It’s a podcast

When Anna was a professor at Idaho State in Pocatello, she bought a house. It was a tenure-track job and she planned to be there for a long time. Life intervened, but she loved that house.

To celebrate, she had her aunt — a noted illustrator — draw a postcard. “It’s a house!” the postcard proclaimed, next to a drawing of a stork holding the house in a bundle in its beak.

Anna’s house in Pocatello, Idaho

That’s how it feels to launch this new project.

We tell this story in the pilot episode, but here’s how the podcast happened. Anna and Katia got together to talk about poetry after Katia, a published novelist, decided to branch out. To learn more, she joined a class about international poetry, and on the side asked Anna to share some of her knowledge about her field of literature. They met twice during the fall of 2020 — virtually, because 2020 — and had wonderful discussions about a work Anna recommended.

Then sometime in early December we were all having a chat in our garden — masked, with Katia sitting several feet away. Katia had brought a prose work she was working on, and read it to us. “Anna went into her sort-of trance,” Katia recalls, “talking to me about the meaning of what she saw and what I was writing about. I remember her saying, ‘Oh, now I see how the pandemic is going to be written about.’

Katia (l.) and Anna meet in the garden on 5 December 2020, the day we realized we could do a podcast

“I mean, she goes very deeply into a very deep place when she talks about poetry.”

Mark, listening to them talk, said it reminded him of their earlier poetry discussions. Then it hit him.

“You guys,” he said. “Your conversations about poetry are beautiful. You should have a podcast!”

They chuckled and went on talking, but at the first break in the conversation he spoke up again. “I’m totally serious about the podcast idea,” he said. And a few days later he mentioned to Katia again.

Somehow, everyone thought it would be a good idea.