It Could Happen Here - CZM Book Club: Selkie Stories Are For Losers, by Sofia Samatar

Episode Date: September 28, 2025

Margaret reads you a story about yearning and magic and folklore and teenage gays.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. Ah, come on. Why is this taking so long? This thing is ancient. Still using yesterday's tech, upgrade to the ThinkPad X1 Carbon, ultra-light, ultra-powerful, and built for serious productivity

with Intel core ultra-processors, blazing speed, and AI-powered performance. It keeps up with your business, not the other way around. Whoa, this thing moves. Stop hitting snooze on new tech. Win the tech search at Lenovo.com. unlock AI experiences with the ThinkPad X-1 carbon powered by Intel Core alter processors

so you can work, create, and boost productivity all on one device. Hi there, this is Josh Clark from the Stuff You Should Know podcast. If you've been thinking, man alive, I could go for some good true crime podcast episodes, then have we got good news for you. Stuff You Should Know just released a playlist of 12 of our best true crime episodes of all time. There's a shootout in broad daylight. People using axes in really terrible ways, disappearances, legendary heists, the whole nine yards. So check out the stuff you should know true crime playlist on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Jorge Ramos. And I'm Paola Ramos. Together we're launching The Moment, a new podcast about what it means to live through a time as uncertain as this one. We sit down with politicians, artists and activists to bring you death and analysis from a unique Latino perspective. The moment is a space for the conversations we've been having us father and daughter for years. Listen to The Moment with Jorge Ramos and Paola Ramos on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The murder of an 18-year-old girl in Graves County, Kentucky, went unsolved for years. Until a local housewife, a journalist, and a handful of girls came forward with a story.

America, y'all better work the hell up. Bad things happens to good people in small towns. Listen to Graves County on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And to binge the entire season, add free, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. Book club, book club, book club, book club, book club, it's the Cool Zone Media Book Club. Welcome to Cool Zone Media Book Club, the only book club where you don't have to do the reading because I do it for you.

I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy. And this week, I'm going to read you a story by one of my favorite authors, Sophia Sematar. The story is called Selky Stories Are for Losers, and it was published in 2015. by Strange Horizons. And you can also get it in Sophia's 2019 collection, Tender. This story was nominated for just a fuck ton of awards in 2014, basically the big ones. The Hugo, the Nebula, the World Fantasy Award,

and the BSFA Award, which is the British Award, basically. And it's a Selky Story, as you might have guessed, because the title is Selky Stories are for losers. And I guess we're all losers, because this is a Selky Story for us. And Selkees are a part of Celtic and Norse myth originally, and Selkees are people, usually women, they're seal people, and they can transform between seal and human form by putting on their seal skins. In a classic Selky story, a guy will see like a hot seal lady and steal her skin, forcing her to be stuck as a human, and then usually he'll marry her, and she'll be sad and lonely and miss the sea. and if she manages to get back her skin

she'll disappear and ditch her husband captor and her kids and fuck off to the sea there's a lot there obviously from a feminist point of view one of the things that I find really interesting is that there's this sort of medieval European conception of women where it's not that women

are like docile like the way that the Victorian woman is presented but instead that women are naturally wild and untamed and you know there's this been complete switch of what misogyny looks like it used to look like calling us wild and untamed

and now it accuses us of being docile or whatever so the Selky myth ties so well into this idea that like women in their original state are these wild creatures okay that's the basic outline of what a selky story might be

for context but it's not this story this story is called Selke stories are for losers by Sophia Samatar I hate sulky stories. They're always about how you went up to the attic to look for a book, and you found a disgusting old coat,

and brought it downstairs between finger and thumb, and said, what's this? And you never saw your mom again. I work at a restaurant called La Pacha. I got the job after my mom left to help with the bills. On my first night at work, I got yelled at twice by the head server, burnt my fingers on a hot dish, spilled lentil parsley soup all over my apron,

and left my keys in the kitchen. I didn't realize at first I'd forgotten my keys. I stood in the parking lot, breathing slowly and letting the oil smell lift away from my hair, and when all the other cars had started up and driven away, I put my hand in my jacket pocket. Then I knew. I ran back to the restaurant and banged on the door. Of course no one came. I smelled cigarette smoke an instant before I heard the voice.

Hey? I turned and Mona was standing there, smoke rising white from between her fingers. I left my keys inside, I said. Mona is the only other server at La Pacha who's a girl. She is related to everybody at the restaurant except me. The owner, who goes by Uncle Tad, is really her uncle, her mom's brother. Don't talk to him unless you have to, Mona advised me. He's a creeper.

That was after she'd sighed and dropped her cigarette and crushed it out with her shoe and stepped into my clasped hand so I could boost her up to the window, after she'd wriggled through the kitchen and opened the door for me. She said, Madame, in a dry voice, and bowed. At least, I think she said, madame. She might have said, my lady. I don't remember that night too well, because we drink a lot of wine. Mona said that as long as we were breaking and entering

we might as well steal something and she lined up all the bottles of red wine that had already been opened. I shone the light for my phone on her while she took out the special rubber corks and poured some of each bottle into a plastic pitcher. She called it the house wine. I was surprised she was being so nice to me

since she'd hardly spoken to me while we were working. Later she told me she hates everybody the first time she meets them. I called home, but dad didn't pick up. He was probably in the basement. I left him a message and turned off my phone. Do you know what this guy said to me tonight? Mona asked.

He won a beef cuss-cus, and he said, I'll have the beef conscious. Mona's mom doesn't work at La Pacha, but sometimes she comes in around three o'clock and sits in Mona's section and cries. Then Mona jams on her orange baseball cap and goes out through the back and smokes a cigarette, and I take over her section.

Mona's mom won't order anything from me. She's got Mona's eyes, or Mona's got hers, huge, angry eyes with lashes that curl up at the ends. She shakes her head and says, Nothing, nothing! Finally Uncle Tad comes over, and Mona's mom hugs and kisses him, sobbing in Arabic.

After work, Mona says, Got the keys? We get in my car, and I drive us through town to the bone zone, a giant cemetery on a hill. I pull into the empty parking lot and Mona rolls a joint.

There's only one lamp burning high and cold in the middle of the lot. Mona pushes her shoes off and puts her feet up on the dashboard and cries. She warned me about that the night we met.

I said something stupid to her like, you're so funny, and she said, actually I cry a lot. That's something you should know. I was so happy she thought I should know things about her. I didn't care. I still don't care, but it's true that Mona cries a lot. She cries because she's scared her mom will take her away to Egypt, where the family used to live, and where Mona has never been. What would I do there?

I don't even speak Arabic. She wipes her mascara on her sleeve, and I tell her to look at the lamp outside and pretend that its glassy brightness is a bonfire, and that she and I are personally throwing every Selky story ever written onto it and watching them burn up. You and your Selky stories, she says. I tell her they're not my Selky stories, not ever. And I'll never tell one, which is true. I never will. And I don't tell her how I went up to the attic that day,

or that what I was looking for was a book I used to read when I was little, Beauty and the Beast, which is a really decent story about an animal who gets turned into a human. and stays that way, the way it's supposed to be. I don't tell Mona that beauty's black hair coiled to the edge of the page, or that the beast had yellow horns and a smoking jacket, or that instead of finding the book,

I found the coat, and my mom put it on and went out the kitchen door and started up her car. And do you know what I think she was leaving the house to go do? I think she was leaving the house to take advantage of these products and services. that's the most likely thing. I haven't finished reading this story yet, so I don't know what's going to happen. But I assume that what happened is that she went out because she heard these ads.

I'm Jorge Ramos. And I'm Paola Ramos. Together we're launching The Moment, a new podcast about what it means to live through a time as uncertain as this one. We sit down with politicians. I would be the first immigrant mayor in generations, but 40% of New York. New Yorkers were born outside of this country. Artists and activists, I mean, do you ever feel demoralized? I might personally lose hope. This individual might lose the faith, but there's an institution that doesn't lose faith. And that's what I believe in.

To bring you depth and analysis from a unique Latino perspective. There's not a single day that Paola and I don't call or text each other, sharing news and thoughts about what's happening in the country. This new podcast will be a way to make that ongoing intergenerational. generational conversation, public. Listen to The Moment with Jorge Ramos and Paola Ramos as part of the My Cultura Podcast Network on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Power struggles, shady money, drugs, violence, and broken promises. It's a freaking war zone. These people are animal. There's no integrity. There's no loyalty. That's all gone. In the 1980s, modeling wasn't just a dream. It was a battlefield.

Book, book, book. It's my deals. Let's get models in. Let's get them out. And the models themselves? They carried scars that never fully healed. Till this day, honestly, if I see a measuring tape, I freak out. The Model Wars podcast peels back the glossy cover

and reveals a high-stakes game where survival meant more than beauty. Hosted by me, Vanessa Gregoriatis, this is the untold story of an industry built on ruthless, ambitious. Listen to Model Wars on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi there, this is Josh Clark from the Stuff You Should Know podcast. If you've been thinking, man alive, I could go for some good true crime podcast episodes, then have we got good news for you. Stuff You Should Know just released a playlist of 12 of our best true crime episodes of all time.

There's a shootout in broad daylight. people using axes in really terrible ways, disappearances, legendary heists, the whole nine yards. So check out the stuff you should know true crime playlist on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All I know is what I've been told, and that's a half-truth is a whole lie. For almost a decade, the murder of an 18-year-old girl from a small town in Graves County, Kentucky. went unsolved, until a local homemaker, a journalist, and a handful of girls came forward with a story. I'm telling you, we know Quincy Kilder, we know.

A story that law enforcement used to convict six people, and that got the citizen investigator on national TV. Through sheer persistence and nerve, this Kentucky housewife helped give justice to Jessica Curran. My name is Maggie Freeling. I'm a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. journalist, producer, and I wouldn't be here if the truth were that easy to find. I did not know her and I did not kill her, or rape or burn or any of that other stuff that

you all said. They literally made me say that I took a match and struck and threw it on her. They made me say that I poured gas on her. From Lava for Good, this is Graves County, a show about just how far our legal system will go in order to find someone to blame. America, y'all better work the hell up. Bad things happens to good people in small towns. Listen to Graves County in the Bone Valley feed on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

And to binge the entire season ad-free, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. And we're back. One sulky story tells about a man from Mirth or taller. He was on the cliffs one day and heard people singing and dancing inside a cave. And he noticed a bunch of skins piled on the rocks. He took one of the skins home and locked it in a chest. And when he went back, a girl with Sidder. there alone, crying. She was naked, and he gave her some clothes and took her home. They got

married and had kids. You know how this goes. One day, the man changed his clothes and forgot to take the key to the chest out of his pocket, and when his wife washed the clothes, she found it. You're not going to Egypt, I tell Mona. We're going to Colorado, remember? That's our big dream to go to Colorado. It's where Mona was born. She lived there until she was four. She still remembers the rocks and the pines in the cold, cold air. She says the clouds of Colorado are bright like pieces of mirror. In Colorado, Mona's parents got divorced, and Mona's mom tried to kill herself for the first time. She tried it once here, too. She put her head in the oven, resting on a pillow. Mona was in seventh grade

Selkees go back to the sea in a flash like they've never been away that's one of the ways they're different from human beings once my dad tried to go back somewhere he was in the army stationed in Germany and he went to Norway to look up the town where my great grandmother came from he actually found the place

and even an old farm with the same name as us in the town he went into a restaurant and ordered Lutfischk, a disgusting fish thing my grandmother makes. The cook came out of the kitchen and looked at him like he was nuts. She said, they only eat Lutfishk at Christmas. There went Dad's plan of bringing back the original flavor of Lutfishk. Now all he's got from Norway is my great-grandmother's Bible. There's also the diary she wrote on the farm up north, but we can't read it.

There's only four English words in the whole book. my god-awful day. You might suspect my dad picked my mom up in Norway, where they have seals. He didn't, though. He met her at the pool. As for mom, she never talked about her relatives. I asked her once if she had any, and she said they were no kind of people. At the time, I thought she meant they were druggies or murderers, maybe in prison somewhere.

Now I wish that was true. One of the stories I don't tell Mona comes from a dictionary of British folklore in the English language. In that story, it's the Selke's little girl who points out where the skin is hidden. She doesn't know what's going to happen, of course.

She just knows her mother is looking for a skin, and she remembers her dad taking one out from under the bed and stroking it. The little girl's mother drags out the skin and says, Farewheel, Pierie Butto. She doesn't think about how the little girl is going to miss her, or how if she's been breathing air all this time, she can surely keep it up a little longer.

She just throws on the skin and jumps into the sea. After mom left, I waited for my dad to get home from work. He didn't say anything when I told him about the coat. He stood in the light of the clock on the stove and rubbed his fingers together softly, almost like he was snapping but with no sound. Then he sat down at the kitchen table and lit a cigarette. I'd never seen him smoke in the house before.

Mom's going to lose it, I thought. And then I realized that, no, my mom wasn't going to lose anything. We were the losers. Me and Dad. He still waits up for me, so just before midnight, I pull out of the parking lot. I'm hoping to get home early enough that he doesn't grumble, but late enough that he doesn't want to come up from the basement, where he takes apart old TVs and talk to me about college.

I've told him I'm not going to college. I'm going to Colorado, a landlocked state. Only 20 out of 50 states are completely landlocked, which means they don't touch the Great Lakes or the sea. Mona turns on the light and tries to put on eyeliner in the mirror, and I swerve to make her mess up. She turns out the light and hits me. all the windows are down to air out the car

and Mona's hair blows wild around her face Pierie Butto the book says is a quote term of endearment Pierie butto I say to Mona she's got the hiccups she can't stop laughing I've never kissed Mona I've thought about it a lot

but I keep deciding it's not time it's not that I think she'd freak out or anything It's not even that I'm afraid she wouldn't kiss me back. It's worse. I'm afraid she'd kiss me back, but not mean it. But do you know what we say but don't mean? That we love our sponsors. Here they are.

We love them. I'm Jorge Ramos. Together we're launching The Moment, a new podcast about what it means to live through at time as uncertain as this one. We sit down with politicians. I would be the first immigrant mayor in generations, but 40% of New Yorkers were born outside of this country.

Artists and activists, I mean, do you ever feel demoralized? I might personally lose hope. This individual might lose the faith, but there's an institution that doesn't lose faith. And that's what I believe in. To bring you depth and analysis from a unique Latino perspective. There's not a single day that all. and I don't call or text each other,

sharing news and thoughts about what's happening in the country. This new podcast will be a way to make that ongoing intergenerational conversation public. Listen to The Moment with Jorge Ramos and Paula Ramos as part of the MyCultura Podcast Network on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Power struggles, shady money, drugs, violence, and broken promises. It's a freaking war. zone. These people are animal. There's no integrity. There's no loyalty. That's all gone.

In the 1980s, modeling wasn't just a dream. It was a battlefield. Book, book, book. Like deals. Let's get models in. Let's get them out. And the models themselves? They carried scars that never fully healed. Till this day, honestly, if I see a measuring tape, I freak out. The Model Wars podcast peels back the glossy cover and reveals a high-stakes game where survival meant more than beauty. Hosted by me, Vanessa Grigoriatis, this is the untold story

of an industry built on ruthless ambition. Listen to Model Wars on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi there, this is Josh Clark from the Stuff You Should Know podcast.

If you've been thinking, man alive, I could go for some good true crime podcast Then have we got good news for you. Stuff You Should Know just released a playlist of 12 of our best true crime episodes of all time. There's a shootout in broad daylight. People using axes in really terrible ways, disappearances, legendary heists, the whole nine yards. So check out the Stuff You Should Know true crime playlist on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

All I know is what I've been told. And that's a half-truth is a whole lie. For almost a decade, the murder of an 18-year-old girl from a small town in Graves County, Kentucky, went unsolved. Until a local homemaker, a journalist, and a handful of girls came forward with a story. I'm telling you, we know Quincy killed her. We know. A story that law enforcement used to convict six people and that got the citizen investigator on national TV. Through sheer persistence and nerve, this Kentucky housewife helped give justice to Jessica Curran. My name is Maggie Freeling.

I'm a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, producer, and I wouldn't be here if the truth were that easy to find. I did not know her and I did not kill her, or rape or burn or any of that other stuff that y'all said. They literally made me say that I took a match and struck and threw it on her. They made me say that I poured gas on her. From Lava for Good, this is Graves County, a show about just how far our legal system will go in order to find someone to blame. America, y'all better work the hell up. Bad things happens to good people in small towns. Listen to Graves County in the Bone Valley feed on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

And to binge the entire season at free, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. Probably one of the biggest probably one of the biggest losers to fall in love with a selky was the man who carried her skin around in his knapsack. He was so scared she'd find it, that he took the skin with him everywhere, when he went fishing, when he went drinking in the town.

Then one day, he had a wonderful catch of fish. There were so many that he couldn't drag them all home in his net. He emptied his knapsack and filled it with fish, and he put the skin over his shoulder. And on his way up the road to his house, he dropped it. Gray in the front and gray in the back tis the very thing I lack. That's what the man's wife says. said when she found the skin.

The man ran to catch her. He even kissed her, even though she was already a seal, but she squirmed off down the road and flopped into the water. The man stood knee-deep in the chilly waves, stinking of fish and cried. In Selky stories, kissing never solves anything. No transformation happens because of a kiss. No one loves you just because you love them.

What kind of fairy tale is that? She wouldn't wake up, Mona says. I pulled her out of the oven onto the floor, and I turned off the gas and opened the windows. It's not that I was smart. I wasn't thinking at all. I called Uncle Tad and the police, and I still wasn't thinking. I don't believe she wasn't smart.

She even tried to give her mom's CPR, but her mom didn't wake up until later, in the hospital. They had to reach in and drag her out of death, she was so closed up in it. Death is skin tight, Mona says. Gray in front and gray in back. Dear Mona, when I look at you, my skin hurts. I pull into her driveway to drop her off.

The house is dark, the darkest house on her street, because Mona's mom doesn't like the porch light on. She says it shines in around the blinds and keeps her awake. Mona's mom has a beautiful bedroom upstairs, with lots of old photographs and gilt frames, but she sleeps on the living room couch beside the aquarium. Looking at the fish helps her to sleep, although she also says this country has no real fish.

That's what Mona calls one of her mom's refrains. Mona gets out, yanking the little piece of my heart that stays with her wherever she goes. She stands outside the car and leans in through the open door. I can hardly see her, but I can smell the lemon-scented stuff she puts on her hair, mixed up with the smells of sweat and weed. Mona smells like a forest, not the sea.

Oh my God, she says. I forgot to tell you, tonight. You know table six, that big horde of Uncle Tad's friends? Yeah. So they wanted the soup with the food, and I forgot. And you know what the old guy says to me, the little guy at the head of the table? What?

He goes, you set bet mademoiselle she says it in a rough growly voice and laughs i can tell it's french but that's all what does it mean you're an idiot miss she ducks her head stiffling giggles he called you an idiot yeah bet it's like beast she lifts her head then shakes it a light from someone else's porch bounces off her nose she puts on a fake norwegian accent and says, my God, awful day. I nod. Awful day. And because we say it all the time, because it's the kind of silly, ordinary thing you could call one of our refrains, or maybe because of the weed I've smoked, a whole bunch of days seem pressed together inside this moment, more than you could count. There's the time we all went out for New Year's Eve, and Uncle Tad drove me. And when he stopped, and I opened the door, he told me to close it, and I said,

I will when I'm on the other side. And when I told Mona we laughed so hard, we had to run away and hide in the bathroom. There's the day some people we know from school came in, and we served them wine, even though they were underage, and Mona got nervous and spilled it all over the tablecloth. And the day her nice cousin came to visit and made us cheese and mint sandwiches in the microwave

and got yelled at for wasting food. And the day of the party for Mona's mom's birthday, when Uncle Tad played music and made us all dance and Mona's mom's eyes went Julie with tears and afterward Mona told me I should just run away I'm the only thing keeping her here my God awful days

all the best days of my life bye Mona whispers I watch her until she disappears into the house my mom used to swim every morning at the YWCA When I was little, she took me along. I didn't like swimming. I'd sit in a chair with a book while she went up and down, up and down, a dim streak in the water.

When I read Ms. Frisbee and the rats of Nym, it seemed like Mom was a lab rat doing tasks, the way she kept touching one side of the pool and then the other. At last she climbed out and pulled off her bathing cap. In the locker room she hung up her suit, a thin gray rag dripping on the floor. Most people put the hook of their padlock through the straps of their suit so the suits could hang outside the lockers without getting stolen.

But my mom never did that. She just tied her suit loosely on the lock. No one's going to steal that stretchy old thing, she said. And no one did. That should have been the end of the story, but it wasn't. My dad says mom was an elemental, a sort of stranger, not of our kind. It wasn't my fault she left. it was because she couldn't learn to breathe on land.

That's the worst story I've ever heard. I'll never tell Mona, not ever, not even when we're leaving for Colorado with everything we need in the back of my car. And I meet her at the grocery store, the way we've already planned, and she runs out smiling under her orange baseball cap. I won't tell her how dangerous addicts are,

or how some people can't start over, or how I still see my mom in the shop windows with her long hair, the same silver gray as her coat. Or how once when my little cousins came to visit, we went to the zoo and the seals recognized me, they both stood up in the water and talked in a foreign language. I won't tell her. I'm too scared.

I won't even tell her what she needs to know, that we've got to be tougher than our moms, that we've got to have different stories, that she'd better not change her mind and drop me in Colorado because I won't understand. hate her forever and burn her stuff and stay up all night screaming at the woods because it's stupid not to be able to breathe whoever heard of somebody breathing in one place but not another and we're not like that mona and me and selky stories are only for losers stuck on the wrong

side of magic people who drop things who tell all who leave keys around who let go the end This story was picked out by my friend Hazel, who said this about it. Selky stories are for losers, like they're for suckers, but Selky stories are also for losers, people who lose people and need to make sense of that loss. And we asked Sophia if there's anything she wanted to include in this reading, and she had this to say about the piece, quote, I think what I'd want to say about this story

is that it marked a turning point in my writing practice. writing it, I understood for the first time what a short story was. I learned this by studying Karen Joy Fowler's excellent story, King Rat, which also uses a mixture of realism and folklore. And that makes sense to me because, honestly, I am blown away by the craft of this story. I think that this story is, well, I've already been saying for years that Sophia Samatar's story, the ogres of East Africa, is my favorite short story. and it's true thematically and prose-wise

but also just on this like craft level I'm just really blown away by how Sophia writes I think that the way that this story the Salki story is telling two parallel stories at the same time with these like brilliant overlaps and parallels that are still remarkably different like culturally different like you know

I'm afraid I'll be taken back to Egypt versus like I'm going going to move to a landlock state and obviously the parallel about the way in which both of their mothers have attempted to leave. And it's interesting because by default, when I think of Selke's stories, I really think about, you know, the running back to the wild and sort of abandoning the family. But then this story is, while there's a little bit of that, it's also just like clearly about like death and being sort of too wild to be alive in some ways. And, you know, when I hear a Selke story traditionally, my thoughts are like, fuck yeah, she got away from that.

that guy, right? But then positioning in it from the point of view of the kids, it deepens a feminist understanding of what it means to feel trapped by a family. And it complicates it in this way that I think is necessary. It makes it no longer so black and white. So yeah, I've enjoyed the story every time I've read it, and I will probably come back to it just from a craft level to study it further. I really can't say enough about it. But I will say that Sophia's most recent books, if you want to read more of her stuff, are the science fiction novella, the practice, the horizon, and the chain, which was a finalist for the Hugo Nebula, Philip K. Dick, and Locus Awards,

and Opacities on Writing and the Writing Life, a meditation on writing, publishing, and friendship. And I'm going to go out and get both of those books. And I have like a thing where I really like books about writing. but most of them aren't very good. And I suspect that this one will be very good. And I really like how different every author who writes books about writing is going to write a book.

Like it's a very, you think it'd be a very, like, standard kind of textbook-y thing, but everyone's books are so completely different. Even like, like Jeff Vandermears, two different books on writing, and they're night and day different from each other. One's called Wonderbook, and it's like esoteric

and feels like you're on L-S-D, but it also teaches you about story and one's called, I think it's called the writing life or something, and it's just about how to not lose your brain while writing. Anyway, I don't know what I'm talking about that. But if you want to keep up with Sophia Samatar's work, you can do that. I believe she's not on social media. I believe she is free, but she has a website, sophia samatar.com, which is S-O-F-I-A-S-A-M-A-T-A-R dot com. And I'm Margaret Kiljoy, and you can find me at Birds Before Thestorm.net. It's a website that I never obtained. I don't know. I'm telling you to go there. I have an author website. I've had it for a very long time, but I don't use it. I am on social media, because I am not free.

You can find me at either Margaret or Magpie Killjoy on various things. I don't know. You'll figure it out. I believe in you. And I write a substack that comes out every week, and I have another podcast. It's called Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff. And also, I hope all of you are doing as well as you can during this. Well, I say this all the time, but it's not like things are, it's always a complicated time. And that's why we have stories. All right. Bye, everyone. It could happen here is a production of Cool Zone Media.

For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia. Or check us out on the IHeard Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for it could happen here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. Ah, come on, why is this taking so long? This thing is ancient. Still using yesterday's tech, upgrade to the ThinkPad X1 Carbon, ultra-light, ultra-powerful, and built for serious productivity

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Hi there, this is Josh Clark from the Stuff You Should Know podcast. If you've been thinking, man alive, I could go for some good true crime podcast episodes, then have we got good news for you. Stuff You Should Know just released a playlist of 12 of our best true crime episodes of all time. There's a shootout in broad daylight. People using axes in really terrible ways, disappearances, led to you. legendary heists, the whole nine yards. So check out the stuff you should know true crime playlist on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Jorge Ramos.

And I'm Paola Ramos. Together we're launching The Moment, a new podcast about what it means to live through a time as uncertain as this one. We sit down with politicians, artists, and activists to bring you death and analysis from a unique Latino perspective. The moment is a space for the conversations

we've been having us, father and daughter for years. Listen to The Moment with Jorge Ramos and Paola Ramos, on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The murder of an 18-year-old girl in Graves County, Kentucky, went unsolved for years, until a local housewife, a journalist, and a handful of girls came forward with a story. America, y'all better work the hell up. Bad things happens to good people in small towns.

Listen to Graves County on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. And to binge the entire season, add free, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast.