This episode’s reading carries a content warning for ableist themes around deafness. If you would like to skip this, skip ahead to the 11-minute mark to bypass the reading.

This time around, it’s my pleasure to welcome fellow gremlin Suzan Palumbo (@sillysyntax) to talk about…something. Suzan reads their trunked story, “Fricatives,” which leads us into a discussion about walking away from stories we’ve written that aren’t ours to tell. And then bagged pickles. We do get things back on track, amazingly, and have some great conversation about the place of emotion versus professionalism in writing, the current discourse around so-called “artificial intelligence” (large language models), and the baseball of crying.