I'll Follow You

Show notes are available at QueenofPeaches.com.

Today on I’ll Follow You, I’m super excited to share my recent conversation with author and journalist Saga Briggs. If you’re listening to this on the day that the episode initially goes live, Saga’s first book will be officially published tomorrow, Tuesday, September 19. It’s called How to Change Your Body: The Science of Interoception and Healing Through Connection to Yourself and Others and, as you’ll hear me enthusiastically state at the top of our chat, I really think everyone should read it. 

Beyond the book, she’s written articles for Scientific American, Aeon+Psyche, and DoubleBlind magazine and has worked as an editor for both the MIND European Foundation for Psychedelic Science and the digital magazine InformED. She grew up in the Pacific Northwest but is currently based in Berlin. 

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Francesca Kritikos is the author of the chapbooks It Felt Like Worship (published by Sad Spell Press in 2017) and Animals Don't Go to Hell  (published by Bottlecap Press in 2021) as well as the forthcoming full-length collection Exercise in Desire (which will be published by Vegetarian Alcoholic Press in early 2022). Her poetry has also appeared in the Des Pair Quarterly, Ghost City Review, and Witch Craft Mag. She completed the undergraduate creative writing program at the University of East Anglia in the UK in 2017. She is on Instagram @fmkrit.

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Pascuala Herrera was a Professor and Accessibility Specialist at Harper College in Palatine, Illinois, for almost 30 years and was selected as Distinguished Faculty, the highest honor given to a faculty member, in 2019 and is now faculty emeritus. She is currently also a full-time consultant and author of Not Always a Valley of Tears: A Memoir of a Life Well Lived. Pascuala received her BA in Sociology and M.Ed in Reading and Learning Disabilities at DePaul University in Chicago.  She is a frequent local and national presenter on the topics of disability awareness, motivation, and the importance of education for individuals with disabilities and Latinx students. Pascuala contracted polio at nine months old, and has spent her career assisting thousands of students with disabilities both in and outside the classroom. As a disabled Latina woman, she inspires and motivates others in working towards achieving their aspirations despite any challenges they face. I was very excited to get to talk to her about her experience as a first-time self-published author. We go deep talking about purchasing ISBNs, hiring a freelance design team, and the ins and outs of marketing yourself, as well as touching on her fascinating experiences as a disability advocate and as a parent.

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S. Elizabeth is a writer, curator, and frill-seeker. Her essays and interviews about esoteric art have appeared in Coilhouse, Dirge Magazine, Death & The Maiden, as well as on her own occulture blog Unquiet Things, which intersects music, fashion, horror, perfume, and grief. Born of the strange and fraught relationship between an astrologer and an artist, S. Elizabeth draws upon the magic in her blood and a lifelong passion for the visual arts to explore her obsessions through her writing. She is the co-creator of The Occult Activity Book Volumes 1 and 2 and is a staff writer at Haute Macabre. She lives in the Florida swamps with a Viking named Ývan and an imaginary corgi named Cheese Tray.

Today we chat about being the avenging angel of properly crediting supposedly anonymous artwork found online, why intros are the hardest part of the writing process, the arcane expectations of the publishing industry, being terrified of academics, reining in the tendency to be clever at the expense of kindness, and her Taurean ability to become more of herself while staying cozy at home.

Complete show notes are available on QueenofPeaches.com.

Tim Clarke has performed throughout Europe, North America, and the UK, including close to 1,000 appearances on London’s West End stages. He’s had leading roles in productions including Jesus Christ Superstar, Blood Brothers, The Buddy Holly Story, Dusty—The Musical, The Glenn Miller Story, and The Demon Headmaster. Tim’s television roles have included Sir Richard Byngham in The Spanish Armada, fireman Mick Foster in Emmerdale, and Detective Inspector Goodman in Canary Wharf, as well as numerous TV commercials.

As a musician, he’s written and recorded the albums Life Changes and To Love and Be Loved and was the winner of the Netherlands International Song Festival and a finalist at the Isle of Wight Song Festival.

A highly competent German and French speaker, Tim has also translated into English the German musicals A Touch of Colour and Scrooge—A Christmas Tale as well as project managed the critically acclaimed musical theater piece In May, which features all original music by Neil Hannon of the Divine Comedy. Which is what brought us together.

In the spring of 2017, I wrote a long, loving post on my blog, Queen of Peaches, about the recording of In May that appeared as a bonus disk on the 2016 Divine Comedy album Foreverland. In the years since, it’s become one of the most highly trafficked pieces on my site. Fans of Neil Hannon are nothing if not devoted to his music. Tim himself found and read the piece and reached out to me about it, and the rest, as you’ll soon hear, is history. I was so excited that he was willing to spend a solid 90 minutes talking me through the ins and outs of his extremely varied career, as well as the creation of this breathtaking set of songs, which have meant so much to me over the past few years.

Complete show notes are available on QueenofPeaches.com.

Today, I’m in conversation with my very dear friend, singer Hilary Webb.

Originally from Schererville, Indiana, Hilary began studying voice at the age of 13. She earned her bachelor’s from Ball State University, where she studied with Mary Hagopian, and she earned her master’s in vocal performance from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She has worked with John Rutter, Dan Forrest, Beverly Sills, Barbara Hahn, and The King’s Singers and has been soprano section leader at Holy Trinity Episcopal Church in Greensboro, North Carolina, since 2011 and has been part of the Bel Canto Company since 2003. Hilary has also performed with the Greensboro Opera, Capital Opera Company, and The Choral and Oratorio Societies of Greensboro, and has made guest appearances with The Triad Pride Men’s Chorus. A two-time National Association of Teachers of Singing Great Lakes Auditions finalist and Mu Phi Epsilon scholarship winner, she competes throughout the country and performs in the U.S. and Europe.

In our chat today, we talk about how we first met thanks to the robust community arts scene of Northwest Indiana in the 1980s and 90s (and how the secret origins of the very name of this podcast go back to my days as piano accompanist for many of Hilary’s solo performances), seeing Placido Domingo live on stage the first time she ever went to the opera in Chicago, hanging out with Beverly Sills, how women and men’s voices come to maturity in different ways, the spiritual dimensions of choral music and the challenges of choral singing during these days of Covid and social distancing, and why she’s specifically chosen not to live in New York, Los Angeles, or Chicago in order to pursue music professionally.

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Myan Binder is a healer, clairvoyant, animal communicator, and spiritual  teacher. She has studied painting at the University of Wisconsin and art  direction at the Miami Ad School and has taught everything from  preschool to ESL to adult refugees. Currently, she teaches classes on all things psychic, including energy awareness, how to turn on your own abilities, how to heal yourself through working with your own energy, how to use your psychic abilities in your everyday life, and how to  communicate with other animals.

She is also the creator of the campaign Clean Your Energy, which engages people in becoming more aware of their own energy and the energy around them.

In our delightful chat today, we discuss why it’s harder to feel safe  when you get pulled out of what you know, how personal it is to create a grounding connection to the earth, the difference between knowing what safety is intellectually versus actually feeling and experiencing it, the magic of using your imagination, how not cleaning your energy can lead to stagnation and miscommunication, why cleaning your energy is more involved than just sitting quietly in meditation, and how the current increase in animal adoptions is giving us a chance to relearn that we’re all animals too.

And speaking of animals, throughout the conversation, we’re very actively joined by Myan’s cat Galaxy, who you will probably hear purring  into the microphone at several points.

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Today I’m delighted to be in conversation with Brian Westfall. Brian is the proprietor of the shop Rare Birds Musical Oddities.

Rare Birds is a shop dedicated to those elusive, beautiful, and  lovingly weird pieces that will bring character and vibe to your recording dates, home studio, and performances.

Vintage guitars, basses, and synths; cowbells once owned by real  cows; Casio keyboards once owned by real 1980s kids; maracas brought back from a great aunt’s college trip to Mexico; drum machines that used to sit on grandma’s organ; toy pianos from Christmas 1958; wheezing chord organs; middle school band orchestra glockenspiels, and much more  await you when you visit Rare Birds Musical Oddities.

As Brian and I nerd out about all things gear related, we also  discuss why this is a great time to be a musician streaming performances online, how nostalgia plays a part in the Rare Birds shopping experience, the frustration of how elusive the really cool stuff can be, why he actually encourages his customers to resell the gear they’ve bought from him, and why he’s more interested in what you’re doing with  your gear rather than what gear you have.

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Today I’m welcoming back to the show my first repeat guest--who also  happens to be the human I’m sheltering in place with--the writer,  musician, and scholar Brian Cremins.

Brian’s joining me today for a recorded version of an ongoing conversation we’ve been having basically since we first met a little over a decade ago, all about our favorite books about music.

Because we’re both writers and both musicians, it turns out we have a lot of thoughts about the intersection of those two disciplines!

We both chose a small stack of books that are important to us individually, though of course there’s a lot of overlap between our lists, and of course there were dozens of other books that came to mind during the course of this conversation.

In talking about those books, we also discuss the way music critics listen to music versus the way musicians listen to music; how descriptive language can mystify what a musician is actually doing in a way that might not be helpful; how the best books can feel more like traveling companions rather than destination points; and spending time imagining what certain albums sounded like in the days before everything was instantly available to us online. Plus, Brian finally goes on the record with his comparison between the Hall and Oates song “I Can’t Go for That” and Radiohead’s “Everything in Its Right Place.”

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I’m delighted today to be in conversation with my very good friend and former colleague Yuval Taylor.

Yuval is the coauthor of the books Darkest America: Black Minstrelsy from Slavery to Hip-Hop and Faking It: The Quest for Authenticity in Popular Music. His writing has appeared in the Guardian, the Antioch Review, and the Oxford American, among other publications. His most recent book, as a solo author, is Zora and Langston: A Story of Friendship and Betrayal, which was a finalist for the 2019 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Biography. It’s a deeply researched look at the  six-year-long friendship, and eventual bitter falling out, between Zora  Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes. The book, which will be released in  paperback in July 2020, has been praised by NPR as having “a vivid anecdotal style,” by the Wall Street Journal as “compelling, concise and scrupulously researched,” and by the New York Times Book Review as “a highly readable account of one of the most compelling and consequential relationships in black literary history.”

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In my attempt to bridge the gap between not wanting to add to the noise about the coronavirus situation, but then also not wanting to ignore its presence in our lives either, I thought that a conversation with my brilliant friend Erin the Psychic Witch might be unique and helpful.

Erin is a gifted psychic teacher and healer with two decades of experience in the healing arts. With a substantial and wide-ranging background in bodywork, natural skin care, holistic and functional nutrition models, energy healing, and psychic development, she brings physical and energetic modalities together to create a practical path toward healing. Her work is nothing less than facilitating the healing, liberation, and multidimensional maturation of all beings, with the ultimate goal of full creative expression. She teaches and offers various containers for healing work online through her website erinthepsychicwitch.com.

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Paul and Angie Lowe were teachers for many decades at Lake Central High School in St. John, Indiana. During the weekdays, Paul taught speech and Angie taught French, and then on afternoons and weekends, they were heads of the theater program, known as the Lake Central Theatre Guild. As you’ll hear them elaborate in the course of the episode, they expanded LCTG’s program in the early 1970s to include former graduates and members of the local theater scene in their summer community theater productions. Nearly a quarter century after they first directed "Jesus Christ Superstar" in 1979, they revived the show in the summer of 2003 as one of the final productions in the old high school theater. Today, many years now after their retirement from teaching, they retain the LCTG initials by way of their new company, L’arc en Ciel Theatre Group, a dinner theater based out of Great Oaks Banquet Hall in Cedar Lake, Indiana.

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Welcome to the perfume episode!

Today I’m in conversation with my dear and brilliant friend Shiamin Kwa.

Shiamin is Associate Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures  and Comparative Literature at Bryn Mawr College. She is the author of  three books, the most recent being Regarding Frames: Thinking with Comics in the Twenty-first Century,  which was just released by RIT Press in February of this year. Her  written work explores relationships between form and content, text and  image, self and self-presentation, surface and depth, and the conflicts  between what we say and what we mean. Her research interests include  theater and fiction, food studies, graphic narratives, literary studies,  cultural studies, comparative and world literature, and literary and  narrative theory.

She also contributed an amazingly funny and tender essay about the band Wham! to my most recent zine The Last Band of My Youth.

In today’s deep dive on perfume, we talk about how smells can seem so  much richer in our memories when we don’t have access to them anymore,  the quiet spaciousness of perfume as object, how we’re meant to interact  with perfume on a time scale, how wearing Frederic Malle’s “Portrait of  a Lady” is like having to do self-promotion as the author of a new  book, and the difficulty of imposing order on things you love.

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Today, I’m incredibly pleased to be speaking with my friend, neighbor, and former bandmate, the poet Tony Trigilio.

Tony is the author and editor of 13 books, including, most recently, Ghosts of the Upper Floor (published by BlazeVOX [books] in 2019), which is the third installment in his multivolume poem, The Complete Dark Shadows (of My Childhood). His selected poems, Fuera del Taller del Cosmos, was published in Guatemala by Editorial Poe (translated by Bony Hernández). He is editor of Elise Cowen: Poems and Fragments (published by Ahsahta Press in 2014), and the author of Allen Ginsberg’s Buddhist Poetics (published by Southern Illinois University Press in 2012). Tony coedits the poetry journal Court Green and is an associate editor for Tupelo Quarterly. He is a Professor of English and Creative Writing at Columbia College Chicago.

Today we discuss his origin story as a poet, the possibilities that  get unlocked by asking a student “tell me more of what you mean by  that,” building bridges between the hemispheres of the brain, how  playing drums professionally helped Tony unite his practice as a writer  with his work as a scholar, and why the best art feels like a friend  saying to you, “I’m going to tell you something but it’s hard to say.”

For more information about Tony, you can find him online at starve.org.

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Keiler Roberts has been writing autobiographical comics for ten years.  Her six books include Sunburning, Chlorine Gardens, and, most recently,  Rat Time, all three of which were published by Koyama Press. Her  self-published autobiographical comic series Powdered Milk received an  Ignatz Award for Outstanding Series in 2016, and in 2019 Chlorine Gardens received Slate's Cartoonist Studio Prize for Best Print Comic of  2018, which was selected by The Slate Book Review and The Center for  Cartoon Studies. Her work has been included in The Best American Comics in 2016 and 2018 and was mentioned on their Notables list for 2014. She  has taught at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago since 2013 and  lives in Evanston, Illinois, with her husband, the artist Scott Roberts,  their daughter Xia, and perhaps the most famous cartoon pet since  Snoopy, their dog Crooky.

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Today on the show I’m incredibly pleased to be in conversation with Angie Yingst.

Angie is a published writer, a sacred artist, a Usui Reiki Master Teacher, and an Earth Medicine Practitioner specializing in shamanic and crystal healing techniques.

Angie has been reading Tarot for thirty years and is a member of the American Tarot Association. She has also trained through the Hibiscus Moon Crystal Academy as a Certified Crystal Healer and an Advanced Crystal Master, and she now serves the school and its community as Curriculum Specialist and Crystal Coach. Angie has also been studying since 2012 with Pixie Lighthorse and has completed all four levels of her training through SouLodge Earth Medicine School.

Angie offers both in-person and distance one-on-one healing sessions that combine crystal healing, shamanic healing, Reiki, drum and rattle, breathwork, and plant medicine to facilitate healing in her clients, balancing her work with the moon cycles and seasonal energies to maximize healing potential. Angie teaches tarot, crystals and crystal healing, shamanic work, psychic development and intuitive work, creative and art workshops, and offers group healing sessions through the Alta View Wellness Center in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

Today we dig deep to talk about grief, addiction, perfectionism, and the dangers of spiritual bypassing, as well as the difference between being a guru and an effective space-holder.

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This week on the show, I’m delighted to be speaking with a very dear friend, the theatrical impresario and President of NoHo himself, Mr. Paul Storiale.

Paul is the Artistic Director for the Defiance Theatre Company, the President and Founder of the Valley Theatre Awards in Los Angeles, and creator of the award-winning stage play The Columbine Project. He’s also the creator of the web series Gossip Boy, which you can stream on Amazon Prime, and a successful comedic actor in his own right, having performed for many years in the dinner theater phenomenon Tony n’ Tina’s Wedding and having recently toured the country as part of the cast of My Big Gay Italian Wedding.

And if that’s not enough of a full plate, Paul is also a Los Angeles elected public official, currently serving as president of the NoHo Neighborhood Council, an advisory board created by the Los Angeles City Charter to provide improved access to government and make government more responsive to local needs in the North Hollywood community.

Today we chat about how to create a little bit of healthy antagonism among your cast during rehearsals, establishing a container for catharsis in a live theater space, and the secret of never having to audition as an actor ever again.

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Today I’m pleased to have on the show one of my all-time favorite humans, David Higgins.

David teaches English at Inver Hills Community College in Minnesota. He is a specialist in 20th-century American literature and culture, and his research explores transformations in imperial fantasy during the Cold War period and beyond. His article “Toward a Cosmopolitan Science Fiction” won the 2012 Science Fiction Research Association’s Pioneer Award for excellence in scholarship. He has published in journals such as American Literature, Science Fiction Studies, Science Fiction Film and Television, and Extrapolation, and his work has appeared in edited volumes such as The Cambridge Companion to American Science Fiction.

He is also the Speculative Fiction Editor for the Los Angeles Review of Books.

In our chat today, we talk about his upcoming book on reverse colonization narratives in the science fiction of the 1960s, how he’s calibrated his own best creative routines, why he congratulates his undergraduate students when they feel like they’ve failed, and the many flexible ways to approach the study and criticism of speculative fiction.

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Michael Sherron is currently an apprentice docent from the class of 2018 at the Phoenix Art Museum and now leads tours there for adults and school groups. In his day job, he's an engineering manager building large scale cloud hosting solutions for the enterprise.

Mike is one of the most remarkable people I know, in terms of his sheer capacity to tackle incredibly ambitious projects simply for the joy of learning how to do them. That deep focus and insatiable curiosity is definitely at the heart of what led him to commit the past two years to studying really intensely in order to start giving tours at the Phoenix Art Museum.

In addition to talking about what the program was like, in the last twenty or so minutes of our chat, Mike guides me through a deeper look at two paintings from the Phoenix Art Museum’s collection, Lew Davis’s The Rebel and Frida Kahlo’s The Suicide of Dorothy Hale.

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Just this past week, my band, the Felus Cremins Band, released our latest album. It’s called American Romantic Music, and you can stream or download it on Bandcamp.

To mark the occasion, I asked my bandmate and partner Brian Cremins to join me to chat specifically about the making of the title track, the song “American Romantic Music.”

Rather than slogging through a whole boring track-by-track rundown of the entire album, I thought it might be instructive to focus just on this one song. I think the process by which it came to be written and recorded is particularly illustrative of the way that we collaborate.

In addition to our chat, you’ll get to hear how the song progressed from its first demo to its first live performance to the final recorded version that’s the heart of the new album.

Show notes are available here.

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Gene Kannenberg Jr. is a cartoonist living in Evanston, Illinois. His comics, mostly abstract with asemic writing, include Qodèxx, Space Year 2015, and The Abstract Circus. His work was included in the Minnesota Center for Book Arts' 2017 exhibit "Asemic Writing: Offline & In the Gallery" and also appears in the book Abstraction et bande dessinée, produced by the ACME Comics Research Group at the University of Liège in Belgium.

Gene received his PhD from the University of Connecticut in 2002, and he has served in the past as Chair of both the International Comic Arts Festival and the Comic Art & Comics section of the Popular Culture Association. His book 500 Essential Graphic Novels was published by Collins Design in 2008.

Gene is currently the Research and Media Assistant at the Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies at Northwestern University, where he has curated two exhibits on comic art.

You can find him online at comicsmachine.com.

Notable work includes his recent 10-year solo retrospective reevaluating “a”  at the Dittmar Gallery on campus at Northwestern University; the online comic Smaller Totems; and the Turned Earth Little Lenormand. Find Lewis online at lewislain.com and be sure to support him on Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/lewislain). 

You can find her on Instagram at @lifestyleoftherealandnotfamous.