Human Voices Wake Us

An episode from 8/10/26: Tonight, I read about the childhood and adolescence of the actor Al Pacino (born in 1940), as told in his wonderful memoir Sonny Boy. (I also recommend the audio version, read by Pacino himself). We also hear about Pacino now, and what looking back at his upbringing in the South Bronx means to him.
After a brief detour on Charlotte Brontë's 1847 novel, Jane Eyre (and recommending that audiobook, too), I read about the early years of Eleanor Roosevelt (1884-1962), as told in Geoffrey C. Ward and Ken Burns's documentary companion book, The Roosevelts: An Intimate History. Here, an orphan by the age of ten, a mostly unloved and unnoticed Eleanor is sent to a boarding school in London, where she finds love and belonging for the first time in her life.
The best way to support the podcast is by leaving a review on Apple or Spotify, sharing it with others, or sending me a note on what you think. You can also order any of my books: Time and the River: From Columbine to the Invention of Fire, Notes from the Grid, To the House of the Sun, The Lonely Young & the Lonely Old, and Bone Antler Stone. I've also edited a handful of books in the S4N Pocket Poems series. I also have a YouTube channel where I share poems and excerpts from these books, mostly as YouTube shorts.
Email me at humanvoiceswakeus1@gmail.com.

An episode from 8/3/26: Tonight, we return to the life of the composer Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) and look into two very different aspects of his creative life. The first is to ask the question how, and under what circumstances, did he write his great music? As it turns out, for the last almost-thirty years of his life, he wrote his music in a 125-square foot room, amid the inescapable the sounds of his family and students. The second question: what was Bach like as a public performer, and what was it like to perform with him—or, more likely, under his critical eye? The two books I read from are John Eliot Gardiner's Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven and Chritoph Wolff's Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician. My other episodes on Bach is Bach and God.
Let me know what you think in the comment.
The best way to support the podcast is by leaving a review on Apple or Spotify, sharing it with others, or sending me a note on what you think. You can also order any of my books: Time and the River: From Columbine to the Invention of Fire, Notes from the Grid, To the House of the Sun, The Lonely Young & the Lonely Old, and Bone Antler Stone. I've also edited a handful of books in the S4N Pocket Poems series. I also have a YouTube channel where I share poems and excerpts from these books, mostly as YouTube shorts.
Email me at humanvoiceswakeus1@gmail.com.

An episode from 7/27/26: Tonight, we visit London at two different times in history. First, I read passages from Craig Taylor’s 2011 book Londoners: The days and nights of London now—as told by those who love it, hate it, live it, left it, and long for it. Then we go back a few centuries in Liza Picard’s Restoration London: Everyday Life in London 1660-1670, and focus especially on the lives of women, children, and the poor.
I also talk about the value of accounts like these, which don’t pretend to be definitive or objective. But what else do we really hold onto, in the end, other than vivid and subjective stories told by the people we’re closest to, or gleaned from books that we love? Taylor and Picard’s books have both become those for me.
The best way to support the podcast is by leaving a review on Apple or Spotify, sharing it with others, or sending me a note on what you think. You can also order any of my books: Time and the River: From Columbine to the Invention of Fire, Notes from the Grid, To the House of the Sun, The Lonely Young & the Lonely Old, and Bone Antler Stone. I've also edited a handful of books in the S4N Pocket Poems series. I also have a YouTube channel where I share poems and excerpts from these books, mostly as YouTube shorts.
Email me at humanvoiceswakeus1@gmail.com.

An episode from 7/20/26: I’ve realized that, even though I’ve become more social than ever before since becoming a father, the deepest meaning and intensity still come from more private experiences. By “private” I mean those experiences shared with one or two people, or our families and friends, just as much as those moments experienced in complete isolation.
I spend this episode giving examples of such private experiences from the lives of writers, artists, and religious figures that I keep coming back to. Then, I bring it around to everybody else and ask how much of our lives—all of our lives—are actually private, and part of our own idiosyncratic and personal worlds? And I wonder how much better off we might all be, being less “social” with our phones and the prevailing forms of media, and instead focusing, as one of Al Pacino’s great movie speeches puts it, on “the six inches in front of our face.”
I close with readings on privacy from my book Notes from the Grid.
The best way to support the podcast is by leaving a review on Apple or Spotify, sharing it with others, or sending me a note on what you think. You can also order any of my books: Time and the River: From Columbine to the Invention of Fire, Notes from the Grid, To the House of the Sun, The Lonely Young & the Lonely Old, and Bone Antler Stone. I've also edited a handful of books in the S4N Pocket Poems series. I also have a YouTube channel where I share poems and excerpts from these books, mostly as YouTube shorts.
Email me at humanvoiceswakeus1@gmail.com.

An episode from 7/6/26: For the past year or so, I’ve been putting out another podcast with the artist and educator Tom Hart over at his Substack, Men, an Explanation. You can find all the episodes we’ve done at Apple or Spotify where we talk about all kinds of things, but mostly creativity and how to be decent in the weird world of 2026. Today, I wanted to share one of those episodes with you, where Tom and I talk about baseball.
It begins with Tom dealing with a bout of insomnia by listening to a podcast of fake AM baseball broadcasts, Northwoods Baseball Sleep Radio; it ends up with the two of us talking about what baseball has meant to us and its connections to creativity and even religion, mysticism, and history.
I end the episode by reading from Mac Davis’s Baseball’s Unforgettables, a book published in 1966 that first belonged to my dad and much later became hugely important in my childhood. I also mention the HBO documentary When it Was a Game, which everybody should check out. If anyone is wondering how I ended up obsessed with history, religion, and meaning, Davis's book and the documentary are good places to start. Both showed me, at a young age, how history so easily becomes folklore and myth and how, in the best ways, individual and shared memory can become layered in the best kind of sentimentality.
Thanks to Tom for letting me repost the entire episode here. I hope listeners to Human Voices Wake Us will go check out the other episodes Tom and I have done.
The best way to support the podcast is by leaving a review on Apple or Spotify, sharing it with others, or sending me a note on what you think. You can also order any of my books: Time and the River: From Columbine to the Invention of Fire, Notes from the Grid, To the House of the Sun, The Lonely Young & the Lonely Old, and Bone Antler Stone. I've also edited a handful of books in the S4N Pocket Poems series. I also have a YouTube channel where I share poems and excerpts from these books, mostly as YouTube shorts.
Email me at humanvoiceswakeus1@gmail.com.