Welcome to “Interruptions, Recorded,” a new podcast series for the newsletter centering conversations on the edge of illness, identity, and narrative. These interviews feature "outside voices" that trouble our understanding of belonging, success, and happiness in a world-in-crisis.
What does it mean to be “on the margins” in an increasingly fragmented world? What’s at stake when we consider “outside” and “inside” as discrete identity categories with no slippage in-between? Why are we obsessed with “normal people?” What helps us move away from modes of discourse—and ways of living—that wholeheartedly cling to normality (or wholeheartedly disavow it, which is just another way of reifying the center’s sick hold)?
Rather than grapple with these questions with experts, this show seeks to explore them with people who live along their edges every day. These are internet friends and book-club members, bad brains and waitress witches, people living and loving in the shadows of culture, interested in interruption as the practice "to nurture new flows and at the same time guard against them."
“For a lot of us, there is this inherited generational real need for food, but also, for me as a kid, feeding myself was a way of exercising some agency around self care. You know, like so many kids, I really wasn’t getting what I needed.”
For our second episode, we welcome the Big Crone Energy of Max Daniels, a writer, teacher, knitter, forager of mushrooms, and an extraordinary friend who’s come to be a font of wisdom during our Sunday night care chats and 2022 collaborative decan walk as we study the tarot, astrology, and ~*feelings*~ of the coming year by tracking the Sun’s passage through the successive 10-degree faces of each zodiacal sign.
Max is also founder of Body of Knowledge, a program designed to help people recover from binge eating outside of the parameters of self-discipline and intuitive body-love—the seemingly (but actually not-so-) opposed messages often promoted by contemporary eating disorder psychology paradigms. Based in Salem, Massachusetts, Max is a recovered binge eater herself, writes a free weekly newsletter on a range of topics including body nostalgia, harm reduction, and gender, and is currently at work on a book, a rapid recovery guide for binge eaters.
Our conversation spans topics including trying to be “post self-improvement,” the pull of the self-help shelf, the tension between routine and discipline, death dates, and interruption as an initiatory and ongoing experience.
