SHARE the MIC: a literary podcast

Sara Robke, an undergraduate at Northwest Missouri State University, shares an essay, "My Grandpa's Mechanical Bed."

Tiffany Imperiale reads a couple of recent essays. Silver linings during a pandemic. Also: Richard learns about an app Tiffany used to read and then write One-Direction-inspired fan fiction.

Richard Sonnenmoser talks with the poet John Gallaher about nostalgia and grief, nature and nurture, family trees and ghosts, mortality and free association. John reads a few poems from his manuscript-in-progress, My Life in Brutalist Architecture.

Richard Sonnenmoser talks with memoirist Heather Harpham about her book,Happiness: The Crooked Little Road to Semi-Ever After,and recalls the last lines of John Milton'sParadise Lost.

Richard Sonnenmoser talks with his writing student and friend, Hayley Brown, about some of the differences between painting and writing, when it might be "too soon" to write about an experience, and the suspension of some social etiquette in a creative writing workshop. Richard thinks about but doesn't tell Hayley a story about the last time he sat in the gazebo at Coleman Hawkins Park in St. Joseph, Missouri.