Memento Morbid

5: ‘Darkness is Healthy and Holy’ - Pam Grossman

What happens when we recognise creativity as a form of magic? Writer, curator, and cultural critic Pam Grossman joins Joanna Ebenstein for a conversation about witchcraft, creativity, death, and the unseen forces that shape our lives. Best known for her books Magic Maker and Waking the Witch, Grossman reflects on her lifelong relationship with magic — from childhood fascinations with mythology and divination to publicly embracing witchcraft as both a spiritual and creative practice. Together, she and Joanna explore how modern witchcraft honours darkness, shadow, and mortality without equating them with evil, and why rituals of remembrance and ancestral connection remain vital in contemporary life. The conversation moves through pagan traditions, tarot, artistic process, justice magic, and the cultural stigma surrounding witches. Grossman speaks candidly about anxiety, creative doubt, and the pressure to “make meaning,” while Joanna reflects on how death awareness can sharpen our sense of purpose and deepen our relationship to creativity. At the centre of the episode is a shared idea: that making art is itself a magical act: a collaboration between intention, imagination, and something larger than the self. Whether understood as spirit, ancestry, the unconscious, or creative intuition, both Joanna and Pam ask what becomes possible when we stop treating creativity as pure productivity, and begin approaching it as devotion, ritual, and transformation. 📢Listeners! You are invited to share your own offerings: voice notes on death, dying, ritual and the beauty of finitude. Include your first name and location if you want them shared- you might be featured in an upcoming episode. Send your offering via WhatsApp to +44 2921 690468 [https://wa.me/message/GFWDJDKM26K3F1] 💀 Memento Morbid is produced by Overcoat Media in partnership with Morbid Anatomy. Host: Joanna Ebenstein Series Producer: Jess Gunasekara Studio Engineer: Fernando Velazco Vargas Additional Production and Sound Design: Katie Hill Production Coordinator: Janice Jardine  Executive Producer: Steven Rajam Artwork: Lauren Seeley substack.com/@mementomorbid [https://substack.com/@mementomorbid]

4: ‘Death isn’t a problem to fix’ - Oliver Burkeman

What does it mean to live well, knowing our time is finite? Author Oliver Burkeman joins Joanna Ebenstein for a conversation about time, mortality, and what it means to live well inside finite lives. Best known for Four Thousand Weeks, Burkeman reflects on his shift from scepticism about self-help and productivity culture to a deeper engagement with anxiety, limitation, and acceptance. Together, they explore why the drive to “do everything” so often leaves us more overwhelmed—and what changes when we stop treating finitude as a problem to solve. The conversation moves through Stoicism, Zen Buddhism, medieval imagery of death, Silicon Valley’s quest for immortality, and the enduring mystery of consciousness. Burkeman speaks openly about fear—of loss, impermanence, and non-existence—while Joanna reflects on how death contemplation can reshape a life’s trajectory and our ideas of what is important. At the centre of the episode is a shared idea: meaning doesn’t arise in spite of limits, but because of them. Death, rather than diminishing life, provides it with meaning, poignancy, and value. Together, they ask what becomes possible when we stop trying to outrun time—and start living within it. 📢Listeners! You are invited to share your own offerings: voice notes on death, dying, ritual and the beauty of finitude. Include your first name and location if you want them shared- you might be featured in an upcoming episode. Send your offering via WhatsApp to +44 2921 690468 [https://wa.me/message/GFWDJDKM26K3F1] 💀 Memento Morbid is produced by Overcoat Media in partnership with Morbid Anatomy. Host: Joanna Ebenstein Series Producer: Jess Gunasekara Studio Engineer: Fernando Velazco Vargas Additional Production and Sound Design: Katie Hill Executive Producer: Steven Rajam Artwork: Lauren Seeley substack.com/@mementomorbid [https://substack.com/@mementomorbid]

3: 'Grave Dirt & Mud Pies' - Leila Taylor

Grave dirt makes the best mud pies…  Leila Taylor, writer, designer, cultural critic and Creative Director of Brooklyn Public Library, joins Joanna Ebenstein for a rich, wide-ranging conversation about the Gothic as both a cultural form and a lived sensibility—one that moves through memory, history, music, and space. Drawing from her acclaimed books Darkly: Black History and America’s Gothic Soul and Sick Houses: Haunted Homes and the Architecture of Dread, Taylor explores how Gothic feeling is not confined to aesthetics or subculture, but emerges through lived experience: in architecture that unsettles, in histories that refuse resolution, and in the emotional residue of place.  She reflects on growing up as a “spooky kid” in Massachusetts, playing funeral in a cemetery with friends—lying in open graves, performing rituals of death, and making mud pies from “grave dirt.” These early encounters with mortality become a lens for understanding how we learn to live alongside death, even as children. The conversation moves through Black Gothic traditions, literary and musical influences—tracing back to  Billie Holiday’s Strange Fruit and moving into Joy Division, The Cure, and Siouxsie and the Banshees—as well as Gothic literature from Frankenstein to Wuthering Heights. Taylor also reflects on haunting media, brutalist architecture, and theories of residual memory, sound, and haunting. 📢Listeners! You are invited to share your own offerings: voice notes on death, dying, ritual and the beauty of finitude. Include your first name and location if you want them shared- you might be featured in an upcoming episode. Send your offering via WhatsApp to +44 2921 690468 [https://wa.me/message/GFWDJDKM26K3F1%20]. 💀 Memento Morbid is produced by Overcoat Media in partnership with Morbid Anatomy.  Host: Joanna Ebenstein  Series Producer: Jess Gunasekara  Studio Engineer: Fernando Robleto Vargas  Additional Production and Sound Design: Katie Hill  Production Coordinator: Janice Jardine  Executive Producer: Steven Rajam  Artwork: Lauren Seeley  substack.com/@mementomorbid [http://substack.com/@mementomorbid]

2: 'I'm a Monster Now'- Paul Giamatti

What Does It Mean to Become Someone Else? Award-winning actor and producer Paul Giamatti joins Joanna Ebenstein for a wide-ranging, eerie, and often amusing conversation about monsters, performance, and the porous boundary between life and death. From childhood fascinations with werewolves and classic horror to the uncanny psychological states accessed through acting, Giamatti reflects on a lifelong obsession with transformation—of bodies, identities, and consciousness. He recounts a genuinely unsettling ghostly moment during a production of Hamlet, explores the idea of acting as a form of possession, and considers why theatre can feel more spiritually charged than film. The conversation weaves through late-night radio and the hypnotic voice of Art Bell, Giamatti’s cult television series Lodge 49, esoteric book collecting, and the strange intimacy of voices in the dark. Thoughtful, curious, and quietly uncanny, this episode asks what it really means to inhabit other lives—and what those experiences might reveal.  📢Listeners! You are invited to share your own offerings: voice notes on death, dying, ritual and the beauty of finitude. Include your first name and location if you want them shared- you might be featured in an upcoming episode. Send your offering via WhatsApp to +44 2921 690468 [https://wa.me/message/GFWDJDKM26K3F1%20]. 💀 Memento Morbid is produced by Overcoat Media in partnership with Morbid Anatomy. Host: Joanna Ebenstein Series Producer: Jess Gunasekara Studio Engineer: Fernando Velazco Vargas Additional Production and Sound Design: Katie Hill Production Coordinator: Janice Jardine  Executive Producer: Steven Rajam Artwork: Lauren Seeley substack.com/@mementomorbid [https://substack.com/@mementomorbid]

1: 'Corpse Girl' - Caitlin Doughty

What Happens to a Body After Death? Mortician, author and death care reformer Caitlin Doughty joins Joanna Ebenstein for a candid, curious and surprisingly funny conversation about what really happens to our bodies after we die and why modern Western culture would rather not think about it. From Caitlin’s early days working in a crematory to founding Order of the Good Death, they explore death positivity, funeral industry myths, human composting, bone rituals and the strange ways we hide mortality from view. Are we the weird ones in history when it comes to death? And what might change if we looked at it directly? 📢Listeners! You are invited to share your own offerings: voice notes on death, dying, ritual and the beauty of finitude. Include your first name and location if you want them shared- you might be featured in an upcoming episode. Send your offering via WhatsApp to +44 2921 690468 [https://wa.me/message/GFWDJDKM26K3F1%20]. 💀 Memento Morbid is produced by Overcoat Media in partnership with Morbid Anatomy. Host: Joanna Ebenstein Series Producer: Jess Gunasekara Studio Engineer: Fernando Velazco Vargas Additional Production and Sound Design: Katie Hill Executive Producer: Steven Rajam Artwork: Lauren Seeley substack.com/@mementomorbid [https://substack.com/@mementomorbid]