The best podcasts for learning about why I do what I do

Sure, my podcast is about books, but I'm driven by all of the arts: music, film, visual arts, comics... you name it. I'm a strong believer that we can connect through the arts, build communities, whatever our backgrounds. I've taught college-level English and humanities courses for more than twenty years, worked in radio and small-press publishing, and published a book on popular culture in the 1990s. I'm equally enthralled by broadly popular entertainment and the oddball fringes of our culture. All part of one big continuum. Books (& music, & comics, etc.) were my solace from before I can remember, so it's hard to pinpoint a moment when my interest was piqued. But expertise? That I can do. BA in English from San Jose State University. MA in Composition & Rhetoric from University of Nevada, Reno. PhD in American Literature & Culture from UNR. 20+ years of teaching compostion, literature, humanities. Six years working for radio station KSJS, including on the literary arts program. Three years as co-creator & editor-in-chief of small press lit mag CRiME CLUb. Author of The 1990s (Popular Culture Through History). Etc. Etc. Etc.

A Book & Its Author is pretty straightforward in its conception. I interview an author about a specific book of theirs and they read from said book. As focused as a podcast on books may seem, it can really be on any topic, depending on the subject of the book in question. This show was largely born out of my previous podcast, The Bucket Of Blah Blah, which was cut down due to the pandemic. Both shows were driven by a personal passion for having conversations with different kinds of people, for learning about new things and novel experiences. Each of the shows in this list does that, albeit in decidedly different ways. They tell stories that give insights not only into the subject matter covered, but also into the personalities of the podcast creators.

I try to listen to a great variety of podcasts with the admittedly limited time that I have. These represent some of the ones that I keep coming back to because I always feel like my consciousness has been expanded a bit after listening. Some of them were among the inspirations to start my own podcast.