READ TO ME with Becky Karush

This week I read from FRIENDSHIP by Lydia Denworth, a new friend of mine. In the opening pages, Lydia sidles us up to the science behind friendship by completely immersing us in scene. We learn how to locate the reader in the body. We see the beautiful shape of a non-fiction book's introduction. And you get to hear me in bliss, in an NYC hotel room, after the kindest party of my life, at which I e...

Hey, people listening with kids—There's one spot of tough language at 5:03. This week on READ TO ME, I read NOTES FROM A YARMULKE WEARER'S WIFE, a piece by my friend Dvora Rabino. We see how a brilliant, watchful woman's heart becomes her compass. We see antisemitism, and a man in a yarmulke as the living definition of "indefatigable." We see complexities and contradictions without answers. If you...

On the newest episode of the podcast, I'm reading from BLEACHERS: Fifty-Four Linked Fictions by Joseph Mills. Set at a pair of youth soccer games, the stories dip into the minds of the parents who shuttle their little athletes around. I read from "Interrobang," two pages filled with funny, frank buoyancy, hard-earned heart, and glorious, diverse farting. (Laugh now, but you'll see. And then laugh...

In this episode, I'm reading from a picture book, ALMA AND HOW SHE GOT HER NAME by Juana Martinez-Neal . A first for READ TO ME! I talk about the deliciousness of simplicity, how to listen for beauty, and why paying attention to your attention is the first step to mastery of craft.  

READ TO ME is the podcast to listen for what we love, inspired by the Gateless Writing method. In this episode, we step into the most lyrical crises of faith in the song HOLIEST DAY by Rachel Rie s, who performs as Her Crooked Heart, and PSALM 77 by a man named Asaph, maybe . Plus, an exquisite bonus interview with Vermont pastor and READ TO ME friend Matt Miller on what Psalm 77 means to him.

READ TO ME is the podcast to listen for what we love, inspired by the Gateless Writing method. In this episode, we celebrate World Read Aloud Day with SHE CAME TO SLAY: The Life and Times of Harriet Tubman by Erica Armstrong Dunbar. We get to love a middle-grade nonfiction book with driving action, pairs of nouns that start fires, scenes of historical violence that do not fetishize or dismiss Blac...

READ TO ME is the podcast to listen for what we love, inspired by the Gateless Writing method. In this episode, we read from PRESQUE TRÈS BIEN, a memoir cookbook. We get to love how Barbara Michelson writes stories as she cooks food — with elegance and slyness, balancing the clarity of instruction with the complexity of flavors (and the vast and funny truth of family).

READ TO ME is the podcast to listen for what we love, inspired by the Gateless Writing method. We begin Season 2 with the Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving Address — also known as the "Words That Come Before All Else." 

READ TO ME is the podcast where we listen for what we love, inspired by the Gateless Writing method. In this episode, co-host Christopher and I read and love up a passage from DOUBLE FUDGE by Judy Blume . It's a wild, parrot poop-filled story, with much to love.

READ TO ME is the podcast where we listen for what we love, inspired by the Gateless Writing method. In this episode, co-host Christopher and I read and love up a passage from SUPERFUDGE by Judy Blume . We recorded this episode twice. Podcast production with an 8-year-old son and a 44-year-old mama moves in gyroscopic lines. But the passage is really funny. (Baby in the closet!)

READ TO ME is the podcast where we listen for what we love, inspired by the Gateless Writing method. In this episode, young Chris and I come to you from a hotel room in Downeast Maine. We're just a few miles from where Judy Blume wrote FUDGE-A-MANIA ! Come listen to Peter Hatcher tell us about a sailing trip, Jimmy Fargo's sardine-and-onion breath, and what you do when someone goes overboard. We s...

READ TO ME is the podcast where we listen for what we love, inspired by the Gateless Writing method. In this episode, we begin the HOLIDAY FUDGE SERIES! With my co-host and son, Gus, age 8, we are reading from four Judy Blume books. Today we start with TALES OF A FOURTH GRADE NOTHING . Join Gus and me in loving this book—and then try out a recipe for strawberry fudge. We love each other and we hav...

READ TO ME is the podcast where we listen for what we love, inspired by the Gateless Writing method. In this episode, we read from THE PARABLE OF THE SOWER by Octavia Butler . It's the terrifying passage that isn't only heartache. We learn how a character's observations show us their heart and smarts. We see how Butler puts degradation and humanity in the same sentence. We see how awful things can...

In this episode, we read from THE ARCHER by Taylor Swift and a short piece by Cass McCrory . We walk the tension wires connecting and separating desire and surrender and fear. We see selves on the edge of transformation, and laughing, and crying, and jumping in, and fighting back, and giving in. We see a pop song draw filaments of image and action that burn to illuminate love.

In this episode, we see how the short story is like both a bar band at a distance and a whale call heard above the water. We read from the dark heart of "Mabel, Mabel," from THEY COULD LIVE WITH THEMSELVES , linked stories by Jodi Paloni.

In this episode recorded under a blanket, we meet the putrid, mysterious, seductive, and star-studded skunk cabbage in Catherine Owen Koning and Sharon M. Ashworth's WADING RIGHT IN . We learn how sentences of clarity, authority, and service can generate reverence. We learn what it takes to fall in love with a wetland, or any place we may have been taught to overlook. 

READ TO ME is the podcast where we listen for what we love, inspired by the Gateless Writing method. What does academic writing look like when it is meant to live beyond the academy? How do you turn research and theory into public scholarship? What happens to story? What happens to sentences? What happens to rhythm? IBRAM X. KENDI shows us, as well as a vision for surviving, maybe someday curing,...

READ TO ME is the podcast where we listen for what we love, inspired by the Gateless Writing method. In this episode, we hear a chorus made of a Slayer, a Candidate, and a Writer. BUFFY SUMMERS comes to us on the brink of final apocalypse in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, S7E10. We get an excerpt from TAFFY BRODESSER-AKNER 's The Gospel According to Marianne Williamson. Great writing calls to other gre...

READ TO ME is the podcast where we listen for what we love, inspired by the Gateless Writing method. In this episode, we read ROSH HASHANAH: 5780 , a poem from Verandah Porche , one of the most original minds and poets I know. We see the gobstopping power of mirror structures. We live an immigrant history. We bless butterflies. We turn to the coming year charged to do better, and shown how.

READ TO ME is the podcast where we listen for what we love, inspired by the Gateless Writing method. In this episode, WE'RE IN TEXAS with a live, participating studio audience. IN TEXAS. We recorded at The Intensive, a three-day writing workshop in the Gateless tradition. In honor of great writing, the extraordinary attendees, and the fact that WE ARE IN TEXAS, we read from that unparalleled Texas...

READ TO ME is the podcast where we listen for what we love, inspired by the Gateless Writing method. In this episode, we celebrate the launch of Paula Rizzo's brand new book, LISTFUL LIVING! How do you establish authority in a how-to book? How do you position the book to be in authentic service to the reader? How do you bring your personality into the sentences without making the book about you? T...

READ TO ME is the podcast where we listen for what we love, inspired by the Gateless Writing method. In this episode, to the moors, to the moors we go! O, romantic and foreboding mists! O fierce upwelling of green! O proto-feminism, mettle, and a singular communion with God! O, O, Jane Eyre!

READ TO ME is the Gateless Writing-inspired podcast where we listen for what we love. In this episode, we read a small piece of MADNESS, RACK, AND HONEY by Mary Ruefle. These collected lectures are about poetry (the writing, reading, and living of it), and here Ruefle writes about secrets. And opera. And Osage stories. And listening. How do you respond to work that is like the inside of a poem? Yo...

READ TO ME is the Gateless Writing-inspired podcast that trains us to listen for what we love. In this episode, we read DEMETER IN WINTER by Diana Whitney. It's set in the brutal cold season, but the poem is hot, thick with imagery, thick with the mythic, climatic, and personal. We get to be inside a poem that makes you feel like you were rolled around in hot honey, licked clean by a catamount, an...

READ TO ME is the Gateless Writing-inspired podcast that trains us to listen for what we love. In this episode, we first pay homage to Toni Morrison with a short excerpt from the perfect SULA, in honor of The Free Black Women's Library. Because Morrison shaped American literature, one reading isn't enough — so we also gravitate and catapult to Vickie Vértiz's poem, ONLY WE MAKE BEAUTIFUL THINGS JU...