This Weekend's Unnecessary Creativity And Necessary Podcasts

This stuff doesn't make itself, you know.

Yup, I was back in the kitchen for a couple of hours today. I worked long enough to listen to two podcasts. And, yet, we had leftovers for dinner.

What Did Sherman And Jess Have To Say?

I listened to Episode 5 of A Tiny Sense of Accomplishment with Sherman Alexie and Jess Walter (which appears to have stopped production last October). I chose it because it was called Why Do You Always Write About White People? something that I do, indeed, do. The hosts were going to discuss "how and even if writers should write about other races, genders and cultures." This is an interesting issue, I think, in children's literature because of the very legitimate push to include more diverse stories in children's publishing. I don't see a lot about whether just any of us can write them, though, and whether we should be trying to write outside our ethnic identity.

There were no hard and fast solutions here. But it got me thinking about the Writing Strategies for Fiction program I presented a couple of weeks ago. The first strategy I discussed was Write What You Know, which means different things to different people and a great deal to me. How does writing about other races and cultures fit in with that?

And Who Is She?

I listened to the Longform Podcast's interview with Brooke Gladstone, because I'd heard of her but that was it. So, who is she? She's a host of On the Media, a radio program covering media analysis.

My big takeaway from this podcast is that Gladstone is interested in On the Media pieces/interviews that relate to a bigger concept, to the greater world. This interests me because, years ago, it was how I saw personal essays defined, and it was what interested me about them.

This afternoon I ordered Gladstone's book The Influencing Machine. I'll let you know how reading that goes.