GrottoPod

Kevin Smokler is an author, documentary filmmaker and event host based in San Francisco. Today on the GrottoPod, he discusses his documentary, Vinyl Nation: A Deep Dig into the Record Resurgence, which debuted digitally on what would have been Record Store Day 2020 (April 19) in partnership with 200 independent record stores across the United States. Smokler is also the author of Practical Classic...

Taneum Bambrick's book, Vantage, is a fictionalized account of the poet's time spent working as the only woman on a garbage crew. Using unforgettable images, Bambrick tackles issues such as class, gender, and environmental degradation without sentimentality. Sharon Olds called the book "a work of art which also functions as a call, as if from under the ground, a cry from water and air." Join a cha...

Yan Slobodkin is a historian of modern Europe, with a focus on French colonial and transnational history. He stops by the GrottoPod this week to discuss his current book project—a history of famine in 19th- and 20th-century North Africa, West Africa, and Southeast Asia, and its relationship to changing ideas of scientific control, political obligation, and humanitarian ethics—and its relevance to...

Beth Lisick's debut novel, Edie on the Green Screen, is about a Bay Area Gen-X rebel, an "It Girl" in the late '90s who faces her own obsolescence in 2010s San Francisco. It is fundamentally about how we manage change, and the change our world has experienced since this story's inception only makes Edie and her travails more relevant to the moment. Join a chat about Lisick's self-described "crabby...

What can international literature teach us about our collective past, present and future in these chaotic times? In the latest GrottoPod Gabfest, producer and Grotto fellow Rita Chang-Eppig talks to Jesus Francisco Sierra, Mathangi Subramanian and Olga Zilberbourg about the appeal of international literature, its necessity in our increasingly connected world, and our favorite authors and books, in...

For the better part of a decade, Lisa Hix, Hunter Oatman-Stanford, and GrottoPod co-host Ben Marks have been writing about antiques, vintage items, and collectibles at CollectorsWeekly.com. As a rule, these writers have tended to shy away from articles about the prices of objects or the celebrities who collect them, tried-and-true angles for journalists working the collecting beat. Instead, they’v...

Take the plunge into an episode on all things aquatic with Bonnie Tsui, whose new book, Why We Swim, dives into swimming history while offering poetic contemplation on the nature of this physical pursuit. The incredible characters in this book—including an Icelandic fisherman who defied death in the ice-cold sea, a Bay Area-based open water marathoner Kim Chambers, Olympic sprinting phenom Dara To...

Dignidad Literaria is a grassroots campaign for greater Latinx inclusion in the United States publishing industry that has grabbed the attention of activists and publishing executives alike. In this episode, Grotto fellow Rita Chang-Eppig talks to author and activist Roberto Lovato, one of the founders and driving forces behind Dignidad Literaria, about the spirit of the campaign, its goals, and i...

Want to learn how to shape experience—or explore whole new worlds? Fact and fiction commingle and collide in today’s episode, the third of our special podcasts about a new series of books from the Writers Grotto called Lit Starts. Each book is filled with prompts to help writers practice their craft. The first four covered character, dialogue, action, and humor; the two newest take on memoir and s...

Gender wars, pandemics, and, of course, workaday clones: is it the daily news, or our shared future? In the latest GrottoPod Gabfest, co-producers Susan Gerhard, Daniel Pearce and Beth Winegarner plus special guest Andrew Braithwaite take on dark visions, with four of our favorite dystopian novels under discussion: Meg Elison's The Book of the Unnamed Midwife, Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, Nao...

Cornelius Eady has published seven books of poetry, including Victims of the Latest Dance Craze, which won the 1985 Lamont Prize from the Academy of American Poets, and Brutal Imagination, a finalist for the 2001 National Book Award in poetry. Running Man, a music-theatre piece Eady coauthored with jazz musician Diedre Murray, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Priz...

This week we go inside Rooted & Written, a new Writers Grotto initiative by and for writers of color. Featured in this one-hour show: live poetry and prose readings from the first Rooted & Written workshop series in September, 2019, as well as discussions and reactions from the event. Rooted and Written's Melissa Pandika leads us on this behind-the-scenes tour, which also features an in-de...

As the year races to a close, we revisit the adrenaline rush of five key books: one inspired in part by SCUM Manifesto scribe Valerie Solanas; another powered by a Great Dane; a play-by-play plus backstory on the epic James Baldwin-William F. Buckley debate of yore; a biographer attempting to reveal his secret sauce; and one book to help us detox from it all, on defusing women's stress. Along with...

Michael Frank is the author of the memoir The Mighty Franks, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection that was named one of the best books of 2017 by The Telegraph and The New Statesman and won the 2018 JQ Wingate Prize. In October, Farrar, Straus and Giroux published What Is Missing, his first novel. In this episode of the GrottoPod, Frank chats with author and Grotto instructor ...

Writer Lucy Jane Bledsoe, whose new novel is Running Wild, interviews fellow authors Pam Berkman and Dorothy Hearst. Berkman and Hearst's new children's book is Filigree's Midnight Ride, the first entry in a series about, as Berkman says, "turning points in history, particularly American history, from the point of view of a dog who was there." Filigree's Midnight Ride tells the story of Paul Rever...

In this special episode of the GrottoPod, author and former GrottoPod co-host Bridget Quinn interviews writer Mary Ladd and San Francisco Chronicle “Bad Reporter” cartoonist Don Asmussen for the Betabrand podcast theater, recorded with a live studio audience at the apparel company's San Francisco headquarters on October 17, 2019. This event celebrated Ladd’s publishing debut of her “disrespectful...

What’s scarier: an abusive father imposing the re-enactment of an iron-age human-sacrifice ritual on his teenage daughter, an idealistic young man imprisoned and brutalized for a crime he clearly did not commit, a cast of characters adrift in a genuinely haunted house, or the political history of the United States? This week’s GrottoPod takes a look at four books that touch on these skin-crawling...

The future is already here—but there's another one, two, or three futures right around the corner. David Ewing Duncan's new book, Talking to Robots: Tales from our Human Robot Futures, speculates on the possibilities of what comes next in the AI-human interface, with help from theoretical physicist Brian Greene, futurist Kevin Kelly, and more. What could go right? What could go wrong? Duncan, whos...

Rummaging through piles of books has never been more fun than with books podcaster Traci Thomas, whose ebullient personality and searing smarts have grown her show, The Stacks, into a true indie media phenomenon. Whether she's in a page-by-page read of Toni Morrison's Beloved, revisiting Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, or getting honest over Iain Reid, Thomas and guests dig up treasures, poring...

Write funnier -- and livelier! Today’s episode is the second of two special podcasts about a new series of books from the Writers Grotto called Lit Starts, which are available on September 10, 2019. Each book is filled with prompts to help writers practice the craft of writing character, dialogue, action, and humor. Each book also features a foreword by a Grotto writer. Today’s podcast is devoted...

Want to take your writing to the next level? Today’s episode is the first of two special podcasts about a new series of books from the Writers Grotto called Lit Starts, available starting September 10, 2019. Each book is filled with prompts to help writers practice the craft of writing character, dialogue, action, and humor. Each book also features a foreword by a Grotto writer. Today’s podcast is...

Joshua Furst is an aficionado of American counterculture. His 2008 novel, The Sabotage Cafe, was a story of then-and-now punks defining themselves in opposition to the mainstream: dumpster-divers living in the shadow of American consumerism. His new novel, Revolutionaries, out now from Knopf, explores the life, legacy, and activism of an Abbie Hoffman-like figure, Lenny Snyder, as told by his disi...

Sara Schneider has been a wine, food, and general lifestyle editor and writer for 25 years, most recently as Consulting Wine and Spirits Editor for Robb Report. Before that, Schneider was Sunset magazine’s Wine Editor, which is where she met GrottoPod co-host Ben Marks of CollectorsWeekly.com back in the 1990s. In this conversation, recorded on June 14, 2019, Schneider and Marks discuss the someti...

What does the publishing industry still have to offer writers who are breaking in? In this episode, George Higgins and Susie Gerhard take to the field to check out the Litquake panel “Tried and True: What’s so great about traditional publishing?

New York Times best-selling author Julia Flynn Siler takes us deep into the story of the women who fought slavery in San Francisco's Chinatown with her new book, The White Devil's Daughters. The Writers Grotto's Bonnie Tsui,