O'Nell Agossa has a personal pact: curiosity is who he is.

His first book is part memoir, part allegorical road trip buddy story, a thoughtful, slightly trippy, poignant tale of self-discovery.

Curiosity & I: Let Curiosity Guide You is a novel about research and theory -- but mostly it's a conversation about how curiosity shows up in work and life between O’Nell's protagonist and a shape-shifting, golden-eyed cat named “Curiosity”.

O'Nell Agossa: https://medium.com/@o.agossa/about 

Theme music by Sean Balick; “Discovery Harbor” by Cloud Harbor and “Skyway” by The Balloonist, via Blue Dot Sessions.

Ep. #334: Curiosity & I, with O'Nell Agossa

In this conversation, Nicole Carr discusses her journey as a journalist and author with the publishing of her book "The Price of Exclusion: The Pursuit of Healthcare in a Segregated Nation." Her book focuses on her exploration of Black medical history through her family legacy. This discussion highlights the often-overlooked contributions of Black physicians, the importance of understanding historical context and ancestry in storytelling, and how these elements shape her narrative.

Carr reflects on the challenges of writing during the COVID-19 pandemic, the importance of thorough research, and the complexities of the publishing process. She emphasizes the living nature of books and the significance of community in the writing process. Carr shares her experiences navigating the publishing landscape and offers valuable advice for aspiring writers.

S2E7 - Nicole Carr | We Published, Beloved! Podcast

A newborn sister. A childhood rivalry. One accident that changed everything. A nostalgic story about growing up, learning responsibility, and discovering what it really means to protect the people you love.

Read this story and subscribe to The Drive-by Raconteur.: https://substack.com/home/post/p-209393431

Read, watch, and listen to everything from The Drive-by Raconteur: https://linktr.ee/drivebyraconteur⁠

Copyright © 2026 by David A. Stafford. All rights reserved.

Tormentor-Protector : The Rocket Kid Chronicles / Chapter 5

She did not find herself. She built her, piece by piece, out of what remained. Dispatches from the Dirt — The Becoming.

Becoming Her (1)

ABOUT THIS EPISODE:
On this episode of Writing the Coast, Julian Brave NoiseCat talks about his book We Survived the Night: An Indigenous Reckoning. We Survived the Night is a finalist for the 2026 Hubert Evans Nonfiction Prize. In his conversation with host Megan Cole, Julian talks about the place we're at in storytelling and print literature and how we might be in a better place to embrace oral storytelling. He also talks about how he brought his own interpretations and storytelling to the Coyote Story.

For more about We Survived the Night: http://bcyukonbookprizes.com/project/we-survived-the-night/

To view the 2026 BC and Yukon Book Prizes shortlists: bcyukonbookprizes.com/2026/04/14/ann…es-shortlists/

ABOUT JULIAN BRAVE NOISECAT:
Julian Brave Noisecat is a writer, Academy Award-nominated filmmaker, champion powwow dancer, and student of Salish art and history. His writing has appeared in dozens of publications, including The New York Times, The Washington Post and The New Yorker. NoiseCat has been recognized with numerous awards, including the 2022 American Mosaic Journalism Prize and many National Native Media Awards. He was a finalist for the Livingston Award and multiple Canadian National Magazine Awards and was named to the TIME100 Next list in 2021. His first documentary, Sugarcane, was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary. Directed alongside Emily Kassie, Sugarcane premiered at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival, where NoiseCat and Kassie won the Directing Award for U.S. Documentary. NoiseCat is a proud member of the Canim Lake Band Tsq’escen and descendant of the Lil’wat Nation of Mount Currie. We Survived the Night is his first book.

ABOUT MEGAN COLE:
Megan Cole is the Executive Director for the BC and Yukon Book Prizes. She is also a writer based on the territory of the Tla'amin Nation. Megan writes creative nonfiction and has had essays published in Chatelaine, This Magazine, The Puritan, Untethered, and more. She has her MFA in creative nonfiction from the University of King's College and is working her first book. Find out more about Megan at megancolewriter.com

ABOUT THE PODCAST:
Writing the Coast is recorded and produced on the traditional territory of the Tla'amin Nation. As a settler on these lands, Megan Cole finds opportunities to learn and listen to the stories from those whose land was stolen.

Writing the Coast is a recorded series of conversations, readings, and insights into the work of the writers, illustrators, and creators whose books are nominated for the annual BC and Yukon Book Prizes. We'll also check in on people in the writing community who are supporting books, writers and readers every day. The podcast is produced and hosted by Megan Cole.

Julian Brave NoiseCat talks about why we need to be teaching the Coyote Story in great works of the humanities

Remember when childhood creativity required little more than crayons, glue, old magazines, popsicle sticks? In this episode, my sister and I turn our mother’s kitchen table into an arts-and-crafts workshop where imagination runs wild. Everything goes beautifully. Until...

Read this story and subscribe to The Drive-by Raconteur.: https://substack.com/home/post/p-211315548

Read, watch, and listen to everything from The Drive-by Raconteur: https://linktr.ee/drivebyraconteur⁠

Copyright © 2026 by David A. Stafford. All rights reserved.

Creations and Catastrophes: The Rocket Kid Chronicles Chapter / Chapter 7

Katie Dozier joins Timothy Green on the Rattlecast for a conversation about poetry, trauma, memoir in verse, and her new book, Residency Review: A Memoir in Verse. Rattle’s Creative Editor and creator of The Poetry Space_, Katie is also the author of All That Glitter and Watering Can. Residency Review grew out of her experience at a low-residency MFA program and braids poetry with emails, quotations, and a Title IX document to explore sexual assault, institutional silence, disability, motherhood, and what happens when a community fails to listen.

In this episode, Katie shares poems from Residency Review and discusses writing about trauma, transforming lived experience into poetry, the possibilities of memoir in verse, and using forms including haibun and contemporary haiku alongside documentary material. We’ll also talk about the relationship between poetry and testimony, the challenges of writing an intensely personal book, and how poetry can say what official language cannot. As always, we’ll open the lines for this week’s prompt-based poetry reading.

This Week’s Prompt:
Write a poem about something you’ve kept on a shelf for far too long. 

Next Week’s Prompt:
Write a hot haibun. 

Submit your poem through Submittable by midnight Sunday for a chance to be invited on the show:
https://rattle.submittable.com/submit/269309/rattlecast-prompt-poems-online

Find more about Katie Dozier here:
https://www.khdpoet.com/

The Rattlecast livestreams every Monday on YouTube, Facebook, and X, then becomes available as an audio podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you listen.

Katie Dozier: Residency Review, Memoir in Verse, Trauma, and Haibun | Rattlecast 354

Intro to Memoir "Too Small" - a young, smaller-stature person, finding his way in the world.

Memoir_SoCal_Too Small_DEMO

NHTE 653 Darlene Koldenhoven

Remember when changing the channel required getting off the couch, television sets were pieces of furniture, and good reception sometimes depended on a pair of rabbit ears wrapped in aluminum foil?

Read this story and subscribe to The Drive-by Raconteur.: https://substack.com/home/post/p-212420679

Read, watch, and listen to everything from The Drive-by Raconteur: https://linktr.ee/drivebyraconteur⁠

Copyright © 2026 by David A. Stafford. All rights reserved.

In Chapter 8 of The Rocket Kid Chronicles, “Adjusting Rabbit Ears,” I look back at the arrival of television, the wonder of our first color set, and those evenings when three networks, a stubborn antenna, and a glowing screen were enough to keep an entire family entertained.

A nostalgic trip back to when television still felt like a glimpse of the future.

Copyright © 2026 by David A. Stafford. All rights reserved.

Adjusting Rabbit Ears: The Rocket Kid Chronicles / Chapter 8

Mary Keating joins Timothy Green on The Rattlecast for a conversation about poetry, disability, humor, resilience, and her memoir in verse, Recalibrating Gravity. A poet, lawyer, and disability-rights advocate, Keating became paraplegic following a car accident at age fifteen and went on to graduate from Yale Law School, build a legal career, and advocate for accessibility and disability rights. A longtime member of the Rattle community and three-time Pushcart Prize nominee, her poetry has appeared in Rattle, The Fiddlehead, ONE ART, Wordgathering, and elsewhere.

In this episode, we discuss Recalibrating Gravity, writing honestly about disability without being defined by it, using humor in poems about difficult experiences, and turning a lifetime of memories into a memoir in verse. We’ll also talk about poetry as a way of finding balance after life changes, Mary’s journey into the Rattle community, and her Rattle poem “Full of It,” a ghazal featured as Poem of the Day. As always, we’ll open the lines for this week’s prompt-based poetry reading.

Find more about Mary Keating here:
https://www.marykeatingpoet.com/

This Week’s Prompt:
Write a poem that’s a page or longer, and then edit it down to a maximum of 14 lines. Include both versions of your poem in the submission, with the shorter poem first.

Next Week’s Prompt:
Write an ode to an antiquated piece of technology. 

Submit your poem through Submittable by midnight Sunday for a chance to be invited on the show:
https://rattle.submittable.com/submit/269309/rattlecast-prompt-poems-online

The Rattlecast livestreams every Monday on YouTube, Facebook, and X, then becomes available as an audio podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you listen.

Mary Keating: Recalibrating Gravity, Disability, and Memoir in Verse | Rattlecast 356

Listen to an extract from No Land to Stand On. Read by the author Mahmoud Khalil and actor Daoud Heidami.

A revelatory and powerful testament of protest, courage and imprisonment in America’s deportation regime.

‘Are you Mahmoud Khalil?’ With this question, ICE took the Palestinian student and US legal resident from his pregnant wife and home in New York City, transported him across the country and locked him up in a Louisiana detention camp under threat of deportation. His ‘crime’: exercising his right to free speech at Columbia University, where he emerged as a leading voice against the slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza. No Land to Stand On is his indelible account of becoming the target of a lawless regime shredding basic rights.

Drawing on his prison diary and writing in vivid, shocking detail, Mahmoud Khalil conjures the despair and cruelty of ICE detention, where prisoners can vanish overnight and visiting families risk their own deportation. In tandem, he tells the multigenerational story of a family expelled from Palestine to a Syrian refugee camp, of his flight from Assad’s regime to Lebanon, of arrival in an America that promised permanence and protection, and of the enduring struggle for Palestine.

An era-defining account of the cost of dissent and a work of immense courage, resistance and moral clarity, No Land to Stand On is a call to all of us to defend our right to safety, freedom and a place to call home.

https://www.panmacmillan.com/authors/mahmoud-khalil/52189

Pre-order Now!

No Land to Stand On by Mahmoud Khalil

WHERE TO BUY
Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GND718LP
Audiobooks: https://www.audiobooks.com/audiobook/1016826
Barnes & Noble: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/ordinary-days-and-tender-places-margaret-bendroth/1149384878?ean=2940201901622
Libro.fm: https://libro.fm/audiobooks/9780807026007

ABOUT
An adoptive parent and historian delves into the differences of families made by law, not biology—and shows us the deep value of those differences

Adoption touches on some of our most vexing social questions, about race and sexuality, abortion rights, economic inequality, even foreign policy and global poverty. More than that, it prods us in tender places, reminding us of our own questions about belonging and separation, identity and alienation, our worries about what is determined by fate and what is freely choose.

Blending personal memoir, history, and broader reflection on American culture, Ordinary Days and Tender Places offers a fresh take on adoption. As an historian and an adoptive parent, Bendroth takes seriously the criticisms and the personal pain many adoptees face, but she also invites readers to take a bigger view. This book asks us to turn the mirror on ourselves and consider the peculiarities of what we consider “normal” family life.

In the end, our questions and controversies obscure a basic fact: raising children born to someone else is a time-honored human practice. In the past and in many cultures today, our modern American ideal, the 2-parent biologically-related nuclear family, is an oddity. Within the long history of humanity our ideas about kinship and our beliefs about what constitutes a “normal” household are surprisingly narrow and, in the end, not all that helpful.

Bendroth introduces readers to new ways of thinking about adoption, exploring the history of American families and children as well as fascinating findings by biologists and evolutionary anthropologists about kinship practices, genetics and inheritance, even motherhood itself. This is, in other words, a book about adoption and much more. It is an invitation to readers to reflect on their own lives, to think deeply about our human need to connect, to love, and belong.

A Selection from "Ordinary Days and Tender Places: How We Talk (and Don't Talk) About Adoption in America"

2025_Memoir_Breast Cancer

Do you remember your first crush?

Not the high-school kind. I mean the first one, back when romance involved shared desks, playgrounds, and secret notes. The person who made you feel something you didn’t yet have a name for.

Mine happened in second grade. Her name was Debra.

Read, watch, and listen to everything from The Drive-by Raconteur: https://linktr.ee/drivebyraconteur

Copyright © 2026 by David A. Stafford. All rights reserved.

A Different Kind of Math: The Rocket Kid Chronicles / Chapter 12

An audiobook of Diana Keough. A journalist uncovers shocking secrets about her own parents in this riveting true story of family, betrayal, and hidden pasts. Full audiobook FREE with the Amazon trial period: https://link.amazon/B0f59EgDRE #ad
Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases at no extra cost to you.

Journalist Diana Keough spent decades believing her upbringing was normal and her family was simply "nice." But when she begins digging into her family’s past, long-buried secrets and hidden lives begin to surface, completely shattering her reality. As her investigation deepens, Diana is forced to untangle a web of deception and ask herself how well any of us can truly know our own parents.

Diana Keough’s narration makes this short, 3-hour and 58-minute Audible Original feel like an exclusive, late-night confession. Her investigative instinct gives the narrative a compelling, documentary-like pacing, while her natural vulnerability makes every personal realization hit deeply. A haunting, beautifully crafted memoir that true crime and investigative biography fans will devour in a single sitting!

Audiobook 🎧 Not from a Nice Family ✍ Diana Keough

Prehistoric creatures and adventures in inner space, and all for the low, low price of 25 cents.

Step into the Wayback Machine with me and travel back to the 1960s when, at the age of eight, I came face to face with prehistory. Well, sort of. And then ventured into an entire world hidden deep inside the human body.

It was quite an adventure for a quarter.

Read and listen to complete stories: https://linktr.ee/drivebyraconteur

Shrink Rays and Fur Bikinis: The Rocket Kid Chronicles / Chapter 13

Writer of original stories, essays, and reflections inspired by memory, history, travel, and the landscapes that shape our lives.

Larry Mitchell is an award-winning American television and film actor known for his roles as Mack in The Devil Wears Prada 2, Detective Scott Kilpatrick in the critically acclaimed HBO MAX limited series, WE OWN THIS CITY, and as Joe Paterno's (Al Pacino) son, Jay Paterno, in the Emmy-nominated (Outstanding TV Movie/Best Director) HBO Film: PATERNO, directed by Barry Levinson. Other highlights include The Trial of the Chicago 7, The Departed, and his work on-stage at The Barrow Group Theatre Company (winner: Drama Desk Award). He lives in New York with his wife and their dog Hudson.

The publishing world is overwhelmingly white and the stories that we read reflect that reality. Because of this long-time trend, many new and upcoming Black and queer authors often feel shut out and excluded from the publishing process.

This podcast demystifies the publishing process with a focus on first-time Black and queer authors.

Choose to be Curious is a show all about curiosity. We talk about research and theory, but mostly it's conversations about how curiosity shows up in work and life.  

Now syndicated and available via Pacifica RadioNetwork.

Audiobook narrator, voiceover and on-camera actress

Welcome to Writing the Coast! This is the weekly podcast where we chat with the authors and illustrators of the books who make up the shortlist of the annual BC and Yukon Book Prizes. On the episodes you'll hear host and podcast coordinator Megan Cole chat with the folks who are creating some of BC and Yukon's best books. We'll also check in with the literary community in our region. For more information about the BC and Yukon Book Prizes visit: https://bcyukonbookprizes.com/

Join Timothy Green, editor of Rattle, for The Rattlecast — the longest free-wheeling, longform livestreaming poetry podcast on the planet. Every Monday we feature in-depth poet interviews, lively craft discussions, prompt-based open lines, and original poems responding to current events in Poets Respond. Experience authentic conversations, shared poetry, and live community interaction in this weekly poetry show. Live every Monday at 8pm ET.

Rattle is a publication of the Rattle Foundation, an independent 501(c)3 non-profit organization whose mission is to promote the practice of poetry, and is not affiliated with any other organization.

Now Hear This is a Tampa, Florida-based agency specializing in management, publicity, and related services.  The company president, Bruce Wawrzyniak, hosts a weekly podcast called "Now Hear This Entertainment," featuring interviews with guests who are having success in entertainment (primarily music), with the content presented in a way that not only entertains fans of that guest and fans of good music (interviews) in general, but in a manner that educates musicians, singers, songwriters – entertainers who want to learn from those who are being interviewed.  The guests come from a wide array of genres and locales.

New tracks tagged #memoir