The Writers' Block
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A weekly podcast featuring writers of all stripes reading from their recent work.
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Mary Roach reads "Listening to Casper" a chapter from her book Spook.
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About Spook
"Then I see this grey object around to the side of me. I would say I was projecting a form onto it, trying to make sense of it, but it had arms and legs at one point. I turned to look at it, but it disappeared."
"What happens when we die? Does the light just go out and that's that -- the million-year nap? Or will some part of my personality, my me-ness persist? What will that feel like? What will I do all day? Is there a place to plug in my lap-top?" In an attempt to find out, Mary Roach brings her tireless curiosity to bear on an array of contemporary and historical soul-searchers: scientists, schemers, engineers, mediums, all trying to prove (or disprove) that life goes on after we die. She begins the journey in rural India with a reincarnation researcher and ends up in a University of Virginia operating room where cardiologists have installed equipment near the ceiling to study out-of-body near-death experiences. Along the way, she enrolls in an English medium school, gets electromagnetically haunted at a university in Ontario, and visits a Duke University professor with a plan to weigh the consciousness of a leech. Her historical wanderings unearth soul-seeking philosophers who rummaged through cadavers and calves' heads, a North Carolina lawsuit that established legal precedence for ghosts, and the last surviving sample of "ectoplasm" in a Cambridge University archive.
Purchase Spook by Mary Roach (at amazon.com).
About the Author
"Before writing Spook and Stiff, I wrote columns, essays, and feature articles for Outside, Wired, GQ, Salon.com, and The New York Times Magazine, as well as many others too embarrassing to specify. I have always gravitated toward the peculiar, happily covering things like flatulence, Eskimo food, vaginal weight-lifting, carrot addiction, amputee bowling leagues, and the question of how much food it takes to burst a human stomach. I'm a contributing editor at the science magazine Discover, though I do not have a science degree and must fake my way through interviews with experts I can't understand.
My previous book, Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers was a New York Times Bestseller, a 2003 Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers pick, and one of Entertainment Weekly's Best Books of 2003. Stiff has been translated into 16 languages, including Hungarian (Hullamerev) and Lithuanian (Negyveilai).
A 1995 article of mine called "How to Win at Germ Warfare" was a National Magazine Award Finalist, and in 1996, my article on earthquake-proof bamboo houses took the Engineering Journalism Award in the general interest magazine category, for which I was, let's be honest, the only entrant. My column "My Planet" (Reader's Digest) was runner-up in the humor category of the 2005 National Press Club awards. My column "The Slightly Wider World of Sports" (Sports Illustrated for Women) did not garner any awards but did afford the life-enriching opportunity to learn alligator-wrestling, jousting, dirt-biking, and knife-throwing.
I work in an office in a building in downtown Oakland, California, along with five other writers. Down the hall is a cosmetology school that produces a lot of fumes, which perhaps explains my writing style.
I was born in Hanover, New Hampshire, which explains nothing. I graduated from Wesleyan University in 1981, and drove out to the Bay Area with some friends because we had heard it was a nice place. I had no job prospects (or skills), and spent a few years working as a freelance copy editor before landing a half-time job in the PR office at the San Francisco Zoo. On the days when I wasn't writing about elephant wart removal surgery and baby koalas, I wrote freelance articles for the local newspaper's Sunday magazine. Eventually, my editors there moved on to more prestigious publications, and took me along with them.
I have no hobbies. I mostly just work on my books and hang out with my family and friends. I enjoy birdwatching -- though the hours don't agree with me -- backpacking, thrift stores, overseas supermarkets, Scrabble, mangoes, and that late-night Animal Planet show about horrific animals such as the parasitic worm that attaches itself to fishes' eyeballs but makes up for it by leading the fish around." -- Mary Roach
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