I had read a book by a neurology researcher who said that meal time should be about companionship, but if you’re on your own, find an interesting podcast.

I ate dinner alone tonight (Gary worked late). So I went into my podcast app and searched for, “The Writing Life.” I clicked on one podcast, but the interview style seemed a little stale and the interviews were mostly with fiction writers.

Next up came The Writing Life produced by the National Centre for Writing at Dragon Hall in Norwich.

Delightful discussions - language nerds all around, geeking out with other language nerds of all varieties. The conversations were lively, quirky, specific, insightful.

Elle Griffin, journalist and first-time novelist, in 2021 said, “Books are dead.” Instead, she decided to serialize her first novel on her Substack. With the bookshelves in my library full of bound volumes of Harper’s Magazine, stuffed with serialized fiction from the paper era, the idea of digital serialized fiction had been bugging me too.

The next episode caught my ear as well: Olivia Hellwell on translating from Slovene to English. My grandparents grew up speaking Slovene (in Slovenia) or being punished for speaking it (in the U.S.). I don’t know any of it — not many people do, which is how Hellwell went from being a Russian language student to earning a fellowship to learn Slovene-to-English translation. She fell into it, loved the beauty of Ljubljana and the encouragement of the Slovene people. But her voice effervesced when she talked about falling in love with translation theory during her Ph.D. studies.

I didn’t even have time to listen to “Writing Biography with Patrick Barkham,” author of The Swimmer: The Wild Life of Roger Deakin, which The Guardian called “an unconventional biography of an unconventional person.” Since I’m currently writing an unconventional biography about a deeply conventional person, this is must-listen stuff too.

I hope Gary will work late again (shhh!).