June 18, 2025 • 30 mins
The seed of the idea for Irish author Kevin Barry’s latest novel was planted more than 25 years ago. But it wasn’t until late into the pandemic as he was walking in the countryside and had a vision of a young couple on horseback riding double that he decided to write The Heart in Winter. Set in 1890s Montana, the book is a savagely funny and achingly romantic tale of young lovers on the lam. On this week’s episode Michael chats with Kevin about The Heart in Winter and why these days, glamorous sentences are not the most important thing in his writing. Reading list: City of Bohane, Kevin Barry, 2011 Beatlebone, Kevin Barry, 2015 Night Boat to Tangier, Kevin Barry, 2019 The Heart in Winter, Kevin Barry, 2024 Underworld, Don DeLillo, 1997 You can find these books and all the others we mentioned at your favourite independent book store. Socials: Stay in touch with Read This on Instagram Guest: Kevin Barry
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
I love the writing of Irish author Kevin Barry, from
his first novel, The Impact Dublin Literary Award winning City
of Boham, through his collections of short stories to night
Boats to Tangier and last year's The Heart in Winter.
Any year where there's a new Kevin Barry book is
a year where Kevin Barry book will be amongst my
favorite things I read. He's funny and somehow both sharp
(00:23):
and blunt. Every sentence in a Kevin Barry story is
carefully calibrated and perfectly weighted, but not in a way
that feels tricksy or labored. There's this breezy playfulness that
means that even when he's writing Menace or Melancholy or
Doomed Lovers, as you're reading, you're moved by the poetry
of his sentences and carried by the dark wit of
(00:45):
his ever present humor. He's just great. He is not
unusually for read this yet another writer from that Irish tradition,
but with him you can also see the debts to
other literature, to theatre, to TV and sina. I was
reading this interview he did with the Paris Review that
noted that night Boat to Tangier had this palpable debt
(01:07):
to Beckett. The central conceit of that book is two
Irish friends sitting at a dock in Spain, waiting for
a ship that might never arrive, as they spin stories
and bicker and hang shit on one another. The Becket
link is absolutely there, but just as quickly, the Paris
Review interview moves on to the Jonathan Glazer film Sexy Beast,
(01:27):
then to Harold Pinter before long, Barry's bringing in Twin
Peaks and listening to the Pixies, and Saw Bellow, then
Flannery O'Connor, all these influences one after another, all of
them and many more besides. But together they combine to
create something that is singularly itself. I'd happily talk to
him about any topic at any length. But it's his
(01:50):
latest book, The Heart in Winter, one of my favorite
books of last year, that is our focus today. It's
another masterpiece, brief and efficient and all the things that
he does best. This time around, It's a Western, and
it's a love story, a couple running from misdeeds and
towards the thrilling possibility of a new life together. It's
(02:12):
his seventh book. But also the first idea for a
novel that he ever had, and one that he began
researching more than twenty five years ago. From Schwartz Media.
I'm Michael Williams, and this is read This the show
about the books we love and the stories behind them.
(02:35):
I think maybe the logical place to kick off and
far bit from me to cast dispersions in anyone else's
speed of production between research and writing, But a quarter
of a century feels like a decent time lag between
starting an idea and executing it.
Speaker 2 (02:53):
Yeah, a slow game sometimes writing fiction, you know. Yeah,
we are referring listeners to my most recent novel, The
Heart and Winter, which is my seventh published book of fiction,
But it was the first one I attempted as a
very you can imagine as an extremely young man in
nineteen ninety nine. I was twenty nine. Actually I wasn't
(03:15):
that young, but no. I was working in Cork City
in Ireland as a freelancing as a journalist and just
had this kind of itch throughout fiction which was only
really been itched about four in the morning, after I'd
crawl home from a nightclub on all fours, you know,
and those sentences would have to burnish of certain genius
at four in the morning, but somehow wouldn't stand up
(03:37):
to the sober light of day. And I knew I
had to get serious and I really had to put
the work in. So I saved up all this money
for my freelancing, and I had three months. I bought
myself three months, and I went to the Court coast
and I put a little caravan on a beach, and
I said, right time to write that novel, young man.
You know. I had that classic twenty nine year old
(03:58):
hard chat with myself. Time now, you know, attend to
your pros, sir. So I went out and I brought
up I didn't even have a laptop at the time.
I don't think I had no books that I started,
and I had nothing. I had absolutely nothing to write about,
you know. And I was just going for these long, bitter,
tormented walks around the Cahab Mountains in West Cork, and
(04:21):
one day, just passing the old copper mines up there,
taught that's interesting abandoned copper minds and reading into the
story a little bit in local histories and finding out
that all the miners had moved to Butte Montana in
the eighteen eighties when the copper minds in Ireland played
out and Butte was booming because they were electrifying America
(04:41):
and there was a rush on copper. So I thought,
my god, here it is a Western with Irish accents.
You know, this is mine. Like I was reading an
unseemly amount of Cormack McCarthy books at the time as well,
so this was all feeding into it. So I said,
all you have to do now, young Feller, is get
yourself to but My It was my first trip to
(05:02):
the US. Actually, in October ninety nine. I flew to
Seattle and got on a Greyhound bus for about fourteen years,
I think it took to get out to debut and
had a royal time for a week there. The city
is very proud of its Irish heritage and welcomed me
with open arms. And I was very direct and forward
at that age. I was going up to everybody in
(05:23):
bars and on the street and listen, now, I'm writing
a novel about this place. What have you got for me?
You know? And they were lovely.
Speaker 3 (05:32):
They were really kind, and they fed me and brought
me drinking, and brought me to the library archives, and
they were giving me boxes of letters that Lovelor and
Irish miners had said looking for wives in the eighteen nineties.
Speaker 2 (05:46):
And I had all this glorious material about opium parlors
and brottles and fights and bars and crazy stuff happening.
It was a great little sin city. There was a
lot of money from the mining wage. Saw everything sprang
up around that. And I went back to Cork and
I wrote one hundred and twenty thousand words, and I
was all dead on the page. I had great texture,
(06:09):
and I had great research, but I didn't know how
to make it recede.
Speaker 1 (06:13):
How did you notice did on the page as a
twenty And I trust you, and I trust your instinct
from that determination and then that gathering of the story.
Ostensibly you're rewarded for your determination. You've found the idea,
You've followed the idea, people have shared it with you.
Did you just know as a reader that it wasn't
seeing the way you wanted it to?
Speaker 2 (06:34):
Exactly so? And I think the fortunate thing I've been
quite a late starter. Was at twenty nine thirty or
whatever it was. At this point, you know, I was
a pretty practice reader. I reviewed books and stuff. I
knew the quality of what was getting published, what was
out there, and I knew what I had on the
page was kind of I didn't have the chops yet.
(06:55):
You know, I didn't do whatever it is you're supposed
to do the ten thousand hours or something to develop.
I knew I had ability. I knew I could write
perky sentences and good lines of dialogue and come up
with kind of funny scenes, but I didn't have it consistently.
And what I really didn't have was the people. I
didn't have strong characters. This is what was technically wrong
(07:16):
with the book. I thought it needed to be a
broad canvas. I thought, I've got to do all of
this story. I've got to do the boat across. I've
got to do the train across, the bout data. I've
got to do the mines, the bars, the brattles, the politics, everything.
You know, I better try in a love story as well,
and I better try this. And it was just got
(07:37):
to be nine hundred and fifty pages.
Speaker 1 (07:38):
You know that so makes sense as an early aspiration
of you know, if you want to do it, you
need to do it at scale. And if you want
to do it at scale, then it needs the density
of the entire world on the page. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (07:52):
I think actually a very common thing is that early
on in anty fiction writers practice that ambition and ability
aren't quite matching up. You're often years away from the
book you're first trying to write, you know. When I
put it aside, I started to write short stories in
a kind of fairly serious way. And you know, a
(08:14):
short story is by no means an apprentice form for
a novel. I don't consider that the case at all,
but it is just concentrated distance. And sometimes you can
get lucky inside a week or two have something that
feels quite finished on your desk. And I started, in
those very early attempts of short stories, I started to
sound a bit more like myself. It's that thing of voice.
(08:35):
It's that thing of voice. I mean. I have a
very vivid memory one day of writing this, a bit
of a short story about and there was a woman
going on a train across the midlands of Ireland. And
I was in the depths of this sentence, and Jesus,
the sentence was gone on for pages, you know, and
it was magnificent, and it was the greatest lyric description
(08:59):
of the art Wish Midland has ever committed to paper,
I'm confident to this day. And I kind of froze
halfway through and looked down at the page and went,
who the fuck is this guy? Because it wasn't me,
you know, for one thing, it wasn't funny. And I
am essentially a comedian, I think when I write. I
think my fiction is often very darkly comic, but essentially comic,
(09:22):
I think. And I started to write stories that were
getting kind of funny and that were amusing me, and
I started to have a good time at desk, and
a very important realization hit me, which is that writing
fiction is essentially a childlike activity. It's a kind of play.
You're playing. You're making up warris and characters and voices
(09:44):
and little stories, you know, and you should be having
fun with it. Children are naturally able to fall into that,
into their element with play, and we're more self conscious
about it the older we get. But it struck me then,
and it's something I very much hold until this day,
is that if I'm not having a good time at
my desk, beloved reader or beloved audience member or beloved
(10:07):
viewer at the far end of the of the equation,
isn't going to be having a good time either. So
anytime I start to feel like a tortured genius, I
get very wary.
Speaker 1 (10:18):
Save tortured genius for the writers' festivals and the publicity
trails putting stuff on the page. I think when you
talk about that kind of early career gap between ambition
on the one hand and ability on the other, I'm
curious about how much of that you know that I
think the best writers are big readers themselves. How much
(10:40):
of that gulf is about the kind of pressures of expectation.
You know who you read, you know the kind of
writers you aspire to sit alongside, and so expecting to
kind of match them for ability out of the gate
is part of the problem.
Speaker 2 (10:58):
I've been thinking about this recently, actually, because I've been
thinking back to my early days and my first attempt
at a novel, and I think, when what I've noticed
from writers who are emerging now, whatever age they're emerging at,
I think they're better read than we were back in
the nineteen nineties. I think they're more broadly read. I
think they're reading all sorts of fiction and fiction and translation.
(11:19):
And I would say a problem I had in my
twenties out, my reading was very narrow. I would get
obsessed with a couple of writers and then of course
try and ape them on the page. My big thing
was the great American Jews, Salt Below, Philip rot, stuff
like that, you know, And I was determined to do
for Cork City what Salt Belo had done for Chicago.
(11:41):
You know, it's mortifying stuff, and it's very difficult to
get past that aspiration, you know. I think George Saunders
talks very well about an early fixation with Hemingway, you know,
and things like reading stories like across the River and
into the trees, and he'd be doing his version and
it would be like across the park working lot and
into the mall, you know, and something that just doesn't
(12:04):
match it up and something is it working. You have
to find that. You have to find your own world
on the page. And funnily enough, it was short stories
that brought me to it. I'd never really been a
rabbit reader of short stories. I wasn't going out buying
collections all the time. I did have a memorable visit
(12:24):
to the Cork City Library Wanted in the mid nineteen nineties,
where I bought one of those great old Norton anthologies.
Home it was a twentieth century American short fiction. Everything
you know from very early days John dos pass us up,
True Chiever and Flannery O'Connor and all that stuff, and
that was a great gosh, this is a great crash
(12:45):
course almost you know, in the short stories of form,
and very early responding to writers from the American South.
I think there's a lot in common between Irish writers
and writers of the American South. There's a great strain
of religiosity that comes into the pros that we can't help.
You know that, there's a lyric impulse, there's a darkly
(13:07):
comic impulse. If you read Flannery O'Connor story about a
one legged Bible salesman in Georgia, that feels very close
to home in the Western Ireland, this kind of crazy stuff.
So I responded very much to that, and slowly but
surely stories started to feel kind of a life for me,
on on on on on the page. I'm still kind
(13:29):
of devoted to the form of the short story. I
still try my hand at them. I used to write
them very quickly as a kid gunslinger, you know. I
used to put out a story in two or three weeks,
and now they think me months in my in my
feeble middle years. You know, it's a mysterious form as well.
In some ways, I think the closer you get to
(13:50):
it and the longer it's been, that unless you know
about it, you know why some stories work and why
there's just don't come right for you. I always think
I know how to write a short story until I
start a new one, and then I go, fuck, I
have no idea how to do this, you know. And
I hate to use any phrases flippant or as pat
as the trick of it with a business as esoteric
(14:11):
and strange as writing fiction. But the trick of it
is the right story for your desk at the right
time in your life. It's understanding what the material for
now is not the story you really want to write
and you might be able to write in ten years time.
Aren't the story you should have written when you were
twenty two, you know? But what can you do now?
What are you bitter enough about right now to make
(14:32):
a piece of work about, or what's really, you know,
inflaming your passions right now that you really want to
respond to it.
Speaker 1 (14:39):
I love that the first passion you went with was
bitterness as a motivating one for telling a good story.
Speaker 2 (14:44):
These are these are these are these are very valuable
energies that we need as writers. Bitterness, shame, and like,
I always think I'm getting somewhere if I read over
a first draft of something, and if I feel more
to fight, if I feel my cheeks reddening, you know,
oh Jesus spotted I put down on the page. I
(15:06):
think I'm getting somewhere.
Speaker 1 (15:09):
When we return, Kevin reveals how Walk in the Hills
inspired his latest novel and why these days, glamorous sentences
are not the most important thing in his writing. We'll
be right back. So that twenty five year lag between
(15:34):
going to Montana and having a first tilted a book, well.
Speaker 2 (15:38):
Yeah, I forgot. I forgot, I forgot the second half
of that story. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (15:42):
Well, my fascination comes from your description of kind of
your process. Did you return to the earlier manuscript or
did you just return to the setting and the place. Yeah?
Speaker 2 (15:54):
What what happened was I managed to, in the meantime
get out six other books of fiction. And it was
late in the pandemic. It was towards the end of
the long dreary second year of the pandemic twenty one
October twenty one, and I was due to write a novel.
So I was kind of shopping around in my subconscious
and I was convinced I was going to write a
(16:16):
novel set in a squat in Amsterdam in the early
nineteen nineties. And I got to the point of spending
a day and a half at it and thought, Fuck, no,
I just don't have I just don't have this world yet.
I don't have these characters yet. I may have at
some top point, but I don't have them now. And
going for I was out walking again. I was in
the hills nearby where I live in County Slide on
(16:37):
the northwest, just walking through the woods on the side
of a mountain one day, and just a little as
walking and writing are so connected, you know, because you're
you're you're letting the unconscious kind of percolate back there,
and just had a vision in my mind's eye of
a young couple on horseback, riding double. And if they're
(17:00):
riding double, they must be trying to get away from
someplace fast. They're in trouble, you know. And it struck
me about them as I saw them in my mind's
eide that they were kind of very slight. They were
kind of wayfish. So these weren't heroic characters or cowboys
or anything, you know. But I thought, where they trying
to get away from They're on a horse. It's a
(17:21):
Western What if it's but Montana in eighteen ninety one,
Just very quickly the succession of thoughts, and I thought, Okay,
that's the setup. Runaway lovers, very easy. Make it fucket
easy for yourself. You know, two runaway lovers trying to
get out of but Montana. I have all that stuff,
I know all the texture of the era. I could
remember all the research. It was very embedded. And I'll
(17:42):
call them Tom and Polly. And I then wrote the
book in about ten months and had a ball with us.
I'd got great fun with it because the characters felt
alive straight away as I started to ride them. And
another thing that experience gives you is that you've become
more economical with your time. And when I have an
idea like that and I think it might be a novel,
I'll give this two weeks. So I'm going to give
(18:02):
Tom Rourke a week, and I'm going to give poly
Gillespie a week and I'll write from their point of
view and see how it feels. So Tom Rourke is
a degenerate, dissolute, twenty nine year old irishman with vague
literary ambitions, and I know what that feels like. So
I tried him for a week and it felt promising.
You know, he was lurching around Butte Montana in eighteen
(18:23):
ninety one on this epic pub crawl, brottle crawl, dope
house crawl, and I was thinking, Okay, I'm getting the
world building naturally as I go with him. This is promising.
My second week, I said, I'm going to try poly Gillespie.
Who's this young woman with a mysterious past who's arrived
from Chicago to Butte as part of an arranged marriage.
(18:44):
And I was more nervous because she's an American voice,
so not immediately native to me. But I remember that
Monday morning I wrote her in her voice for about
ten minutes, and I said to myself, you have a novel.
You have your Butte Montana novel. Because she was just
ready to go. I could tune into her with she
had this spacey, kind of dreamy kind of worldview that
(19:07):
I felt very comfortable with, and I knew she would
kind of earth the story for me.
Speaker 1 (19:11):
I can't remember a book I've had more fun with
but also a sense of doom. Inevitably with his story
like this, we know the beats of how a story
like this goes, and in this case, the engine isn't
irritation or shame. It's proper passion. I mean, it's it's
a story about two people consumed by a kind of lust,
(19:34):
both for each other and for the possibility that running
away together gives them.
Speaker 2 (19:39):
Yeah, and it's kind of I think what they recognize
when when they meet each other for the first time,
which is in a photographic studio where he has a
has a job as an assistant to kind of a
day job. When he's like in the midst of his
various kind of drug and alcoholic reveries, he manages to
go in for a few hours to displace and they meet,
(20:00):
and as soon as they clap eyes on each other,
I think they both realized, this is the great drama
of our lives. This is it here, and we have
no choice. We just have to got to follow this
thing and see where it brings us. But it wasn't.
It's actually having denied that there's any contemporary resonance for
a story like this. It was significant that they meet
(20:20):
in a photographics studio because eighteen ninety one, by Luck,
I think, really is a very useful time to write about,
because it's the very earliest iteration of our world. America
has been electrified for the first time. Every main street
has a little photographic studio, and very ordinary, very working
class people, for the first time in human history are
(20:42):
thinking about how they look, and they're thinking about an
image and trying on style. You know, the rich people
have been thinking about this for centuries because they've been
having oil paintings made of them. But now every Tom,
Dick and Harry has going, hey, how is this looking?
Speaker 1 (20:58):
How is this hat?
Speaker 2 (20:59):
And Tom and Poli are very aware of how they
look together, and they're very kind of interested in that.
So there is that sort of Bonny and Clyde kind
of element to it that comes in again. But I
was I had the original manuscript from the late nineties
in a box under a bed in a guest room
at the far in the house, and I was afraid
(21:22):
to even put a finger in there. I wasn't going
to find anything good. I remembered one phrase and I
used it just to make it feel like it was
still the same project. It was some sort of occult sense.
Speaker 1 (21:35):
A little gift to yourself, your past, a.
Speaker 2 (21:37):
Little gift to myself. That was the nicest thing about
this project, really, I suppose was. I felt like I
was paying off a debt to my twenty nine year
old self. I was saying to my twenty nine year
old self, this was a good idea for you. You
were on the right track for such talents and abilities
as you have. This is a great world for you,
you know. So it was nice then to find Okay,
(21:58):
you can. It can be a slogan, you know, and
you can hang on to things for years and make
something worthwhile of them. Like Alie writer will tell you
that there are always abandoned stories and abandoned projects, but
they're never fully abandoned. They're always sitting at the back
of your mind, in your unconscious just waiting for some
spark that might bring them to life.
Speaker 1 (22:18):
City of Berhin. You're twenty eleven, your first published novel, Yeah,
after you'd brought out a book of short stories. In
many ways, the beats of that story are the beats
of a Western as well, And I'm curious about the
generic conventions that you find useful to play with and
what they give you permission to do when you're writing. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (22:39):
I've published four novels to date and I would say
they all have strong genre elements. City of Bohan as
kind of a futuristic, vaguely dystopian kind of gangster opera.
It's a whole mix of things. My second published novel, Beatlebone,
is the most unfashionable of all the genres. It's fan fiction,
you know, imagining John Lennon in my story in the
(23:02):
West of Ireland. Night Boat to Tangier is kind of
a contemporary noir or an attempt at that, about two
court gangsters adrift in Spain, and then an actual Western. Finally,
what a Western gives you, Actually, it's very forgiving as
a genre. It gives you a lot because the fundamental
(23:25):
thing about Westerns that people have to be forever jumping
up on horses and lighting out for fresh territory. And
when they're doing that, you're naturally getting propulsion and momentum
and they're going to have to have encounters. So the
genre itself just gives you a lot of energy to
start the thing rolling, you know, and it's it's all
dend down to what kind of a rendition you can
(23:47):
give to this all kind of valid, hoary form, you know,
like it's it's it's funny like that. There's so many
incredible examples of the Western from from film and from television,
thinking of things like the Great Show Dead would but
when you come to the literary Western and the Western
in novels, you can exhaust a list of the really
(24:09):
good stuff quite quickly. Anyone who writes a Western now
has to not the gap in some way to the
Cormack McCarty because he kept it a live as a
possibility that you could still take this whole real form
and do something new with it. And you know, there
are good director has been good work over the years
here and there in it. But you know, it feels
(24:31):
like there's still plenty you can do with this. The
fun of it is what attracts me.
Speaker 1 (24:36):
I think I read an interview with you where you
talked about amongst the American writers who you revered Don Delilla,
and I thought I thought that was an interesting an
interesting parallel with your work Beetleburn in particular, is the
novel of yours that I felt, and this might not
(24:58):
be the right way to put it, but almost like
I had a permission structure from the way DeLillo fictionalized
real human beings and both took great care with it
but also gave himself a license to play and take
it where he wanted to take it. Is that a
fair yeah?
Speaker 2 (25:16):
I think yeah, And I think talking as we were
a little while ago, about how narrowly read a lot
of emerging writers were back in the old days in
the nineties, the standard form for the boy writers, for
the baby boy writers was that you would graduate from
Martin Amis to Don DeLillo about nineteen ninety five when
(25:36):
Underworld about you know, that was that was the big
graduation mark. And I was obsessed with Underworld when it
came out. But my great Delila one was Allays Libra
The Portrait of Lee Harvey Oswald, and it's one of
the books I keep close to my desk still because
I go back to his portrait of that of Jack Ruby,
the guy who assassinated Oswald, and turn who ran a
(26:00):
strip show in Dallas. And it's maybe fifteen or twenty
pages over the course of the book is all you get.
But it is magnificent, This portrait of Ruby. It's incredibly funny.
It's a crazy mad emphetament fueled scuzzy neon Dallas underworld
in nearly nineteen sixties. And you can tell Dalilo is
having a ball writing this stuff. He's just so having
(26:22):
so much fun with it, and it is. Yeah, for Beatlebon,
he was definitely one of the key kind of reference
points I think in how you can how you can
be bold enough and have a brass enough neck to
take iconic events, are iconic characters and tried to use
them for your fictional ends.
Speaker 1 (26:42):
It sounds like you have a kind of palpable sense
of the ways in which your abilities, your experience as
a writer. You know, you're a very different writer to
the writer you were twenty five years ago that you've
now kind of developed, even earned the stripes to be
able to tell the stories that you're telling now, to
(27:03):
kind of create the kind of world in the hat
in Winter.
Speaker 2 (27:07):
Yeah, it's yeah, like writing fiction is the thing I've
been doing every day since nineteen ninety nine. Basically, that's
the first thing I do when I get up. I
don't do anything else. I don't teach or anything like that.
I've been lucky enough to time. I managed to make
a readership quite quickly, and I've been able to keep
going by just writing fiction. And it's long enough to
(27:28):
see yourself change as a writer. I would say, in
the very earliest things I was writing, my primary interest
was in language and in the style and what I
could do with the sentences, how much glamor I could
get into the sentences. And I'm still very interested in
this element. But I think most important for me now
(27:48):
are the people, the characters in the stories. And I
tend to spend a lot of time now just kind
of in a day dreamy kind of way, kind of
sitting with them and thinking about them and putting them
them into situations before I even start to write.
Speaker 1 (28:04):
You know, well, you managed to combine that with still
a more meticulous execution of a perfect sentence than many
writers working today. And it's a privilege to read those sentences.
It's been so good to talk to you today.
Speaker 2 (28:17):
That's been it's been great fun, Michaels, Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1 (28:22):
Kevin Barry's latest novel, The Heart in Winter, and in fact,
all these novels are available everywhere now. Rather than letting
(28:44):
you know what else, I've been reading this week a
bit of news and unfortunately a bittersweet bit of news.
After producing almost one hundred episodes of Read This talking
with some of the best writers from Australian around the world,
as of next Thursday, June twenty six, Read This This
will no longer have a home. Schwartz Media very kindly
created this podcast in the first place and have been
(29:06):
the publishers behind it since day one, and their support
and belief in the show has been so rewarding and
so exciting. But they're getting out of the audio game.
You may have read news that seven am is being
sold to a different media company, and as a consequence,
there's no home for read This here anymore. We are
deeply hopeful that it's not the end for Read This.
(29:27):
We love making the show and we hope to continue
to for many months and years to come. But for
now there's a hiatus a coming, call it reading time.
But in the meantime, you can help us while we're
out there shopping for a new home. The best thing
you can do is make sure you review and rate
us on your podcast at and if you haven't already
made sure you subscribe. It's in the read this feed
(29:49):
that you will find out where we're going to pop
up next. Read This is a Schwartz Media production, made
possible by the generous support of the AAR group. It
is produced and edited by Clara Ames, with mixing from
Travis Evans and original compositions by Zolt and Fletcher. Thanks
for listening, See you next week.
I love the writing of Irish author Kevin Barry, from
his first novel, The Impact Dublin Literary Award winning City
of Boham, through his collections of short stories to night
Boats to Tangier and last year's The Heart in Winter.
Any year where there's a new Kevin Barry book is
a year where Kevin Barry book will be amongst my
favorite things I read. He's funny and somehow both sharp
(00:23):
and blunt. Every sentence in a Kevin Barry story is
carefully calibrated and perfectly weighted, but not in a way
that feels tricksy or labored. There's this breezy playfulness that
means that even when he's writing Menace or Melancholy or
Doomed Lovers, as you're reading, you're moved by the poetry
of his sentences and carried by the dark wit of
(00:45):
his ever present humor. He's just great. He is not
unusually for read this yet another writer from that Irish tradition,
but with him you can also see the debts to
other literature, to theatre, to TV and sina. I was
reading this interview he did with the Paris Review that
noted that night Boat to Tangier had this palpable debt
(01:07):
to Beckett. The central conceit of that book is two
Irish friends sitting at a dock in Spain, waiting for
a ship that might never arrive, as they spin stories
and bicker and hang shit on one another. The Becket
link is absolutely there, but just as quickly, the Paris
Review interview moves on to the Jonathan Glazer film Sexy Beast,
(01:27):
then to Harold Pinter before long, Barry's bringing in Twin
Peaks and listening to the Pixies, and Saw Bellow, then
Flannery O'Connor, all these influences one after another, all of
them and many more besides. But together they combine to
create something that is singularly itself. I'd happily talk to
him about any topic at any length. But it's his
(01:50):
latest book, The Heart in Winter, one of my favorite
books of last year, that is our focus today. It's
another masterpiece, brief and efficient and all the things that
he does best. This time around, It's a Western, and
it's a love story, a couple running from misdeeds and
towards the thrilling possibility of a new life together. It's
(02:12):
his seventh book. But also the first idea for a
novel that he ever had, and one that he began
researching more than twenty five years ago. From Schwartz Media.
I'm Michael Williams, and this is read This the show
about the books we love and the stories behind them.
(02:35):
I think maybe the logical place to kick off and
far bit from me to cast dispersions in anyone else's
speed of production between research and writing, But a quarter
of a century feels like a decent time lag between
starting an idea and executing it.
Speaker 2 (02:53):
Yeah, a slow game sometimes writing fiction, you know. Yeah,
we are referring listeners to my most recent novel, The
Heart and Winter, which is my seventh published book of fiction,
But it was the first one I attempted as a
very you can imagine as an extremely young man in
nineteen ninety nine. I was twenty nine. Actually I wasn't
(03:15):
that young, but no. I was working in Cork City
in Ireland as a freelancing as a journalist and just
had this kind of itch throughout fiction which was only
really been itched about four in the morning, after I'd
crawl home from a nightclub on all fours, you know,
and those sentences would have to burnish of certain genius
at four in the morning, but somehow wouldn't stand up
(03:37):
to the sober light of day. And I knew I
had to get serious and I really had to put
the work in. So I saved up all this money
for my freelancing, and I had three months. I bought
myself three months, and I went to the Court coast
and I put a little caravan on a beach, and
I said, right time to write that novel, young man.
You know. I had that classic twenty nine year old
(03:58):
hard chat with myself. Time now, you know, attend to
your pros, sir. So I went out and I brought
up I didn't even have a laptop at the time.
I don't think I had no books that I started,
and I had nothing. I had absolutely nothing to write about,
you know. And I was just going for these long, bitter,
tormented walks around the Cahab Mountains in West Cork, and
(04:21):
one day, just passing the old copper mines up there,
taught that's interesting abandoned copper minds and reading into the
story a little bit in local histories and finding out
that all the miners had moved to Butte Montana in
the eighteen eighties when the copper minds in Ireland played
out and Butte was booming because they were electrifying America
(04:41):
and there was a rush on copper. So I thought,
my god, here it is a Western with Irish accents.
You know, this is mine. Like I was reading an
unseemly amount of Cormack McCarthy books at the time as well,
so this was all feeding into it. So I said,
all you have to do now, young Feller, is get
yourself to but My It was my first trip to
(05:02):
the US. Actually, in October ninety nine. I flew to
Seattle and got on a Greyhound bus for about fourteen years,
I think it took to get out to debut and
had a royal time for a week there. The city
is very proud of its Irish heritage and welcomed me
with open arms. And I was very direct and forward
at that age. I was going up to everybody in
(05:23):
bars and on the street and listen, now, I'm writing
a novel about this place. What have you got for me?
You know? And they were lovely.
Speaker 3 (05:32):
They were really kind, and they fed me and brought
me drinking, and brought me to the library archives, and
they were giving me boxes of letters that Lovelor and
Irish miners had said looking for wives in the eighteen nineties.
Speaker 2 (05:46):
And I had all this glorious material about opium parlors
and brottles and fights and bars and crazy stuff happening.
It was a great little sin city. There was a
lot of money from the mining wage. Saw everything sprang
up around that. And I went back to Cork and
I wrote one hundred and twenty thousand words, and I
was all dead on the page. I had great texture,
(06:09):
and I had great research, but I didn't know how
to make it recede.
Speaker 1 (06:13):
How did you notice did on the page as a
twenty And I trust you, and I trust your instinct
from that determination and then that gathering of the story.
Ostensibly you're rewarded for your determination. You've found the idea,
You've followed the idea, people have shared it with you.
Did you just know as a reader that it wasn't
seeing the way you wanted it to?
Speaker 2 (06:34):
Exactly so? And I think the fortunate thing I've been
quite a late starter. Was at twenty nine thirty or
whatever it was. At this point, you know, I was
a pretty practice reader. I reviewed books and stuff. I
knew the quality of what was getting published, what was
out there, and I knew what I had on the
page was kind of I didn't have the chops yet.
(06:55):
You know, I didn't do whatever it is you're supposed
to do the ten thousand hours or something to develop.
I knew I had ability. I knew I could write
perky sentences and good lines of dialogue and come up
with kind of funny scenes, but I didn't have it consistently.
And what I really didn't have was the people. I
didn't have strong characters. This is what was technically wrong
(07:16):
with the book. I thought it needed to be a
broad canvas. I thought, I've got to do all of
this story. I've got to do the boat across. I've
got to do the train across, the bout data. I've
got to do the mines, the bars, the brattles, the politics, everything.
You know, I better try in a love story as well,
and I better try this. And it was just got
(07:37):
to be nine hundred and fifty pages.
Speaker 1 (07:38):
You know that so makes sense as an early aspiration
of you know, if you want to do it, you
need to do it at scale. And if you want
to do it at scale, then it needs the density
of the entire world on the page. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (07:52):
I think actually a very common thing is that early
on in anty fiction writers practice that ambition and ability
aren't quite matching up. You're often years away from the
book you're first trying to write, you know. When I
put it aside, I started to write short stories in
a kind of fairly serious way. And you know, a
(08:14):
short story is by no means an apprentice form for
a novel. I don't consider that the case at all,
but it is just concentrated distance. And sometimes you can
get lucky inside a week or two have something that
feels quite finished on your desk. And I started, in
those very early attempts of short stories, I started to
sound a bit more like myself. It's that thing of voice.
(08:35):
It's that thing of voice. I mean. I have a
very vivid memory one day of writing this, a bit
of a short story about and there was a woman
going on a train across the midlands of Ireland. And
I was in the depths of this sentence, and Jesus,
the sentence was gone on for pages, you know, and
it was magnificent, and it was the greatest lyric description
(08:59):
of the art Wish Midland has ever committed to paper,
I'm confident to this day. And I kind of froze
halfway through and looked down at the page and went,
who the fuck is this guy? Because it wasn't me,
you know, for one thing, it wasn't funny. And I
am essentially a comedian, I think when I write. I
think my fiction is often very darkly comic, but essentially comic,
(09:22):
I think. And I started to write stories that were
getting kind of funny and that were amusing me, and
I started to have a good time at desk, and
a very important realization hit me, which is that writing
fiction is essentially a childlike activity. It's a kind of play.
You're playing. You're making up warris and characters and voices
(09:44):
and little stories, you know, and you should be having
fun with it. Children are naturally able to fall into that,
into their element with play, and we're more self conscious
about it the older we get. But it struck me then,
and it's something I very much hold until this day,
is that if I'm not having a good time at
my desk, beloved reader or beloved audience member or beloved
(10:07):
viewer at the far end of the of the equation,
isn't going to be having a good time either. So
anytime I start to feel like a tortured genius, I
get very wary.
Speaker 1 (10:18):
Save tortured genius for the writers' festivals and the publicity
trails putting stuff on the page. I think when you
talk about that kind of early career gap between ambition
on the one hand and ability on the other, I'm
curious about how much of that you know that I
think the best writers are big readers themselves. How much
(10:40):
of that gulf is about the kind of pressures of expectation.
You know who you read, you know the kind of
writers you aspire to sit alongside, and so expecting to
kind of match them for ability out of the gate
is part of the problem.
Speaker 2 (10:58):
I've been thinking about this recently, actually, because I've been
thinking back to my early days and my first attempt
at a novel, and I think, when what I've noticed
from writers who are emerging now, whatever age they're emerging at,
I think they're better read than we were back in
the nineteen nineties. I think they're more broadly read. I
think they're reading all sorts of fiction and fiction and translation.
(11:19):
And I would say a problem I had in my
twenties out, my reading was very narrow. I would get
obsessed with a couple of writers and then of course
try and ape them on the page. My big thing
was the great American Jews, Salt Below, Philip rot, stuff
like that, you know, And I was determined to do
for Cork City what Salt Belo had done for Chicago.
(11:41):
You know, it's mortifying stuff, and it's very difficult to
get past that aspiration, you know. I think George Saunders
talks very well about an early fixation with Hemingway, you know,
and things like reading stories like across the River and
into the trees, and he'd be doing his version and
it would be like across the park working lot and
into the mall, you know, and something that just doesn't
(12:04):
match it up and something is it working. You have
to find that. You have to find your own world
on the page. And funnily enough, it was short stories
that brought me to it. I'd never really been a
rabbit reader of short stories. I wasn't going out buying
collections all the time. I did have a memorable visit
(12:24):
to the Cork City Library Wanted in the mid nineteen nineties,
where I bought one of those great old Norton anthologies.
Home it was a twentieth century American short fiction. Everything
you know from very early days John dos pass us up,
True Chiever and Flannery O'Connor and all that stuff, and
that was a great gosh, this is a great crash
(12:45):
course almost you know, in the short stories of form,
and very early responding to writers from the American South.
I think there's a lot in common between Irish writers
and writers of the American South. There's a great strain
of religiosity that comes into the pros that we can't help.
You know that, there's a lyric impulse, there's a darkly
(13:07):
comic impulse. If you read Flannery O'Connor story about a
one legged Bible salesman in Georgia, that feels very close
to home in the Western Ireland, this kind of crazy stuff.
So I responded very much to that, and slowly but
surely stories started to feel kind of a life for me,
on on on on on the page. I'm still kind
(13:29):
of devoted to the form of the short story. I
still try my hand at them. I used to write
them very quickly as a kid gunslinger, you know. I
used to put out a story in two or three weeks,
and now they think me months in my in my
feeble middle years. You know, it's a mysterious form as well.
In some ways, I think the closer you get to
(13:50):
it and the longer it's been, that unless you know
about it, you know why some stories work and why
there's just don't come right for you. I always think
I know how to write a short story until I
start a new one, and then I go, fuck, I
have no idea how to do this, you know. And
I hate to use any phrases flippant or as pat
as the trick of it with a business as esoteric
(14:11):
and strange as writing fiction. But the trick of it
is the right story for your desk at the right
time in your life. It's understanding what the material for
now is not the story you really want to write
and you might be able to write in ten years time.
Aren't the story you should have written when you were
twenty two, you know? But what can you do now?
What are you bitter enough about right now to make
(14:32):
a piece of work about, or what's really, you know,
inflaming your passions right now that you really want to
respond to it.
Speaker 1 (14:39):
I love that the first passion you went with was
bitterness as a motivating one for telling a good story.
Speaker 2 (14:44):
These are these are these are these are very valuable
energies that we need as writers. Bitterness, shame, and like,
I always think I'm getting somewhere if I read over
a first draft of something, and if I feel more
to fight, if I feel my cheeks reddening, you know,
oh Jesus spotted I put down on the page. I
(15:06):
think I'm getting somewhere.
Speaker 1 (15:09):
When we return, Kevin reveals how Walk in the Hills
inspired his latest novel and why these days, glamorous sentences
are not the most important thing in his writing. We'll
be right back. So that twenty five year lag between
(15:34):
going to Montana and having a first tilted a book, well.
Speaker 2 (15:38):
Yeah, I forgot. I forgot, I forgot the second half
of that story. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (15:42):
Well, my fascination comes from your description of kind of
your process. Did you return to the earlier manuscript or
did you just return to the setting and the place. Yeah?
Speaker 2 (15:54):
What what happened was I managed to, in the meantime
get out six other books of fiction. And it was
late in the pandemic. It was towards the end of
the long dreary second year of the pandemic twenty one
October twenty one, and I was due to write a novel.
So I was kind of shopping around in my subconscious
and I was convinced I was going to write a
(16:16):
novel set in a squat in Amsterdam in the early
nineteen nineties. And I got to the point of spending
a day and a half at it and thought, Fuck, no,
I just don't have I just don't have this world yet.
I don't have these characters yet. I may have at
some top point, but I don't have them now. And
going for I was out walking again. I was in
the hills nearby where I live in County Slide on
(16:37):
the northwest, just walking through the woods on the side
of a mountain one day, and just a little as
walking and writing are so connected, you know, because you're
you're you're letting the unconscious kind of percolate back there,
and just had a vision in my mind's eye of
a young couple on horseback, riding double. And if they're
(17:00):
riding double, they must be trying to get away from
someplace fast. They're in trouble, you know. And it struck
me about them as I saw them in my mind's
eide that they were kind of very slight. They were
kind of wayfish. So these weren't heroic characters or cowboys
or anything, you know. But I thought, where they trying
to get away from They're on a horse. It's a
(17:21):
Western What if it's but Montana in eighteen ninety one,
Just very quickly the succession of thoughts, and I thought, Okay,
that's the setup. Runaway lovers, very easy. Make it fucket
easy for yourself. You know, two runaway lovers trying to
get out of but Montana. I have all that stuff,
I know all the texture of the era. I could
remember all the research. It was very embedded. And I'll
(17:42):
call them Tom and Polly. And I then wrote the
book in about ten months and had a ball with us.
I'd got great fun with it because the characters felt
alive straight away as I started to ride them. And
another thing that experience gives you is that you've become
more economical with your time. And when I have an
idea like that and I think it might be a novel,
I'll give this two weeks. So I'm going to give
(18:02):
Tom Rourke a week, and I'm going to give poly
Gillespie a week and I'll write from their point of
view and see how it feels. So Tom Rourke is
a degenerate, dissolute, twenty nine year old irishman with vague
literary ambitions, and I know what that feels like. So
I tried him for a week and it felt promising.
You know, he was lurching around Butte Montana in eighteen
(18:23):
ninety one on this epic pub crawl, brottle crawl, dope
house crawl, and I was thinking, Okay, I'm getting the
world building naturally as I go with him. This is promising.
My second week, I said, I'm going to try poly Gillespie.
Who's this young woman with a mysterious past who's arrived
from Chicago to Butte as part of an arranged marriage.
(18:44):
And I was more nervous because she's an American voice,
so not immediately native to me. But I remember that
Monday morning I wrote her in her voice for about
ten minutes, and I said to myself, you have a novel.
You have your Butte Montana novel. Because she was just
ready to go. I could tune into her with she
had this spacey, kind of dreamy kind of worldview that
(19:07):
I felt very comfortable with, and I knew she would
kind of earth the story for me.
Speaker 1 (19:11):
I can't remember a book I've had more fun with
but also a sense of doom. Inevitably with his story
like this, we know the beats of how a story
like this goes, and in this case, the engine isn't
irritation or shame. It's proper passion. I mean, it's it's
a story about two people consumed by a kind of lust,
(19:34):
both for each other and for the possibility that running
away together gives them.
Speaker 2 (19:39):
Yeah, and it's kind of I think what they recognize
when when they meet each other for the first time,
which is in a photographic studio where he has a
has a job as an assistant to kind of a
day job. When he's like in the midst of his
various kind of drug and alcoholic reveries, he manages to
go in for a few hours to displace and they meet,
(20:00):
and as soon as they clap eyes on each other,
I think they both realized, this is the great drama
of our lives. This is it here, and we have
no choice. We just have to got to follow this
thing and see where it brings us. But it wasn't.
It's actually having denied that there's any contemporary resonance for
a story like this. It was significant that they meet
(20:20):
in a photographics studio because eighteen ninety one, by Luck,
I think, really is a very useful time to write about,
because it's the very earliest iteration of our world. America
has been electrified for the first time. Every main street
has a little photographic studio, and very ordinary, very working
class people, for the first time in human history are
(20:42):
thinking about how they look, and they're thinking about an
image and trying on style. You know, the rich people
have been thinking about this for centuries because they've been
having oil paintings made of them. But now every Tom,
Dick and Harry has going, hey, how is this looking?
Speaker 1 (20:58):
How is this hat?
Speaker 2 (20:59):
And Tom and Poli are very aware of how they
look together, and they're very kind of interested in that.
So there is that sort of Bonny and Clyde kind
of element to it that comes in again. But I
was I had the original manuscript from the late nineties
in a box under a bed in a guest room
at the far in the house, and I was afraid
(21:22):
to even put a finger in there. I wasn't going
to find anything good. I remembered one phrase and I
used it just to make it feel like it was
still the same project. It was some sort of occult sense.
Speaker 1 (21:35):
A little gift to yourself, your past, a.
Speaker 2 (21:37):
Little gift to myself. That was the nicest thing about
this project, really, I suppose was. I felt like I
was paying off a debt to my twenty nine year
old self. I was saying to my twenty nine year
old self, this was a good idea for you. You
were on the right track for such talents and abilities
as you have. This is a great world for you,
you know. So it was nice then to find Okay,
(21:58):
you can. It can be a slogan, you know, and
you can hang on to things for years and make
something worthwhile of them. Like Alie writer will tell you
that there are always abandoned stories and abandoned projects, but
they're never fully abandoned. They're always sitting at the back
of your mind, in your unconscious just waiting for some
spark that might bring them to life.
Speaker 1 (22:18):
City of Berhin. You're twenty eleven, your first published novel, Yeah,
after you'd brought out a book of short stories. In
many ways, the beats of that story are the beats
of a Western as well, And I'm curious about the
generic conventions that you find useful to play with and
what they give you permission to do when you're writing. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (22:39):
I've published four novels to date and I would say
they all have strong genre elements. City of Bohan as
kind of a futuristic, vaguely dystopian kind of gangster opera.
It's a whole mix of things. My second published novel, Beatlebone,
is the most unfashionable of all the genres. It's fan fiction,
you know, imagining John Lennon in my story in the
(23:02):
West of Ireland. Night Boat to Tangier is kind of
a contemporary noir or an attempt at that, about two
court gangsters adrift in Spain, and then an actual Western. Finally,
what a Western gives you, Actually, it's very forgiving as
a genre. It gives you a lot because the fundamental
(23:25):
thing about Westerns that people have to be forever jumping
up on horses and lighting out for fresh territory. And
when they're doing that, you're naturally getting propulsion and momentum
and they're going to have to have encounters. So the
genre itself just gives you a lot of energy to
start the thing rolling, you know, and it's it's all
dend down to what kind of a rendition you can
(23:47):
give to this all kind of valid, hoary form, you know,
like it's it's it's funny like that. There's so many
incredible examples of the Western from from film and from television,
thinking of things like the Great Show Dead would but
when you come to the literary Western and the Western
in novels, you can exhaust a list of the really
(24:09):
good stuff quite quickly. Anyone who writes a Western now
has to not the gap in some way to the
Cormack McCarty because he kept it a live as a
possibility that you could still take this whole real form
and do something new with it. And you know, there
are good director has been good work over the years
here and there in it. But you know, it feels
(24:31):
like there's still plenty you can do with this. The
fun of it is what attracts me.
Speaker 1 (24:36):
I think I read an interview with you where you
talked about amongst the American writers who you revered Don Delilla,
and I thought I thought that was an interesting an
interesting parallel with your work Beetleburn in particular, is the
novel of yours that I felt, and this might not
(24:58):
be the right way to put it, but almost like
I had a permission structure from the way DeLillo fictionalized
real human beings and both took great care with it
but also gave himself a license to play and take
it where he wanted to take it. Is that a
fair yeah?
Speaker 2 (25:16):
I think yeah, And I think talking as we were
a little while ago, about how narrowly read a lot
of emerging writers were back in the old days in
the nineties, the standard form for the boy writers, for
the baby boy writers was that you would graduate from
Martin Amis to Don DeLillo about nineteen ninety five when
(25:36):
Underworld about you know, that was that was the big
graduation mark. And I was obsessed with Underworld when it
came out. But my great Delila one was Allays Libra
The Portrait of Lee Harvey Oswald, and it's one of
the books I keep close to my desk still because
I go back to his portrait of that of Jack Ruby,
the guy who assassinated Oswald, and turn who ran a
(26:00):
strip show in Dallas. And it's maybe fifteen or twenty
pages over the course of the book is all you get.
But it is magnificent, This portrait of Ruby. It's incredibly funny.
It's a crazy mad emphetament fueled scuzzy neon Dallas underworld
in nearly nineteen sixties. And you can tell Dalilo is
having a ball writing this stuff. He's just so having
(26:22):
so much fun with it, and it is. Yeah, for Beatlebon,
he was definitely one of the key kind of reference
points I think in how you can how you can
be bold enough and have a brass enough neck to
take iconic events, are iconic characters and tried to use
them for your fictional ends.
Speaker 1 (26:42):
It sounds like you have a kind of palpable sense
of the ways in which your abilities, your experience as
a writer. You know, you're a very different writer to
the writer you were twenty five years ago that you've
now kind of developed, even earned the stripes to be
able to tell the stories that you're telling now, to
(27:03):
kind of create the kind of world in the hat
in Winter.
Speaker 2 (27:07):
Yeah, it's yeah, like writing fiction is the thing I've
been doing every day since nineteen ninety nine. Basically, that's
the first thing I do when I get up. I
don't do anything else. I don't teach or anything like that.
I've been lucky enough to time. I managed to make
a readership quite quickly, and I've been able to keep
going by just writing fiction. And it's long enough to
(27:28):
see yourself change as a writer. I would say, in
the very earliest things I was writing, my primary interest
was in language and in the style and what I
could do with the sentences, how much glamor I could
get into the sentences. And I'm still very interested in
this element. But I think most important for me now
(27:48):
are the people, the characters in the stories. And I
tend to spend a lot of time now just kind
of in a day dreamy kind of way, kind of
sitting with them and thinking about them and putting them
them into situations before I even start to write.
Speaker 1 (28:04):
You know, well, you managed to combine that with still
a more meticulous execution of a perfect sentence than many
writers working today. And it's a privilege to read those sentences.
It's been so good to talk to you today.
Speaker 2 (28:17):
That's been it's been great fun, Michaels, Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1 (28:22):
Kevin Barry's latest novel, The Heart in Winter, and in fact,
all these novels are available everywhere now. Rather than letting
(28:44):
you know what else, I've been reading this week a
bit of news and unfortunately a bittersweet bit of news.
After producing almost one hundred episodes of Read This talking
with some of the best writers from Australian around the world,
as of next Thursday, June twenty six, Read This This
will no longer have a home. Schwartz Media very kindly
created this podcast in the first place and have been
(29:06):
the publishers behind it since day one, and their support
and belief in the show has been so rewarding and
so exciting. But they're getting out of the audio game.
You may have read news that seven am is being
sold to a different media company, and as a consequence,
there's no home for read This here anymore. We are
deeply hopeful that it's not the end for Read This.
(29:27):
We love making the show and we hope to continue
to for many months and years to come. But for
now there's a hiatus a coming, call it reading time.
But in the meantime, you can help us while we're
out there shopping for a new home. The best thing
you can do is make sure you review and rate
us on your podcast at and if you haven't already
made sure you subscribe. It's in the read this feed
(29:49):
that you will find out where we're going to pop
up next. Read This is a Schwartz Media production, made
possible by the generous support of the AAR group. It
is produced and edited by Clara Ames, with mixing from
Travis Evans and original compositions by Zolt and Fletcher. Thanks
for listening, See you next week.
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