READ TO ME with Becky Karush

This week on READ TO ME, we read the poem TREATMENT by Kirun Kapur.   Wild. It's wild. Reading this poem, I feel a gathering up of my attention all along the front of my body — like I was a slack windsock that's suddenly full and taut with wind.   And then that wind plays me, tosses me around into wryness and laughter, and then into devastation, and into intimacy —   into the straight hard line of...

This week on READ TO ME we are introducing our first mini episode, starring Makenna Goodman, author of THE SHAME. (Listen to last week's episode on THE SHAME.) Today Makenna and I chat about the main character of THE SHAME, about books that make her happy, and about craft that she's drawn to. For more info about this book and to read Becky's thoughts, visit here: https://www.readtomepod.com/season...

This week on READ TO ME, let's be thankful for sacred spaces, spaces where we are free to be and free to work. In my sacred space this week, the coffee shop, I read to you from THE SHAME by Makenna Goodman. Together we'll experience the power of monologue, being in the body, and the surge of a good story. Head on over to your favorite couch, your favorite coffee shop, or on your morning commute an...

This spring and summer and fall has been improbably glorious. Raging hot and dry. Grueling funk. Showing up for kids, for work, for your people, for your city, on the page because you have to, because you get to, because you want to. Because you are here.   So, let's do what we do on this podcast, waking up after a seven-week rest, let's turn ourselves to beauty in words, and lift up in eager awe...

Congressman John Lewis. Lt. Colonel Alexander Vindman. We read op-eds from both in today's episode.   Why both at once? Because sometimes pieces are like magnets; their poles line up. There's something they want to say in tandem, or in chorus; some pattern that shows up when one layers over the other.   So let's listen to John Lewis and Alexander Vindman, and we see what kind of love these two pie...

Singer-songwriter Kris Delmhorst does this special thing. Ready? She takes melody and rhythm and words and harmony and strings and winds and guitar — and she make glorious ships that she sets out from the harbor of her mind, sailing them to us on the current of her voice.   Ready for more? Today I read to you HORSES IN THE SKY from Kris's new album LONG DAY IN THE MILKY WAY (pre-order it, right no...

Today we read "a dark scrawl" by Evie Shockley , and get this, get this, get this there is only ONE VOWEL used in every word of this poem. One vowel. The letter A. As a gymnastics move, this is AWESOME, like, she's flipping, she's flipping, she's still flipping!!! SHE IS STILL IN THE AIR FLIPPING. And then, and then — what happens to us when that one vowel sound, that open a and ahh and ahr , pell...

Why do middle grade books last and last and last? Books about wizards, books about twin girls with a red Spider Fiat, books about... babysitters? Because the writing dedicates itself to characters and action, and the best of them hold the author's heart and mind in the white space. Come listen to the warm authority and craft in KRISTY'S GREAT IDEA, the first book in the The Baby-sitters Club serie...

A year ago, I swam in the ocean before breakfast. So did Kelly, so did Elise. Lizbeth, Lisa, Eaddy, Jan. Sage. A clutch of my sister Gateless teachers. We swam to the dock. Lunched on the porch. Wrote in the morning. Improv'd in the evening. And one afternoon, we read aloud from THE SUMMER FLETCHER GREEL LOVED ME by Suzanne Kingsbury. We aren't able to gather this year, so we raise up this book by...

Today we read an excerpt from THE SPACE BETWEEN by Janine DeBaise. It's an essay from The Hopper, an environmental literary magazine from Green Writers Press.   We splash down the St. Lawrence River. We stop and walk below the high-water mark, in the space between environmental science reporting and family stories. We laugh around a campfire. We learn how the body arcs us into meaning, and how a s...

This week on READ TO ME we go to the land! I read from the introduction to FARMING WHILE BLACK: Soul Fire Farm's Practical Guide to Liberation on the Land by Leah Penniman.   We look at the craft of guidebook writing. We savor the craft the global frame, and Penniman's expert use of it. We chomp on nutrient-rich sentences, and we see that mission statements do, in fact, have craft too.   And we ge...

Today we read the succulent poem BURIAL by ROSS GAY. Get this— it's one sentence! It's a poem that travels from ash and roots to plums and a father dancing, and it's one sentence long! Find out how a single line loops into a circle, and feels as cozy as a garden chat, and raises the dead, all casual-like, with fun.

Today on READ TO ME I am highlighting another wonderful Gateless writer, Elizabeth Alina, and her piece WHEN WAS THE LAST TIME YOU FELT LONELY, a writing & photography collaboration with her partner, Parker Pfister.   Read with me as we experience the delight of a journey that starts with repression but ends in liberation. That starts and ends with a question. That invites you to run with it to fr...

Today on READ TO ME, I read from THE SOUL OF AN OCTOPUS by Sy Montgomery. Sy's love for animals and the earth goes out beyond her skin into millions of other people's minds, into their bodies, so they sit crying on the sofa reading, and are so grateful for the heartbreak, and all the smoke it clears away. Come see how this love happens on the page.

This week I'm reading MASKED BLESSINGS by RUBEENA IANIGRO. This sensuous poem charts an evolution from passion to ecstasy, to rage to little hip checks of jokes (via a clock!) to a spiritual evolution on the narrator's terms. What?!? How does all that happen in one poem? Come hear Rubeena wield power on the page — and hear how I ended up sitting next to her on a couch in New York City.

Today on READ TO ME I read and love TONI MORRISON WAS THE GREATEST AMERICAN WRITER by Damon Young . He wrote it just after her death in August 2019. It's 700 words — and it goes from song lyrics to an ecology of black art to Toni Morrison as American literature itself to the central relationship of Toni Morrison and black people to America is it is today to Toni Morrison's legacy and directive. IN...

Today on READ TO ME we pull up a chair for Food Can Hurt by Rene Denfeld, a new essay published in the new online magazine WE FOUND TIME from Zibby Owens. Reading to you from the backyard shed, I love up commas and clauses, grains of salt and the authority of the body, and arcs to meaning that build and build. Lucky you! You get to savor Rene Denfeld's words!  

Today on READ TO ME, we cook dinner with the greatest heroine in children's literature. Heck, all of literature! Ramona Quimby, Age 8 by Beverly Cleary. I wonder if Beverly Cleary chased after Ramona, like a mom gasping after a fast toddler. Or I wonder if writing Ramona was like coming to a buffet table always full. Either way, reading Ramona taught me to write, and Clearly gave solace to every i...

Today on READ TO ME, we read the poem SMALL-TOWN MONTANA, 2019 by Beneth Goldschmidt-Sauer. An accomplished, award-winning writer, Beneth's work is exquisite, sly, mischievous, and bold. And so smart. My goodness, so smart. And in direct lineage from Jane Eyre, the patroness of singular, passionate minds. Come with us into the grace of attention as we love this compressed and flaring jewel.

I think we could listen in again to this passage from Jane Eyre because it shows the strength of the narrator while fulling immersing me into the scene. This is writing at its best, writing that took me away from the current pandemic, even if was just for a few minutes. -- To the moors, to the moors we go! O, romantic and foreboding mists! O fierce upwelling of green! O proto-feminism, mettle, and...

The week on READ TO ME I read from UNTAMED by Glennon Doyle. We're here for three reasons. Ready? 1) Glennon, like so many artists, had big plans for the launch of this new book. So we're helping throw the party! 2) Imagining Glennon Doyle at a Gateless Writing salon—with the safety, the wild talent, the admiration for the work, the chocolate, and the Thai head massage—is an absolute mind delight....

This week on READ TO ME, we're sitting on the porch with a song, "If You Could Hear Me Now," by The Mammals. Can you hear the bluejays and swallows in the background? They came around because The Mammals sing in the language of the earth. They put their verses together so that you fly on them, like a bird, in dips and swings. They take you to the horizon and spin it around, in harmony. Come learn...

This week on READ TO ME, we have two pieces, "Esmeralda's Prayer" by Tennessee Williams and Drag Queens and Limousines by Mary Gauthier. It wasn't my genius to put them together. Mary did that, in honor of New Orleans, and artists and outcasts, and queer kids and dreamers, and that which lives on a hard edge, with a heart edge, and makes beautiful things. Enjoy.

This week on READ TO ME, we drop into two pages from THE RAVEN KING by Maggie Stiefvater. Is there a better genre to read right now that young adult fantasy? No. There is not. Earnest, funny, delicate, with enough desire and longing to burn an ocean... and, in this passage, a crow for a pet and Tarot cards, too. It's the writing of terror and hope. Of being tested. Of finding your friends. Of push...

This week on READ TO ME I am reading from AMERICAN SPY by Lauren Wilkinson. The book operates on several different layers of reality at once, and the words are written in a way that so masterfully lets us experience each one. American Spy provides us with a context, a woman spy in the middle of a UN speech, that is fascinating, with jolts of some of the most powerful types of energy. This book too...