Fiction Makes Us Kinder with Chris Bohjalian
The Book Maven is back with another important conversation about finding empathy in our writing. In this episode, Bethanne Patrick talks to Chris Bohjalian about his newest novel The Jackal’s Mistress [https://bookshop.org/a/107867/9780385547642]. They discuss recounting difficult historic events, finding empathy through fiction, and the process of researching information for this book.
Canon or Can It returns this week, focusing on Gone With the Wind [https://bookshop.org/a/107867/9781451635621], which lives in infamy for its portrayal of American chattel slavery as secondary to its romantic narrative.
Can Bethanne beat the clock? She gives us 6 Recs for our To Be Read lists, this week focusing on books with phenomenal TV adaptations. Titles include: Restoration [https://bookshop.org/a/107867/9780393345988] by Rose Tremain, The Beekeeper of Aleppo [https://bookshop.org/a/107867/9780593128176] by Christy Lefteri, Brotherless Night [https://bookshop.org/a/107867/9780812978278] by V. V. Ganeshananthan, In the Shadow of the Banyan [https://bookshop.org/a/107867/9781451657715]by Vaddey Ratner, Savage Coast [https://bookshop.org/a/107867/9781558618206] by Muriel Rukeyser, and Half of a Yellow Sun [https://bookshop.org/a/107867/9781400095209] by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
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The Book Maven: A Literary Revue is hosted by Bethanne Patrick, produced by Christina McBride, and engineered by Jordan Aaron, with help from Lauren Stack.
All titles mentioned:
The Jackal's Mistress [https://bookshop.org/a/107867/9780385547642], Skeletons at the Feast [https://bookshop.org/a/107867/9780307394965], Secrets of Eden [https://bookshop.org/a/107867/9780307394989], Tran-sister Radio: A Transgender Love Story [https://bookshop.org/a/107867/9780375705175], Midwives [https://bookshop.org/a/107867/9780375706776], The Flight Attendant [https://bookshop.org/a/107867/9780525432685], and The Amateur by Chris Bohjalian
Cold Mountain [https://bookshop.org/a/107867/9780802126757] by Charles Frazier
The Vermont Brigade in the Shenandoah Valley [https://bookshop.org/a/107867/9781021672827] by Aldace Walker
This Republic of Suffering [https://bookshop.org/a/107867/9780375703836] by Drew Gilpin Faust
The Heart of American Poetry and Lunch Poems [https://bookshop.org/a/107867/9780872860353] by Frank O’Hara
Not the End of the World [https://bookshop.org/a/107867/9780316536752] by Hannah Ritchie
Nighttime is My Time [https://bookshop.org/a/107867/9780743412636] by Mary Higgins Clark
Gone With the Wind [https://bookshop.org/a/107867/9781451635621] by Margaret Mitchell
The Unvanquished [https://bookshop.org/a/107867/9780679736523] by William Faulkner
The Red Badge of Courage [https://bookshop.org/a/107867/9780553210118] by Stephen Crane
Jubilee [https://bookshop.org/a/107867/9780544812123] by Margaret Walker
Restoration [https://bookshop.org/a/107867/9780393345988] by Rose Tremain
The Beekeeper of Aleppo [https://bookshop.org/a/107867/9780593128176] by Christy Lefteri
Brotherless Night [https://bookshop.org/a/107867/9780812978278] by V. V. Ganeshananthan
In the Shadow of the Banyan [https://bookshop.org/a/107867/9781451657715] by Vaddey Ratner
Savage Coast [https://bookshop.org/a/107867/9781558618206] by Muriel Rukeyser
Half of a Yellow Sun [https://bookshop.org/a/107867/9781400095209]by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Episode Transcript:
Welcome to season two of The Book Maven: A Literary Revue. This season, we'll talk to leading authors, dig into the classics to decide which should stay in the literary canon, and I'll recommend some of my favorite books to you. We'll have all that and more in this episode. But first…
This week, I talked to Chris Bohjalian about his latest novel, The Jackal's Mistress. We discussed recounting difficult historical events, finding empathy through fiction, and the process of researching for this book. Join us now in conversation as Chris talks about The Jackal's Mistress as a uniquely American work of fiction.
BP: Does it feel big, The Jackal's Mistress to you?
CB: First of all, Bethanne, thank you. It's always great to chat with you.
BP: Thank you. Likewise.
CB: It's my 25th book. Now, the fact that it's my 25th book doesn't necessarily mean it is a big book. 25 books are only a testament to my longevity, not necessarily my talent.
BP: But, you know, even if we were to take talent out of the equation, this book feels... it has the feel of relevance. It feels like a very American book. I'm not trying to say Great American Novel. Not at all. But it’s a very American book, and it’s a book for our time right now.
CB: I hope so. The fact is there is a lot of Civil War literature.
BP: There is. And yet, like World War II literature, it never seems to run out of relevance. There’s always a place for something that helps us see things in a different way.
CB: And the thing I love about Civil War fiction versus Civil War history—and I love Civil War history too, make no mistake—is that Civil War fiction tends to focus on individuals. Women, men, you get up close and personal. Whether it’s the remarkable short stories of Ambrose Bierce, Cold Mountain (Charles Frazier), or Dolen Perkins-Valdez. When you write about individuals in the Civil War in fiction, I think you see the conflagration in ways you might not when you're watching the sweep of armies across Gettysburg or Georgia.
BP: These people were real. And it’s not simply a bunch of facts. There’s writing about them. There are historical documents. It's a story that I wonder how it got lost like this. I mean, it was meant for you clearly—because how else did it get lost like this?
CB: Yeah. All we know about the two principals, Henry Bedell, a lieutenant with the Vermont Brigade, and Betty Van Meter, who lived in the northern part of the Shenandoah Valley, 20 miles southwest of Harper’s Ferry in Berryville, all we really know about these two people begins with a Middlebury College valedictorian from the class of 1862 named Aldace Walker. Because attrition among officers was so high by 1864, this kid is a major in the Vermont Brigade, and before he turns 30, he writes his memoir, The Vermont Brigade in the Shenandoah Valley. About five or six pages in, he refers to what he calls “one anecdote.”
The anecdote is the story of one of the lieutenants in the Vermont Brigade being left for dead and kept alive by a rebel woman who literally kept him alive, for lack of a better word—and this is not the word Walker used, of course, “karma.” She’s thinking, “If I can keep this horrific Yankee blue belly alive, maybe my husband will someday come home to me.” That’s fundamentally the true part of the story, and that’s really all we know. There are other less important but interesting footnotes. For example, in 1915, Betty Van Meter was given a citation by the Vermont legislature for keeping a son of Vermont alive in 1864. Abraham Lincoln’s Secretary of War, the notoriously curmudgeonly Edwin Stanton, was so moved by her efforts that he tried to move heaven and earth to see if he could find her husband in the Union POW system. When I spoke to historians about this story, most of them had no idea because historians focus on the sweep of armies, or they focus on very specific, interesting macro changes in the country, such as Drew Gilpin Faust’s This Republic of Suffering, which examines how 620,000 dead Americans dramatically changed our view of death, religion, the afterlife, and, of course, medicine. They’re not focused on Henry Bedell and Betty Van Meter in a farmhouse in the Shenandoah Valley doing this unbelievably dangerous thing because there’s Jule Early’s Confederate army. There’s John Mosby, who led his guerillas, and hanging Union officers. What Betty Van Meter did was treason. So, the few historians who’d heard of this anecdote knew very little about it, and they all asked me the same thing: What have you learned? Do you think they were lovers?
BP: Oh, I’m banging my forehead. It matters not one whit.
CB: No. What matters is the unbelievable humanity of this woman who makes this decision, for whatever reason.
BP: I think people who write stories, who write novels, and who have developed great empathy and compassion in reading and writing—considering what stories can do for us—are going to have a role in standing up, not just in the face of whatever comes, but, and this is something that is relevant to The Jackel’s Mistresss, as you pointed out in the days afterward. Because those stories we have from the Civil War now, the testimony we have from someone like Aldis Walker and you point out in your afterword, he became a truly, truly gifted writer and lawyer. He was a really important person. This is the work we have to continue doing. And it isn’t always about history books with numbers and dates. It’s also about foregrounding the stories, as you said, about Betty/Libby and karma and kindness, and making sure people see those because there are already stories about cruelty and callousness, and that seems to be such an important part of it. To me, I don’t know if I’ve read all 25 of your books.
CB: Oh, you don’t want to. Some of them are absolute train wrecks. I’m responsible for the single worst first novel ever published, bar none.
BP: That’s an amazing achievement! You’ve given yourself, however, that award—well, I don’t know if it stands, Chris, but I will say I’ve read many, and I believe that Secrets of Eden – that was something that hit me when I read it: the compassion for the characters. And I wonder, where do you attribute this? Maybe you wrote a novel that wasn’t as good as a later one, but I’m looking at you, even though our audience won’t see the video. I am looking at your incredible bookshelves, which I’ve had the privilege of seeing on various Zooms and things before. Where does this deep compassion come from for you? Does it come from reading? Does it come from something else? Where does this deep compassion? We mentioned Luis Urrea earlier before we started recording, and he has always said, “Fill your pen with compassion, or don’t pick it up.”
CB: Oh my God. His story, my God. The whole idea that a writer’s career begins with the murder of his father is just unbelievable to me.
BP: Unbelievable.
CB: So, where does the compassion come from? If I have compassion… you know, I view The Jackal's Mistress fundamentally as a Romeo and Juliet kind of love story about doomed lovers from opposite sides of the wall. But I grew up in a lot of places. At one point, I went to five schools in six years, in three states. I wasn’t an army kid…
BP: Oh my goodness!
CB: … we moved around. We moved around a lot. And so I was always that kid trying to figure out the mores and the culture. Scott Fitzgerald talks a lot about how writers are observant. You’re always that kid with your fingers pressed against the glass, from the outside looking inside at the party, wondering why you weren’t invited. I think that’s why I’m a writer: I had the great, weird blessing of moving around a lot. I always knew my parents loved me, but it’s only in the last 25 years that I’ve really begun to understand their demons as well as their angels. Maybe that’s where my characters come from—hearts and souls. The whole idea that my parents were damaged, and I loved them, and they loved me. And heaven knows I’m a mess.
BP: But we can love each other, even when we are imperfect—perhaps even because we’re imperfect.
CB: I love that.
BP: Thank you.
CB: And I think you’re definitely onto something. We all know that fiction makes us more empathetic. Fiction makes us better, kinder, gentler, people because, you know, to paraphrase Atticus Finch in Harper Lee, you really don’t understand a person until you walk in their shoes. Again, not wanting to go crazy with the politics here or say I’m a champion for anything—because God knows you don’t want me championing any of your causes! God knows if I champion your cause you are going to lose! Okay, The Jackal's Mistress, as we talked about earlier, is my 25th book. So, I’ve been doing this countdown on social media from my first book to 25th.
BP: Yes, I’ve been watching this!
CB: Yes! And recently, we did my seventh novel, a 2000 novel called Trans-Sister Radio: A Transgender Love Story. Of all the books I’ve posted so far, including even Midwives, which, you know, was a #1 New York Times bestseller and Oprah’s Book Club selection, and a movie with Sissy Spacek—Trans-Sister Radio has elicited the most comments on my social media, with readers talking about how this was their introduction to the trans community. I’m really glad you wrote it because I understood things I didn’t understand before. And it’s a novel, you know, one published 25 years ago. You mentioned Secrets of Eden, a novel about a minister and a domestic abuse murder-suicide that might actually be a double homicide. That was an introduction to many of my readers to the epidemic of domestic abuse—domestic violence, not just in this country but around the world. And that’s another example of what fiction can do.
BP: That is a great example of what fiction can do, and I hope that The Jackal's Mistress will, for many readers, be an introduction to the stories we don’t often hear about any war, let alone the American Civil War. So, I have to ask before you go, what comes next? Is it going to be a new novel? Is it going to be a movie? What’s next? I mean, come on—you know The Flight Attendant, Chris, that was amazing!
CB: No, thank you. Thank you. All, all props to the flight attendants Kaley Cuoco, showrunner Steve Yockey, Max, and Warner—um, I love the TV series. It was really fun and great. Okay, what's next? And it's all done. It comes out in August 2026. It’s a novel called The Amateur, and you're going to love it. A lot of it is set at Smith College in 1979 and 1980. It’s about an aspiring LPGA golf superstar: a young woman who, the summer before she’s about to start college, accidentally kills a caddy at a swanky country club when she drives a ball through the practice net and hits him in the forehead.
BP: Chris, I’m going to be begging Todd Dowdy, our beloved Todd, for some kind of PDF immediately. I can’t wait. How exciting is that? That’s going to be huge! But in the meantime, you’ve got a lot to do with The Jackal’s Mistress now, and I hope everything goes so well. I’ll be talking it up with my usual enthusiasm.
Thank you, Chris, for joining us this week. You can find all of Chris Bohjalian’s books wherever books are sold. Now let’s move on to Friday Reads, where we’ll see what you've been reading this week.
Readers everywhere, welcome back to another Friday Reads session where I talk to you about what you are reading online. And as always, Jordan, my producer, is here to talk with me about the posts you’ve put up. So, what do we have this week?
JA: Our first post today is from Tracy Wise, who says #FridayReads: “I think I may have fallen in love with Frank O'Hara's poetry. Well, better late than never.”
BP: It’s edited by Edward Hirsch, The Heart of American Poetry, and Tracy’s put up an image of the book. Since she mentions Frank O'Hara, I just want to say that Frank O'Hara was not only one of our nimblest poets but also someone who sadly died way too young at around 40. O'Hara’s Harvard roommate was none other than Edward Gorey—I love that. You should fall in love with Frank O'Hara the way Tracy has, and I recommend starting with his Lunch Poems. They’re really, really beautiful. This compendium by Edward Hirsch is a beautiful and deeply personal look at American bards through the centuries, from Phyllis Wheatley, the first African American woman to publish poetry in the United States, to Joy Harjo, who has been our poet laureate and is Native American. There are 40 poems, from the immediately recognizable like Emily Dickinson’s “Because I Could Not Stop for Death” to the downright enigmatic like Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy”—or maybe it’s not that enigmatic. I’m not sure. Finally, I’ll tell you that if you're a fan of the full breadth of American literature, whether it covers the personal, the political, the natural, or the fantastical, this is a beautiful volume to add to your shelves. What’s next, Jordan?
JA: Our next post today is from Gemma Bristow, who says #FridayReads: Not the End of the World by Hannah Ritchie, an accessible and readable attempt to define the most effective solutions to environmental problems based on data.
BP: This is very interesting because Ritchie is a data scientist at Oxford University and is attached to the Our World In Data project. She’s also a follower of big optimist Professor Hans Rosling. So, more on the big optimist in a moment. Gemma has put up a book jacket, and the reason I love this one is because it’s got its library garland wrap on it. Anyone who’s ever worked in a library knows what I mean—the plastic that signifies, “I’ve checked this book out of a library.” I love that. The subtitle of Ritchie’s book is How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet. That’s big optimism, right? Let’s all hope the author is correct. But even if she is, there are some things she fails to address at all, such as geopolitics and their influence on what happens with sustainability and environmental initiatives. So if you're a fan of other big optimist authors like Steven Pinker, Matt Ridley, Derek McCluskey, or even Bill Gates, take a look at Hannah Ritchie’s Not the End of the World. Alright, last up, Jordan. Whom do we have? Is it whom or who? Uh, one of these days, I’ll get it right every time. But not yet.
JA: Well, we’re all working on that one. I’m always, uh… But our last one today is from Lisa Unger, who says: “The word ‘honored’ doesn’t begin to cover how I feel about being asked to write a foreword for a new edition of Nighttime is My Time by the late GOAT Mary Higgins Clark. There’s not a crime fiction writer working today that doesn’t owe her a debt of gratitude for her trailblazing work.
BP: Lisa Unger is one of my favorite suspense and crime writers. Uh, and yes, I do read her work and it’s very, very good. But I also love the fact that Lisa is friends with several other amazing women who write crime fiction, like Alair Burke, Laura Lipman, and others. I’m going to forget some names, but they’re excellent friends. They’re just wonderful people to be around. And so the fact that Lisa has been tapped to write this new introduction to Mary Higgins Clark’s Nighttime is My Time is pretty amazing. The image of Lisa’s hand holding a copy of the new edition of the book in front of a bookshelf—probably her own—is so cool. And if you’ve never read Mary Higgins Clark, the Queen of Suspense, it might be because she died in 2020 at the age of 92. What I mean by that is she’d been writing for so long—51 suspense and mystery novels. A little anecdote: An editor of mine once interviewed her at her New Jersey home when she was a mere 72 and almost knocked her down the stairs. I thought, “Oh, that would’ve made for a good plot—figuring out what happened!” But fortunately, Mary Higgins Clark did not die that day, and she lived to 92. Many, many writers, as Lisa Unger says, owe her a debt of gratitude for what she’s done. Nighttime is about a private high school’s 20-year reunion class—and that’s at least what’s left of it, because the women who aren’t dead have good reason to suspect every male attendee at the reunion of killing the other women in the class. So this one’s a great read! If you’re a fan of Carol Higgins Clark, Mary Higgins Clark’s daughter and frequent co-author, Sandra Brown, Fern Michaels, and Iris Johansen.That’s it for this week’s Friday Reads. Thank you as always, Jordan, for helping me out here.
The Jackal’s Mistress looks to find empathy for our history while maintaining moral clarity about enslavement in America and its role in bringing about the Civil War. While Chris Bohjalian aims for objectivity around events in his novel, he also wants to change the perspectives that are sometimes found in older works based on Civil War history.
One such work is Gone With the Wind, which lives in infamy for its portrayal of American chattel slavery as secondary to its romantic narrative. In today’s canon, we’ll dive into Margaret Mitchell’s novel.
When it comes to Daddy, I want a pony. No little girl in literature fits the bill better than Bonnie Blue Butler, daughter of Rhett and Scarlett, in Margaret Mitchell's 1936 novel Gone with the Wind. Daddy Rhett provides every toy available on two continents and a princess's wardrobe. Little Miss Butler has no idea. These gifts have less to do with her cuteness than with the power struggle between her parents. Since this battle royale occurs in the wake of the American Civil War, Mitchell's symbolism makes sense. Personal relationships echo matters of state.
Many will conjure up Clark Gable as Rhett and Vivien Leigh as Scarlett from the 1939 film adaptation. Perhaps it was even one of your favorite films. I mean, it was a frequent enough rerun on the 11 o'clock movie. Viewers still quote its well-known lines, from “Fiddle-dee-dee, I'll think about it tomorrow” to the apocryphal “Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn.” By the way, in the novel, it’s merely “my dear, I don’t give a damn,” but that doesn’t have the same ring.
Those memories have little to do with one of the reasons the Union went to war with the Confederacy, which was the issue of abolition for enslaved people. It’s important to note how completely, and almost nimbly, Margaret Mitchell sidesteps the causes of the Civil War in favor of Southern belles. Mitchell, raised in a well-off Georgia household, had some college education in the North, but her childhood memories of stories about the South imprinted on her in a lopsided manner.
Despite her mother’s encouragement to broaden her education, Mitchell didn’t broaden her own perspective. Gone with the Wind is a paean to the moneyed white Southern landowners and their pre-war glories. There might have been a place for such a take, at least in 1936, had Mitchell chosen to focus on Scarlett’s journey or zoomed in on Rhett and Scarlett’s marriage as it dissolved, with some backstory on how the war affected them. That take might still be relevant. Think of Faulkner’s The Unvanquished, or The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane, or Jubilee by Margaret Walker—books about the same war that offer a more balanced view of all the inhabitants of the American South. Because if you’re looking for a balanced view, Gone with the Wind will not provide it.
Some historians and critics praised Mitchell's attention to Southern women and the hardships they faced during the war and Reconstruction. She was certainly a gifted storyteller. The novel won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize in 1937. However, Mitchell focused not only on white Southern women, but also portrayed black Southern women in a way that verges on farcical. For example, Prissy’s line “I don’t know nothing about birthin’ no babies” comes straight from the pages of the novel. Except in the novel, Prissy says that not while Scarlett is giving birth, but while Prissy herself is in labor. From characters who use deliberately nasty and antiquated terms for people of color, to insinuations of enslaved workers being carefree, to Scarlett’s abuse of Prissy at a critical moment, the novel displays an entirely careless portrayal of Northerners as callous carpetbaggers.
Gone with the Wind is a novel rife with racism and stereotyping. The film version improved these dynamics ever so slightly, but Hollywood wasn’t much better at addressing racial injustice when adapting it for the screen. David O. Selznick, who produced the film, failed to heed NAACP Secretary Walter White's recommendation of hiring an African American expert to more carefully address the depictions of the black characters in the film. Instead, Selznick employed two white people, one of whom was a friend and colleague of Mitchell herself. Even if Mitchell had been anti-racist (pro tip: she was emphatically not), you can read any number of articles and blog posts about her unfortunate views. Once she chose to publish, the book itself became permanently racist.
It may have been old Jeff Davis who originally said, “The South shall rise again,” but that bitter strain of Southern discomfort got served up again by Mitchell’s book and its nostalgic if mistaken brew. I won’t sip from that concoction again, and neither should you. I’m canning Gone with the Wind not to preserve it for the future, but to eschew it, along with other toxic attempts to resuscitate a longing for a way of life based on cruelty.
Welcome to another edition of Six Recs, where I try to give you six themed book recommendations in less than three minutes. And Jordan, my producer, times me. You know, if I don’t manage to do this in under three minutes, then the bookcase falls. But this week, we’re talking about countries that have been at war with themselves, because of course our interview is with Chris Bohjalian on The Jackal’s Mistress. So I’ve got six different countries and six different novels. I’m going to start, Jordan, whenever you tell me the stopwatch is set.
JA: We’re rolling.
BP: First up, Restoration by Rose Tremain, which is set during the English Civil Wars of the Cromwell era. If you’ve seen the movie adaptation starring Robert Downey Jr. and surprisingly Meg Ryan, as an inmate in an asylum, you haven’t actually experienced the power of Tremain’s Booker Prize-winning novel. Oliver Cromwell’s powerful, brimstone-scented fist came down on the land then, really, really hard. I think the book is excellent.
Next up, The Beekeeper of Aleppo by Christy Lefteri, which deals with Syria and its civil war in modern times. The story follows Nouri and Afra Ibrahim, who have no choice but to leave their country for Great Britain, but their journey is complicated by disability, grief, and deprivation. The book doesn’t explain the war itself, but its portrait of what refugees face is authentic and compassionate.
Brotherless Night by V. V. Ganeshananthan is an incredible novel of the Sri Lankan Civil War from the 1970s. The author, whose parents immigrated from Sri Lanka to the United States, focuses on how women—whether civilians or soldiers—are affected when a country is split in two. This book has won two huge prizes and deserves much more attention. Pick it up.
In the Shadow of the Banyan by Vaddey Ratner is set in Cambodia. If you are listening or reading along and don’t know the history of how the Khmer Rouge decimated Cambodia in the mid-seventies, read this novel immediately to understand that genocide knows no borders. The terrorists killed 25% of the population.
Savage Coast by Muriel Rukeyser is Rukeyser’s account of the Spanish Civil War, written during that time in the 1930s, but it wasn’t published until the 2010s. It has more to do with her personal experience than with literary fiction, but it’s an important account because it dives deep into how violence and allegiance make strange bedfellows—and wartime partners do too.
Finally, Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. I have to say: caveat lector, Adichie is a well-known turf. However, she is also a stunning novelist, and this book about her home country’s secessionist Biafra, which existed independently for just three years, is a testament to those who fought for its independence and what they endured.
That’s it for this week, Jordan. How did I do?
JA: Well, we came in just under the wire at two minutes and 52 seconds.
BP: Oh, not too bad. Thank you so much, and see you all back here next week for another six. Well, that does it for this episode of The Book Maven, a literary review. Follow us on Substack for our weekly newsletter containing new book releases, commentary, and more. Talk to you next week.
The Book Maven, a literary review, is hosted and produced by me, Beth Ann Patrick. It’s produced by Christina McBride, with engineering by Jordan Aaron, and our booking producer is Lauren Stack.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thebookmavenunbound.substack.com [https://thebookmavenunbound.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thebookmavenunbound.substack.com [https://thebookmavenunbound.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]
