Happy New Year! In this first episode of 2023, Aparna loves pedantry. Haley turns the tables and interviews Aparna about her dissertation. She gets honest about the desire to work with only joyful texts and why it’s a complicated desire. Honestly, Aparna is on fire in this episode. We discuss whether kids should be critical of the things they love and the implications of censoring what children read. We examine and consider the merits of differentiating between environmental and eco-poetry. We each describe the best day of food we’ve ever had. Aparna discovers the magnitude of pettiness that passionate physicists are capable of. Haley, still in her whale era, discovers that baleen whales can blow rainbow hearts.
Haley spotlights the “How to Save a Planet” podcast (https://gimletmedia.com/shows/howtosaveaplanet)
Aparna spotlights the “Normal Gossip” podcast (https://audioboom.com/channels/5062384)
Mentions:
“Radical Children’s Literature Now!” Philip Nel, 2011.
“Why Ecopoetry?: There’s no Planet B.” John Shoptaw (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/articles/70299/why-ecopoetry)
“Touching This Leviathan” Peter Wayne Moe, 2021
Ayana Elizabeth Johnson “What if we get this right?”, OnBeing Podcast, 2022, (https://onbeing.org/programs/ayana-elizabeth-johnson-what-if-we-get-this-right/)
“The Order of Time” Carlo Rovelli (audiobook narrated by Benedict Cumberbatch), 2017
“The Lost Whale” by Hannah Gold, 2022
Thank you to Pádraig Ó Tuama whose poem “The Facts of Life” inspired the title of this podcast.
Cover image by Sanjana Kapur.
