Miette's Bedtime Story Podcast

I know, I know, I'm late for Bloomsday, and at this point, I thought you'd have forgotten. My friends, why haven't you forgotten? I mean, you surely know that the world is breaking the sound barrier with how fast it seems to be going where this cozy handbasket might be taking it, wherever it is handbaskets go.

Much love from my hidey-hole, where I spent the bedtime hours in recitation from the beginning of Ulysses in celebration of the hour at hand. My audience of one was sound asleep by the snotgreen sea.

In my many years of Bloomsday readings, I’ve neglected to tell you about my first run-in with the text. It was more years ago than I’ll ever admit, when I had recently moved to New York, and had almost immediately found myself a nice new literary teenage boyfriend. We had only been dating a few […]

Hello and would you just look at the calendar and where has the time gone? I would make excuses for the lapse in months or tell you what I’ve been up to, but that would be projecting, and if you want to know these things, I’m sure you’ll just ask. In any event, the theme […]

I’m sitting on what may be the most beautiful beach in the world, trying desperately to avoid dropping my computer into the chasms dug in the sand by last night’s hatching turtles, and trying even more desperately to explain to you why it’s been so long since I’ve flooded your Eustachians. But the beach is […]

In the Wells Tower profile of Barry Hannah I reference in the spoken introduction to today's story (which you should treat yourself to), written before Hannah's 2010 death, the following is offered:

A few weeks ago, there was a hurricane that you might have read about (unless it blew a rock on top of you and you decided to live beneath it, in which case, my sympathies). During this hurricane, I was away on what was supposed to have been a Caribbean holiday of a few days, which turned into one of a few days plus a few days more plus a few bonus days.

I'm sitting here desperately trying not to listen to the U.S. Presidential Debate that's streaming into my earbuds, because the entire thing seems like such hot-twisted-metal train wreckage that the hairs on my neck get singed just listening to it. And I like my neck-hairs.

When Patrick Scott has been known to bail me out of a slump in the past, he’s done so with his passel of Old Reliables: Raymond Carver. Flannery O’Connor. Russell Banks. The indisputably great, in other words. So when this time, he sent this recording of a piece by a speculative fiction writer I’d never […]

In some parts of the world, it’s Bloomsday already, and in yours, it may be at the end of a summery Friday work-day, so perhaps The Big Day will greet you just as you’re weeding through your feedreader with an icy drink by your side while you dip your legs in a pool full of […]

It’s been a while since I’ve last read, for reasons whose details I won’t serenade you with, but which have to do with huge, overwhelming, life-changing projects that ultimately will leave me with more time to do this more often (I’ll need a little luck, if you want to drop some in the mail), but […]

If, while listening to tonight’s story, you come to the dialogue and have no idea about what I am talking, you won’t be alone. I staggered across tonight’s author by way of the great Hayden Carruth, whose introduction to Rowland E. Robinson’s Danvis Tales ranks among the most incisive layer-peeling short pieces of literary commentary […]

Sometimes a story catches you by title alone. I have a real soft spot, personally, for "The Night of the" stories, no matter the medium. Hunters, Iguanas, Living Dead, even Comets (to a lesser degree)... all of these things weaken my articulated joints. Tonight's story is no different in that regard, but all kinds of different if those Night stories are your precedents...

Sometimes it just kills me how many stories I've read here. A lot, that's how many. And as much as I'm endeared to those earlier lo-fi bootleggy recordings, there are some stories which just aren't served by the lack of quality, and some stories that, after this many years, should be read again anyway...

You'll have to excuse the fact that this sounds somewhat as if it might have been recorded in a submarine in the icy waters beneath an alien planet; I haven't been around for a while, and my audio equipment was dusty and had been playing bingo in a church basement...

Usually, when I think about this humble little project, it fills me with all kinds of amourpropre. Even when I'm temporarily removed from my own devices (audiotorily speaking), I can't help but self-congratulatorily pat myself backwise (I'm flexible) at keeping the motor of this anthology running. Then sometimes...

Tonight's guest narrator owns and operates The Devastationalist Manifesto, a project I desperately wish would soon revive itself from its two-year hiatus, and not just because I miss the occasional chance for self-gam-gawkery...

Sturgeon's a presence which should have been established here long ago, and I was grateful beyond expression when tonight's guest reader volunteered to represent him. That said, I was only told there was...

Some of you may remember the sweet sounds of Patrick Scott from earlier Miette Bailouts. When I put out the call for guest readers, he was quick to the case. But Patrick's a busy guy, now that he's a famous filmmaker, and so when you listen to his lustrous interpretation of Flannery O'Connor, you will pick up the occasional whirr of what seems a loud computer fan...

If you know Sam Jones from various internet outlets, you will be neither surprised nor disappointed that he chose to read Walser for his guest stint here. However, if you know Sam Jones from various internet outlets alone, you might not know...