Author Topic: PseudoPod 543: Be Still, My Dear, And Listen  (Read 3547 times)

Bdoomed

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on: May 22, 2017, 12:24:04 AM
PseudoPod 543: Be Still, My Dear, And Listen

by J. T. Glover.

“Be Still, My Dear, And Listen” was published in Issue 7 of “Makeout Creek”, a literary magazine based in Richmond, Virginia.

J. T. GLOVER is an academic research librarian by day and lives in Richmond, Virginia, and is originally from Seattle His short fiction published in The Children of Old Leech, The Lovecraft eZine, and Handsome Devil: Stories of Sin and Seduction. His blog can be found at jtglover.com, and it includes links to other publications, some of which can be read for free online.

This week’s reader – Dagny Paul – is a teacher, writer, failed artist, comic book geek, and associate editor/occasional host of Pseudopod. She is guest editor for Pseudopod’s Artemis Rising 3 event in 2017.

She lives in the middle of nowhere, Louisiana. Follow her on Twitter for no good reason @dagnypaul. Listen to her story “There is No Road Through the Woods” on Pseudopod.



Info on Anders Manga’s album (they do our theme music!) can be found here.



Of course we called her “Audrey.” We were sixteen, mad about Sherilyn Fenn, tuned in together every Thursday, and we went to school with a pimply, stinking cow named Audra Horning? What happened was inevitable.


Listen to this week's Pseudopod.

I'd like to hear my options, so I could weigh them, what do you say?
Five pounds?  Six pounds? Seven pounds?


AliceNred

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Reply #1 on: June 01, 2017, 05:30:03 AM
I think this was outstanding.

Stop throwing gnomes at me. They hurt.


Katzentatzen

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Reply #2 on: June 21, 2017, 09:47:21 PM
Not much scarier than teen bullying.

"To understand a cat you must realize that he has his own gifts, his own viewpoint, even his own morality."
--LILIAN JACKSON BRAUN


Metrophor

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Reply #3 on: July 06, 2017, 02:49:35 AM
You know, I consider myself the sort of person who can take most topics in stride. I'm a long-time listener and aside from a couple of relatively early episodes (Counting From Ten comes to mind), there haven't been many times when I actually had to stop and turn the podcast off.
This was one of those times.
This episode was very hard for me to listen to. Probably it's because the topic hits uncomfortably close to home for me- I was an Audra in high school myself.  I'm thirty-one now, and I'm still feeling the aftereffects.
Mind you, what I went through wasn't to the physical extent of the character in this story, of course, and my bullies were pretty much exclusively male, but I could see enough of myself in what was happening that it made me incredibly uncomfortable.
I suppose you could say that means it was an effective horror story.
I don't know what it is about childhood, or the schoolyard in particular, that's so conductive to sociopathy, but this one was a little too real for my liking. Well-written, certainly. The narration was excellent. But I almost broke down a couple of times in the car not just from how vicious the protagonist was, but the victim blaming and how little the narrator seemed to care. (Or at least, how little she told herself she cared.) I suppose the inability to move on from that kind of trauma, for the aggressors as well as the victim, may have been some form of comeuppance, but that's small comfort.

Bravo, everyone, and I mean that sincerely.
I don't think I'll be listening to this one again.
« Last Edit: July 06, 2017, 02:54:28 AM by Metrophor »