What I'm Listening to Now

Poet Jane Kenyon’s advice to writers includes, “Be a good steward of your gifts. Protect your time. Feed your inner life. Avoid too much noise. Read good books, have good sentences in your ears. Be by yourself as often as you can. Walk. Take the phone off the hook. Work regular hours.”

I love the bit about “have good sentences in your ears,” and part of the way I cultivate this practice is through audiobooks and podcasts. When I’m transitioning from my day job of teaching to writing, I try to keep an audiobook going. My favorite is anything by Toni Morrison, read by her. I mean, Beloved, quite possibly the greatest novel, American or otherwise, is read aloud by Toni Morrison and you can listen to that right now. What kind of alchemy is this?

I really think that audio narration of one’s own writing is a special art form that should get its own recognition, and now there are prizes for best Audiobook of the year. Another favorite is Heavy: An American Memoir, read by the author, Kiese Laymon, won Best Audiobook of 2018. I also enjoy writing-advice books, read by the author, Colum McCann’s Letters to a Young Writer, is excellent and undeniably elevated by McCann’s Irish accent.

I don’t mean this to be an ad for Audible, there are lots of other ways to listen. You can download Libby (an app that works with iOS, Android and some newer Fire tablets), and check out audiobooks from your library for FREE.

Podcasts keep me connected and informed at a time when the mainstream media landscape is, at best, changing and no longer meeting my information needs, or less charitably, a flaming cesspool. So, here some of my top listens from people creating interesting audio:

• Movement Memos - from Kelly Hayes, activist. I find something worthwhile in each episode, but recently the one “To Transform our Trauma, We Must Nurture Movements for Change,” really spoke to me.
• If Books Could Kill - a funny, debunking podcast that uses the genre of “airport bestsellers,” and takes down the faulty logic behind them. Co-hosts Michael Hobbes and Peter Shamshiri have a witty, gay-straight-bro rapartee that I enjoy. Their episodes almost never miss, so it’s hard to pick just a couple of standouts, but the two that are especially good include, “Freakonomics,” and “Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus.”
• Scene on Radio - is an entire curriculum. John Biewen, and his team at the Kenan Institute for Ethics’ Director of Storytelling and Public Engagement at Duke University, have created something really special with this. The season on “Seeing White,” is one of the best audio documentaries on the subject and I frequently assign this to my students. The remarkable thing about this podcast is that each season builds on the previous ones, like a course of study might. Their most recent season on “Capitalism,” is excellent and draws on some of the insights from the previous seasons. Aspirational.
• Reckon True Stories - from Deeshaw Philyaw and Kiese Laymon interviews writers about nonfiction writing, and helps remind me that I’m a writer, first and foremost.
• Unpacking Zionism - This is a series from friends and colleagues at the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism, and it always gives me new ways to think about what’s happening on my campus and beyond, and the many avenues that this destructive ideology tries to constrict our vision.

There are a few more but those are my top listens. And, if you’re new to podcasts, I’ve linked to each show’s main website, from there, you can find the podcast on whatever your preferred app for streaming (Apple, Spotify, Buzzsprout, Podbean, etc.) It doesn’t matter which streaming app you use, the content from the podcast is the same.

So, here are my teasers about what’s to come from me. Beginning Monday, December 2, I’ll be releasing a new 5-part podcast series, “The Trouble with White Feminism,” as part of the Unpacking Zionism series. I recorded this in the summer along with several colleagues, about the way that people like Sheryl Sandberg rushed to stake a claim for their brand of feminism in the days immediately following October 7, 2023. I’ll post a link here when it releases.

The second announcement is that in 2025, I’ll be rolling out a new podcast series, tentatively called, “White-Bodied,” meant to enlighten, heal and inspire white-bodied folks to embrace change that matters. I am excited about creating this and putting it out into the world. There are still lots of unknowns about it but I am embracing the uncertainty of it as part of the journey.

Before you go, a gentle reminder about this GoFundMe that I’m doing for MCCNY Charities. Thanks for chipping in!