Audio by Adam

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 6:29 — 5.9MB)

Down a couple of old Maryland country roads that barely show up on state maps you’ll find Grandma Cora, an elderly African American lady who is known throughout those parts for her delicious sweet potato pies, which she lovingly backs on her old stove and sells to make ends meet nicely. I spent an afternoon with Grandma Cora for this “Women in Business” story, and got both happier and fatter as a result.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 19:48 — 18.1MB)

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 8:44 — 8.0MB)

After articles about the President and “dog bites man,” the obituaries are among the most popular articles the New York Times features. Part news story, part profile, obits attempt to sum up a person’s life and significance, and no more. Indeed, how many “column inches” a person is expected in the paper to get when he dies is closely guarded knowledge at the Times.  In this story,   I crash the gates of Hell, and spend some time with the people who make the Obit Section work, and their overseers. As with many of my stories, Chopin is included at no extra charge.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 4:56 — 4.5MB)

For nearly 60 years, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Gary Snyder has combined an environmental awareness shaped by America’s Far West with a Zen Buddhist perspective that celebrates and reveres the natural world.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 8:35 — 7.9MB)

In which the California poet (and Buddhist) discusses her poetry with Adam, and reads excerpts from several of her poems with explanations….

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 8:37 — 7.9MB)

Since October 2008, Kay Ryan has been serving as America’s 16th poet laureate, tapped by the librarian of Congress to be ambassador for American poetry. She has published more than half a dozen books of collected poems. and is cherished for her  compact, vivid and accessible verse.  This profile is based on my interview with her at the Academy of American Poetry in New York City.

Here is a to the VOA story I did about her and includes audio links to an extended excerpt from our interview and sound files of Ryan reading several of her poems.

See also my profiles of US Poet Laureates Charles Simic and Donald Hall.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 7:45 — 7.1MB)

There are hundreds of musicians, good and bad, tooting and strumming and bowing and belting in the New York subway system, but Mr. Spoons is sui generis. Not only is he fantastic at playing the spoons, he has an outsize character to match. I spent some serious time with him, and filed this report for VOA.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 15:42 — 14.4MB)

This is a look at the Iron John aka the Wild Man, an archetypal figure representing the deep masculine found in the Grimm Brothers tales, and other traditions. This was popularized by the poet Robert Bly as a story with much to tell modern Western man, who may have lost touch with their own wildness, and therefore their capacity to protect others, and to live fully.

See also my profiles of Robert Bly himself elsewhere in this blog.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 5:58 — 5.5MB)

Folk all over the world have their own versions of homemade liquor that will blow the top of your head right off.,  but “White Lightning” from the stills of Appalachia have their own appeal for Americans who have heard about it through family lore and popular culture, or tasted it in a parking lot or next to a trailer or at a wood burning stove.  During a trip to the back-country road trip through Tennessee and North Carolina, I sought out a real “moonshiner,’ and I sure found one in the person of “Popcorn Sutton.”   With his long beard, beat up old hat, and impossibly thick mountain accent, he fit the stereotype to a “T.”  His booze ain’t bad ‘nuther. I still have some underneath the kitchen sink you are welcome to try.  Banana flavored!

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 5:59 — 4.8MB)

Art Spiegelman is most famous for his Pulitzer Prize winning work “Maus,” a graphic novel about the Holocaust in which Nazis are portrayed as cats, and Jews are depicted as mice.  In this profile, Spiegelman talks about his roots as a Mad Magazine afficionado, underground cartoonist, and his experience growing up in a Queens NY family overshadowed by the Shoah.