Category: Podcast
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The Holy Spirit of My Uncle’s Cojones, Part 3
In this part of the novel, you get a real taste of what some of us call “internalized racism.” This is when a non-white person starts to believe, on a subconscious level, what the racist world says of him: in young, sixteen-year-old’s Tony case, he’s seen as a mongrel, the mix of a white man…
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The Holy Spirit of My Uncle’s Cojones, Part 2
Tony and his Salvadoran-Appalachian family attend his uncle Jack’s funeral, where the mourners aren’t mourning–either the men are running in just to make sure he’s dead, and the two dozen women are lining up to look at their old lover one more time. Here, we learn why Uncle Jack is so important to Tony–we go…
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Audio Book: The Holy Spirit of My Uncle’s Cojones, Part 1
In the first pages of the novel, we meet Antonio “Tony” McCaugh Villalobos, an Appalachian-Salvadoran writer living in Knoxville, Tennessee, and far from his Salvadoran roots. He’s just published his first book, a literary novel, which means he didn’t get any money for it. He’s trying to write his next novel, but has writer’s block.…
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The Art of Fiction: Outline Your Novel, or Don’t…Or, Yeah, Maybe
In class, the subject always comes up: should you outline your story, or not? That is, should you make a road map for your novel, one that you will follow like a disciple, from page one to the climax, three hundred pages later? Or, will you dare to step off the outline, if the story…
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An Interview With Pico Iyer
This is an interview with memoirist and travel author Pico Iyer, about his book Sun After Dark. It is about traveling and empathy–what does it mean to dwell in someone else’s culture for a while, especially we who come from the States, who are more privileged than most of the world? What does our home become, in…