I'll Find Myself When I'm Dead

This week, we’re talking about revision. We discuss a chapter of Stephen Koch’s The Modern Library Writer’s Workshop that’s one of the better nuts-and-bolts revision guides, common drafting issues, t…

This week we’re checking in with March Faxness again, now that the field has narrowed to four songs/essays (including David’s!). We discuss the recent games, preview the semifinals, and make our pick…

This week we’re talking about possibly the best essay-related week of the year: March Faxness round 1, in which 64 essays about cover songs faced off in a tournament. We try to touch on our favorites…

This week we’re talking about the real reason this podcast exists: the annual March Xness essay/song tournament, which is about cover songs this year.

Some things we mention:

March Faxness (and the p…

This week we’re talking about essays that aren’t in the first person. Elena picked one example, Eliot Weinberger’s “The Rhinoceros,” and Justin picked another, an excerpt from Claudia Rankine’s Citiz…

This week we’re talking about this year’s edition of the Pushcart Prize anthology. We compare it to Best American, discuss the important differences, and focus on a few selections from the anthology.…

This week we’re talking about this year’s edition of Best American Essays. We compare it to previous years (spoiler: this one is a bummer), discuss the new subgenre of pandemic essays, and focus on a…

This week we discuss our first listener pick, Sophie Calle’s “The Address Book,” which was suggested by Will Howard. Also: lots of “Succession” talk (including a couple of potential spoilers), John M…

This week we discuss our feelings, how to write about feelings, our feelings some more, and two essays about feelings: Jerald Walker’s “Breathe,” and Chris Offutt’s “Trash Food.” (Sorry about the aud…

This week we discuss the biggest news in the entire world since our last episode—Elena's appearance last week on Jeopardy!

Elena’s episode (until it gets taken down):  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v…

In our Season 4 premiere, we discuss what we've been up to since last season, a reader email, Big People Fashion, AI voice prints, and the recent Anthony Bourdain & Val Kilmer documentaries. Also: El…

In our season 3 finale, we discuss documentary/nonfiction theater. Elena explains the subgenre, and David joins us to discuss “The Laramie Project,” a nonfiction play. Also: a stapler anthology updat…

This week, we’re re-recording the lost episode from two weeks ago, about Eula Biss’ 2020 book Having and Being Had. We discuss its main topics—capitalism and class—as well as whether it’s a book-leng…

This week, our special guest, longtime friend, and fellow nonfiction professor Dave Madden joins us to discuss two essays about fucking: Samuel Delaney’s “Ash Wednesday,” and Kristen Dombek’s “Letter…

Our episode for this week failed to record (thanks, Zoom!), so we're going back to the archives. More than a year ago, back when the pandemic was still young, we recorded an episode about Val Kilmer'…

This week, we discuss the 1993 Canadian/French Canadian film “Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould,” which we think is essayistic in many ways. Also: breath mints found in orifices, the thesis ci…

In this week's episode, we discuss two "The Art of ..." interviews from the Paris Review: one on the essay with Hilton Als, and another with Geoff Dyer about nonfiction in general. Also: our mutual l…

In this week's episode, we're talking about our generations. After Justin's mini-generation was dubbed Geriatric Millennials, we decided to read two examples from Donald Hall's book Essays After Eigh…

This week, we discuss the Texas Review's All-Essay Issue from late 2020, including two specific essays by Wendy C. Ortiz and Vincent James. Also: a virgin fake-gin cocktail, Godzilla vs. Kong, terrib…