Perhaps some of you are aware of my love for the spoken word. The way prose rolls off the tongue. The rhythms of speech, the breaking of rhythms, for the purpose of furthering meaning, furthering impact, furthering the capacity of words to cut through that haze you have floating around you full of ads and text messages and layer on layer of thin partitions separating you from what you experience.
Well, I noticed I had a hole in my day, which I was mostly filling with NPR. Which is fine, but it gets repetitive. Really. Try listening to NPR news for half an hour two days in a row. Try it for 20. There is a certain style of delivery which newscasters follow without variation. It gets numbing. Lulling. I realized I’d much rather be learning to tell a good story.
So today I made my first earnest attempt at partaking of some fiction podcasts. And I liked them so much I thought I’d share what I found.
1. Elizabeth Bear, “The Chains that You Refuse”. Title story of her new collection. Downloaded from her blog here.
2. Escape Pod, a speculative podcast periodical. Episode 94, which included a really cool endearing story by Kay Keynon about the Loch Ness Monster.
3. Paul Jessup, “The Happiness of Pinned Wings”. A deep, dark zombie thing. Made me sad. From the Grendelsong podcasts.
4. Jeff Vandermeer on Why Fantasy is Important. Articulate and genre-independent. From the Odyssey podcasts.