This week on the Sewanee Review Podcast, Joanna Pearson sits down with assistant editor Hayden Dunbar to discuss the various pressures of character and story, and to explore the ways in which our collective neuroses pervade popular modes of narrative storytelling. Through meditations on her own work and others (Shirley Jackson and Joyce Carol Oates, among others), Pearson speculates how ghosts in the attic, urban legends in the age of the internet, and murderous clowns all encircle an enduring psychological obsession with the capital-O Other.
Joanna Pearson has published two collections of stories, Every Human Love and more recently, Now You Know It All. Every Human Love was a finalist for the Shirley Jackson Awards, the Foreward INDIES Awards, and the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for Fiction. Now You Know It All was chosen by Edward P. Jones for the 2021 Drue Heinz Literature Prize. Her stories have appeared in the Colorado Review, the Kenyon Review, Subtropics, the Sewanee Review, and elsewhere.
The Sewanee Review Podcast is recorded in the Ralston Listening Room at the University of the South. This episode is produced by Luke Gair and edited by ProPodcast Solutions with music by Annie Bowers. Don’t miss any of our conversations with some of today’s best writers. Subscribe to the Sewanee Review Podcast on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.