We’re late to celebrate Grant’s new book, something out there in the distance, so we’re doing it this week, bringing on his co-collaborator on the project, Gail Butensky. Grant and Gail partnered up to create a beautiful and unusual project. This week’s show mixes things up a bit because Brooke interviews Grant, and Grant interviews Gail, and Grant shows up for his segments in all kinds of locations, including his mother’s apartment at her memory care facility. The show covers the power of intuition when it comes to both storytelling and photography, the risks indie presses can and do take, and why loving a good road-trip is a prerequisite to being Grant’s friend. And the trend this week, more state of mind than trend, is in celebration of indie books.

Gail Butensky is a renowned photographer whose work has been featured on numerous record covers as well as in books and magazines. Her lens documented the punk and rock scenes of the '80s and '90s, with work appearing in The San Francisco Guardian, The Village Voice, and The Chicago Reader, and in publications including Our Band Could Be Your Life and CBGB & OMFUG: 30 Years. She is the author of the photography book, Every Bend. Grant Faulkner is the co-founder and co-host of Memoir Nation, co-founder of the online literary journal 100 Word Story, and the former executive director of National Novel Writing Month. He’s the author of The Art of Brevity: Crafting the Very Short Story, as well as fiction collections All the Comfort Sin Can Provide and Fissures. His stories have appeared in Tin House, The Gettysburg Review, and Norton anthologies. Together Grant and Gail collaborated on the new flash novel, something out there in the distance, out on the University of New Mexico Press.

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Lots of writers want to write about sex and all the ways it shows up in their lives—and yet, it’s incredibly challenging to do. It’s exposing and uncomfortable. It means sharing the most intimate moments of our own lives, but also the lives of others. It can involve sharing mistakes, shame, and also some of the worst things that have ever happened to us when it comes to the negative side of the sexual spectrum: assault and abuse. That’s why this week’s show and conversation with Courtney Kocak is extra impactful. She talks about her own journey and evolution, and what she learned about herself and her own journey from writing her “accidental” feminist coming-of-age story, as she calls it. An encouraging message this week that you can do it, too. We’re all learning to live out loud a little better through our writing, one word at a time.

Courtney Kocak is a writer, podcaster, and comedian based in Los Angeles. She originally hails from a rural farming community in Minnesota, home to more cows than people. As a writer, Kocak wrote for Amazon’s Emmy-winning animated series Danger & Eggs and Netflix’s Know It All. Her bylines include The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Cosmopolitan, Slate, HuffPost, The Sun, Catapult, BUST, Bustle, and others. She hosts three podcasts, The Bleeders, Private Parts Unknown, and Podcast Bestie, and her new memoir is Girl Gone Wild.

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This week is a treat because at the heart of many memoirs are stories of people throwing themselves into meaningful distractions in order to not have to face the challenges and unravellings so common to adult life. In her new book, Why Fly, Caroline Paul becomes obsessed with learning to fly a gyrocopter as her long-term marriage is dissolving. In the show we speak about risk, about love and loss, and about the things that keep us grounded—and not. It’s the stuff from which good story emerges, and this week’s book trend is not about AI. Just kidding, it actually is, and we’re sorry.

Caroline Paul is a bestselling author, adventurous adventurer, and one of the first women to join the San Francisco Fire Department. She is known for non-fiction and memoirs highlighting risk-taking and outdoor adventure, such as Fighting Fire, The Gutsy Girl, Tough Broad, and most recently Why Fly. Paul has been a member of the Writers Grotto in San Francisco since 1999. Discover more about Caroline and her work at carolinepaul.com.

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