It’s the Going Public Valentine’s Day Edition! We’ve got a bit of sad, a bit of sultry, and a touch of thoughtfulness…plus Tom Jones of course.
What I’d Tell You If I Could, by Litsa Dremousis
Read by Xe Sands
Xe writes…
…a valentine for the grieving
Recorded with permission from the author. Essay originally published in The Weeklings.
There are so many things I’d like to say about this raw and beautiful piece from Litsa Dremousis…things about grief and love, about losing my dad, about that disconnect between what helps and what people offer. But none of them seem to want to come out in a coherent fashion, reminding me again how grateful I am that writers do what they do, and why I narrate instead of write.
So instead of any of that, let’s talk about Valentine’s Day and why this piece is a Valentine of sorts, not that Dremousis wrote it as such. Valentine’s Day often strikes me as a day of loss for many of us. Bear with me for a sec. OK, for many, today is a beautiful day because they will spend part of it with the person they love most in this world, celebrating that love.
But for so many, today is more about what you no longer have or never had to begin with, about the loss of something so precious that it seems impossible that it’s gone.
This is for them.
Read by Valya Dudycz Lupescu
Valya writes…
Valentine’s Day poem written and read by Valya Dudycz Lupescu for the Poetry Foundation’s Audio Love Poems for Valentine’s Day.
You can read the text for the poem here: www.vdlupescu.com/journal/2014/02/love-words/
coffee and birdsong, by Diane Haven
Read by Diane Havens
Diane writes…
This short poem from my collection “Without Makeup” is my own sort of haiku, (without the rules). It reminds me to live in the moment before we run out of moments.
Tom Jones, Book VII, Chapter 10, by Henry Fielding
Read by Mark Turetsky
Mark writes…
Book 7 Chapter 10 of Tom Jones.
This is part of an ongoing project in which I will record and post one chapter per week of Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones over the course of four years.
We finally meet up again with Tom Jones in this chapter. He’s on his way to Bristol, and his guide has no idea how to get there. Tom stops in a small town to ask directions from two country bumpkins who are of less than no help to him. A helpful Quaker man sees his trouble and offers to help him, informing him that they won’t find the road before nightfall, and so they retire to a public house for the evening. The Quaker informs Tom that just that day his daughter had run away and married for love, instead of marrying the match he had chosen for her. This is precisely the wrong story to tell Jones, who very astutely tells the man to welcome his daughter home, as he has become the sole source of misery in the life of a person he claims to love. The Quaker becomes affronted and begins speaking with the innkeeper, whose own wife had that day run away, taking everything they owned. Jones’ guide has informed the innkeeper who Jones is, and therefore the innkeeper is worried Jones will try to rob him, so he stays up all night watching Jones sleep in a pile of straw.
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