I came here as a reading geek. I wanted to talk week after week to writers who most spoke to me. But I realized very quickly that if I wanted listeners to try my books, I’d have to try theirs. It had to be a two-way street. And that’s what an interview is, too. An interview on the air is so much more than what gets said. You hear the laughter, the emotional flow. And it’s only then that the listener starts to feel comfortable and really listen. That’s the point at which they say, “I might read that book.” And I want to get the reader to that point. And it really involves a lot of give and take, a lot of emotional sharing.
I generally read about six to eight hours a day, and try to read the author’s complete work before I interview them. And you’d be surprised at how few authors have ever met someone who’s read everything they’ve written. I’m like a mirror to them. Then they start trying to see themselves in the mirror, and then we’re really in something like the equivalent of a psychoanalytic transaction between a person and their image. That’s when you get the things that are generally interesting.

I think we have a spiritual and imaginal dimension that I never hear referred to, so I wanted my half-hour to be a place where every kind of seriousness about the value of life — its preciousness or its wastefulness, its insanity, its possibility — could be a valued subject for conversation. And I wanted listeners to say, “God, I never hear people talking about this.”