — why the simplest design is the one that works

- The Shark Tank pitch that aired and went nowhere

- Nineteen years of caregiving while running an invention company

The Takeaway

He got the PhD so he could keep surfing. Everything after that — the patents, the streamer, the survival gear — came out of following the thing he actually wanted to do.

Guest Links

See/Rescue Streamer and Rob's other work: http://seerescuestreamer.com/

Rob's books on Amazon

Jo's crime mystery Scarlet Shadows, book one of the Scarlet Mysteries: https://amzn.to/4wJk4cc

As an Amazon Associate, Empty Hell earns from qualifying purchases. Buying through our links costs you nothing extra and helps keep the show running.

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Dan Henk is back — tattoo artist, novelist, illustrator, and a guy who got his head tattooed because brain cancer treatment left patches where his hair wouldn't grow. He's on his fifth novel, D-Day Is Here, and he's painting the cover and nine interior illustrations himself, the way the old pulp magazines used to do it. Jo and Dan get into how tattooing changed from a secret society to something you can order off Amazon, why your body puts nerves exactly where it wants protection, and the art school lesson Dan still passes to his apprentices.

Key Moments

- Radiation left patches where his hair wouldn't grow back, so he had his head tattooed instead

- Why the ribs hurt worse than the throat — the body puts nerves where it wants to protect

- Interviewing his Vietnam-vet father for the book, and the parts his dad still won't talk about

- Photos flatten everything. Hold your drawing up to a mirror and you'll see what you got wrong

The Takeaway

If you justify it, you're not going to get better. Dan tells his apprentices he's harder on them because he wants them to be the best — and the reason it works is they know he's not tearing them down.

Guest Links

danhenk.com — H-E-N-K, not Hank

Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok under Dan Henk

Dan's novels on Amazon

Jo's crime mystery Scarlet Shadows, book one of the Scarlet Mysteries: https://amzn.to/4wJk4cc

As an Amazon Associate, Empty Hell earns from qualifying purchases. Buying through our links costs you nothing extra and helps keep the show running.

Everything Empty Hell: https://linktr.ee/Emptyhell

Five people who have never met each other, and one voicemail from my mom.

I asked friends from every era of my life to come on and tell me who I was to them. Nobody compared notes. They agreed on more than I'm comfortable with — including one thing all of them independently decided was wrong with me.

Featuring Amélie, Bean, Charlotte, Sarah and Cory. Contains a brothel, a triangle choke, a quinceañera I nearly didn't leave, and a photograph that should not exist in a printing shop in northern France.

A pirate looks at fifty-one.

For my birthday I went to the Rolodex and asked people who've known me at wildly different points — 1996 Las Vegas, a sub-basement in Camden, a dating app during COVID, a workout call run by Tony Horton — to come on and talk about how we met and what they made of me.

They don't agree on how we met. Several of them are provably wrong. One of them caught me trying to gaslight her and named the venue.

What they do agree on, without having spoken to each other, is that I can't take a compliment. So they took turns making me.

There's also an apology list, because it turns out I've been carrying one.

Scarlet Shadows — The Scarlet Mysteries, Book One — is out October 15. Every sale between now and then goes to charity.

Amélie — met on Facebook when she was nineteen and Europe still needed an invitation to join. Now in Prague. Owns the single most incriminating anecdote in this episode.

Bean — Las Vegas, 1996. Designated driver, roommate, and the reason I'm still here.

Charlotte — London. Met in the sub-basement of Cyberdogs in Camden. Fifteen years of the Terrence Higgins Trust event and counting.

Sarah — met online during COVID from ten hours apart. Measured me in a hotel pool.

Cory — Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Met on a Tony Horton workout call. Plays bass, does Shakespeare, once drove three hours at 4am into an ambush I arranged.

And voicemails from my mom, Sarah, and from Jenni.

Everything below goes to charity until October 15. Book sales, affiliate commissions, all of it. After the 15th the links stay up but the money stops being someone else's.

• Scarlet Shadows — The Scarlet Mysteries, Book One — out October 15.
• Surviving Gen X — the memoir. It has boobs in it. Lizzie drew them.
• Power Up — https://mypowernutrition.com/jo — Tony Horton's stuff, mentioned around 21:00. My affiliate link. Nobody paid for the mention; I just drink it.
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Jaymes Buckman fronts Hot Apollo, a band he describes as Tempest Rock — loud like thunder, sparkly like lightning. He started out as the kid whose friends told him they hated his voice and handed him a drum kit instead, so he built his own band where nobody could tell him not to sing, and got better through sheer stubbornness and repetition. Jo and Jaymes get into where the name came from, what happens when you trust the wrong people in the music business, and why he'd rather be broke making his own songs than comfortable singing someone else's.

Key Moments

- "No, we hate your voice, but you have a drum kit" — the origin of a frontman

- The Hot Apollo name comes from an Allen Ginsberg poem, and he's spiritually obligated to credit the guy who found it

- Trusting the wrong people cost him about a third of his catalog on the major streamers

- He watched his late father's sketch comedy show for the first time last year, and can't tell him how funny it was

The Takeaway

Work on your weaknesses, not just your strengths. He skipped anything he wasn't already good at as a kid — then started running anyway, and came first in the mile at sixteen.

Guest Links

Look for Hot Apollo anywhere — Instagram, Facebook, X, Bluesky, TikTok, Spotify, Apple, SoundCloud, Bandcamp

Jo's crime mystery Scarlet Shadows, book one of the Scarlet Mysteries: https://amzn.to/4wJk4cc

As an Amazon Associate, Empty Hell earns from qualifying purchases. Buying through our links costs you nothing extra and helps keep the show running.

Everything Empty Hell: https://linktr.ee/Emptyhell

Francis DiClemente spent ten years turning medical records, teenage confessional poetry, and a shoebox of photographs into STUNTED: A MEMOIR OF DELAYED MANHOOD. Diagnosed with a brain tumor at fifteen that left him physically underdeveloped while everyone around him grew up, the Emmy-winning Syracuse filmmaker walks Jo through the whole grind — the bad first draft, the query-letter void, and the decision to publish honestly enough to include the parts where he was the one being cruel.

KEY MOMENTS

- Ten years and a 450-page first draft he had to write just to learn what didn't matter

- The month he lost building an index, because McFarland ships to libraries

- Writing the scenes where he was the mean kid, not the victim

- His sister's pre-college advice: everybody has something about themselves they don't like

THE TAKEAWAY

Chill out — you're a little bit different, but you'll get through it. And don't be a wuss. The regret isn't the tumor or the years of looking fourteen; it's the drive to LA he talked himself out of.

FRANCIS DICLEMENTE

Blog: https://francisdiclemente.com/

STUNTED: A Memoir of Delayed Manhood (Toplight Books / McFarland & Company)

Jo's new book Scarlet Shadows available on pre-order now (Launches Oct 15, 2026!)

As an Amazon Associate, Empty Hell earns from qualifying purchases. Buying through our links costs you nothing extra and helps keep the show running.

Everything Empty Hell: https://linktr.ee/Emptyhell

Yvonne Pelling is the Patient and Community Engagement Lead at PASSERELLE, the SPOR National Training Entity — Canada's national hub for capacity development in patient-oriented research. She came into the field through Access Open Minds, a youth mental health service design project, and she's spent the years since arguing that collaboration isn't a value you hold, it's a skill you practice badly until you don't.

We get into what changes when patients, clinicians, policymakers, and community members stop being research participants and start being research partners. Yvonne also walks me through PhotoVoice — handing teenagers iPads and tripods and asking them what youth mental health transformation actually looks like — and her current pie-in-the-sky project: growing bioluminescent bacteria to study collaboration as a living system. Yes, it started in her house. Yes, her kids complained about the smell.

Key Moments

* Participant versus partner, and why the difference is the whole field

* Why patient-oriented research bans acronyms and jargon, and what a Jargon Buster is

* PhotoVoice with 100 participants across nine sites, ages 13 to 29

* Why arts-based methods pull richer answers than surveys and focus groups

* Growing bacteria at home before moving it to a lab, and what light has to do with teaming

The Takeaway

The hardest thing about collaboration is the self. Not the schedule, not the funding, not the other people — the ego that needs to be seen, and the discipline to give space instead of take it.

Guest Links

Passerelle NTE: https://passerelle-nte.ca/

Access Open Minds: search "Access Open Minds" and "PhotoVoice Plus" to explore the project online

Jo's book, Scarlet Shadows: https://amzn.to/4wJk4cc

As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.

https://linktr.ee/Emptyhell

Linda Drattell wrote her first poem at sixteen and started her novel thirty years ago — long before she lost her hearing in her thirties, and long before she survived the 2016 Bastille Day truck attack in Nice. She talks with Jo about the dragon that turned out to be everybody, the two women who carry her poem "The Torrent and the Tree" into chemotherapy, and the therapist who refused to discuss the attack and wanted to talk football instead. Four books in, the through-line isn't trauma — it's writing things vague enough that strangers can climb inside them.

Key Moments

• 01:12 — A Spanish teacher's homework assignment turns into a children's book about a dragon
• 02:07 — "That dragon is me." Three creators, three reasons, same answer
• 02:45 — Inside a poetry critique group: "I know more about them than my own family"
• 04:11 — A LinkedIn post becomes an invitation from the Korean Haiku Federation
• 08:37 — Going deaf in her 30s, and being the last person in the house to figure it out
• 10:02 — "The Torrent and the Tree," written at 16, and the two women who take it to chemo
• 13:22 — Bastille Day 2016 in Nice: the slow waitress who may have saved her life
• 19:07 — The second arrow: how reliving trauma paves a gravel road into a freeway
• 20:00 — Ten years on, the question that's still hard: why me, why still here

Takeaway

Leave the door open. Linda writes the tree, the dragon, and Filamena vague enough that anyone can walk in and find themselves already standing there — which is why a stranger at a book signing shoved a copy at her to sign while she went and bought a second one.

Find Linda Drattell

• Website: https://lindadrattell.com
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/AuthorLindaDrattell/

As an Amazon Associate, Empty Hell earns from qualifying purchases. Buying through these links costs you nothing extra and helps keep the show running.

Everything Empty Hell: https://linktr.ee/Emptyhell

Dr. Randy Overbeck is back, and this time there's not a single ghost in the book. Abigail Trench is his first historical — a novel about the Culper Ring, George Washington's spy network in occupied New York, and specifically about Agent 355, the one woman in it whose identity nobody has ever established. He and Jo get into what the historical record actually contains (almost nothing), why he doesn't buy the standard theory about what happened to her, and how you write a British officer as a principled man instead of a villain. Then it turns into a working writers' conversation: three levels of feedback, a dozen beta readers, and the first chapter he rewrote fourteen times.

Key Moments

• 00:23 — A departure: mystery and suspense, but no paranormal this time
• 01:51 — The Culper Ring explained — six men and one woman, and the secrecy that held
• 02:21 — The sixth man's identity stayed hidden until the 1930s, 150 years on
• 04:03 — Why the revolution belongs to people working in the shadows, not just the famous names
• 05:25 — Agent 355, "the lady," and how little the record actually says
• 06:43 — The prevailing theory about her fate, and why he thinks it doesn't hold up
• 07:47 — Where the history stops and the fiction openly starts
• 09:08 — Researching Red Shadows at Saugatuck and sitting down with tribal leaders
• 11:15 — Two POVs: Abigail, and the British officer whose house she works in
• 13:14 — Book two, Robert Townsend, and Major John André
• 13:26 — Benedict Arnold was the war's most successful general before he wasn't
• 15:03 — Why a British gentleman considered spying a notch above robbery
• 15:51 — Handwriting analysis, decades later, unmasks Culper Jr.
• 17:25 — The 1774 request Parliament refused, and the three years that made it moot
• 20:55 — Diversion Books, Simon & Schuster, and the step up from small press
• 21:41 — Seven novels in and still in a weekly writers group
• 23:28 — Three levels of feedback before anyone sees a finished manuscript
• 26:37 — Rewriting one first chapter fourteen times
• 29:32 — Big publisher or not, you still promote it like an indie

Takeaway

Seven novels, a shelf of national awards, and Simon & Schuster on the spine — and he still hands unfinished chapters to a weekly group that includes a poet, a horror writer, and a sci-fi writer, because people outside your genre catch what you've stopped being able to see. Fourteen rewrites on a single first chapter. That's the job.

Find Dr. Randy Overbeck

• Website: https://www.authorrandyoverbeck.com
• Podcast — Great Stories about Great Storytellers: available wherever you get podcasts
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/authorrandyoverbeck
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/authorrandyoverbeck/
• X/Twitter: https://twitter.com/OverbeckRandy
• BookBub: https://www.bookbub.com/authors/randy-overbeck

Randy's Books

• Abigail Trench: A Novel of Washington's Spy Ring (Diversion Books, dist. Simon & Schuster) — https://amzn.to/4fWMtVT
• Book two in the Abigail cycle goes to the publisher shortly; audiobook of Abigail Trench is in production

As an Amazon Associate, Empty Hell earns from qualifying purchases. Buying through these links costs you nothing extra and helps keep the show running.

Everything Empty Hell: https://linktr.ee/Emptyhell

Ryan Güt spent two decades holding down the groove.  He's played with some of the best including Stöner, Brant Bjork, and Mario Lalli & the Rubber Snake Charmers. On The Shastafarian, his debut solo record, he puts his art and soul into it and even painted the cover art. We get into the big band grandfather who started it, the vintage keyboard room at Church Studios, why physical media still matters in an age of digital burnout, and what he'd say to the kid he used to be.

Key Moments

• From big band to the kit. His grandfather drummed big band in Chicago before moving the family to L.A. Ryan came up on saxophone and piano, and the drums took over in high school.

• A solo record built for a band. He wrote and played all of it alone, then handed it to friends and told them to play it the way they hear it, not the way he cut it.

• Vinyl over the cloud. He painted the front and back covers himself. Nobody signs a download, and nobody can delete a record off your shelf.

• First live outing for the record. Friday, Aug. 21 at the Dune Room in Indio, supporting desert legends Fatso Jetson, with Coachella Valley's Mighty Jack.

Take Away
"You're okay. It's okay to be sensitive, it's okay to be different — no one can be you, so be the best you you can be." Adopted as an infant, Ryan spent years chasing an acceptance he eventually had to hand himself.

Find Ryan Güt

• Website: https://www.theshastafarian.com

• The Shastafarian on Bandcamp: https://theshastafarian.bandcamp.com

• Instagram: @theshastafarian

• YouTube: @therealshastafarian

• Live: Friday, Aug. 21 — Dune Room, Indio, CA (w/ Fatso Jetson and Mighty Jack)

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