The WALKING podcast – Details, episodes & analysis

The acclaimed WALKING Podcast returns with its acclaimed "Special Election Night Coverage Counterprogramming Special."

A fine hike for tumultuous times: along the shore and through the woods, featuring chittering birds and the distant, patriotic thrum of state-run ferries shuttling American commuters across Puget Sound. [Misophonia trigger warning: at around 15:00, I pick and eat a wild apple.]

This walk is sponsored by "Gondos: The Novelization of the Major Motion Picture Gondos," my novel that you can read for free. When sea monsters invade the Venice canals, it's up to a team of scientists, soldiers of fortune and traditional gondoliers to battle them back in militarized, Batmobile-style gondolas called "gondos." It's the blockbuster literary event that readers are calling "addictive," "exeptionally strange," and "bananas bananas good." Read it: TODAY! 

Take care of yourselves and each other, America.

Here, in the darkest, dourest, deadliest, bleakest doldrums of Winter 2020, I don't feel like making any more podcasts, because what's the point, but I thought I'd slip last year's holiday extravaganza episode back into your feeds, in which we exploded the usual format of the show to bring you a star-studded, Yuletide spectacular that harkens back to the homespun, holiday podcast specials of days gone by! With special guest appearances by: Decemberists guitarist Chris Funk, fine arts photographer Meghann Riepenhoff and friends, TV producer Jesse Ziebart, Grammy-nominee Korum Bischoff, and restauranteur and businessman Harvey Wolff from Proper Fish. Come along on a wintry ramble around the island, chasing away a case of the holiday blahs! 

The WALKING Podcast Holiday Special is brought to you by Dresden Stollen Bakers. When Irmgard Maron came to the United States in 1928, she brought a cherished recipe for stollen from her native Dresden. She began baking for friends and relatives during the holidays and, at their urging, started a small bakery business. Ninety-one years later, three generations of her descendants still gather to bake this deliciously rich holiday bread once a year and sell it to families like yours around the world.

It has been a comfort these last couple of months, during the pandemic, to pass by the Maron homestead on my walks and see the silhouettes of various Marons, all masked up, still busily packing stollen in the outbuilding to ship around the world, their long tradition undeterred and unstoppable.

Welcome to the first episode of this special pandemic mini-season of The WALKING Podcast. And this time, it's a family affair!

I've hired my two daughters as co-hosts because I can't figure out what else to do with them. That's right! It's a whole new kind of walk, with the wordless, contemplative pitter-patter of THREE sets of feet and—they've promised; really looked me in the eye and promised—minimal complaining.

Why are these girls doing it? Is it because they love going out on a ramble with their dear old dad? Nope! In fact, they hate it! I'm always asking and they never come. It's because they want to get paid!

We're selling classified ads—$1 each. Send us your well-wishes to far away friends; your quarantine complaints, your self-promotions; your tractor parts for sale. As always, we'll read them in the middle of the walk and post a picture of where we were when we read them. Venmo a buck to Jon Mooallem LLC with a 3-5 sentence message.

PS: The person who was crying at the end of this episode was fine. See you next week. We'll try to keep the stage whispering to a minimum.

There is a season--turn, turn, turn. A time to listen to someone else take a walk, a time to take a walk yourself.

We are now in the latter. As I took this walk out to the harbor the other morning, I recognized that walking has become *the* leisure time activity of US Quarantine Culture: a way to maintain the fitness of our lower bodies and souls, a thing not just to do, but to write about and discuss. And so, I made a decision, mid-stride: The WALKING Podcast will be saying goodbye for a while, remaining fallow until conditions change and require it to sprout up again. Stay safe. Help other people when you can. Happy walking.

I'm sorry but you can't come along on this walk. This one's just for me.

My new book is out today. It's called THIS IS CHANCE! You can buy it here on Amazon or support your local shop if that is safe and possible for you right now.

Thank you.

Nothing much to say here. This--as always--is a recording of me walking in the woods. Maybe it's helpful to you. Maybe you'd like to take a walk but can't. I feel lucky that I can, so I feel obligated to share.

This week: no sponsor. But you can hear me phone a friend. This walk is sponsored by a spirit of togetherness. 

I never knew what this podcast was for; I was always surprised that people listen to it. Maybe it has a purpose now? Maybe it has something small of value to offer? Wouldn't that be strange?

This week's walk is sponsored by Ian Karmel, who sends us a philantvertizement for Kenton Women's Village in Portland, Oregon: "an amazing charity that provides shelter to houseless women in Portland - but that also goes so much further than that. It also gives them hope. I know that's a super corny thing to say, but seriously. The Village is a group of tiny houses, so the women have a sense of security, privacy, and space as well as leadership, self-determination and community. On-site case management, mental and physical health services and long-term housing placement are provided and the results are pretty impressive."

I say all the results at the ad break! Please consider supporting this important work.

Not a very relaxing moment here in Washington State. And yet, thankfully, the trails feel (and sound) exactly the same.

This week's walk is sponsored by Ann Friedman, journalist, newsletter-er, and co-host of the Call Your Girlfriend podcast. Ann stands out in my mind (and in my social media sphere) as someone who's always making an effort to champion what's good and stand up for what's right. I really admire that. Her Philanthvertizement reads as such:

"I would love your listeners to consider a donation to IRAP, the International Refugee Assistance Project, which provides legal advocacy for refugees and displaced people. Their motto is 'Everyone should have a safe place to live and a safe way to get there.' I started donating to this group in 2017, when three things happened. First, Trump's Muslim ban took effect—and protesting at airports felt profoundly ineffective in the face of such cruelty. A few months later, I read Mohsin Hamid's novel Exit West, in which refugees can leave one country and instantly appear in another just by walking through a door. These portals are the only magical element of the story: Mostly, it focuses on the brutal realities faced by a pair of young lovers when they become stateless. And a few months after I read Exit West—but long before I had stopped thinking about it— I heard IRAP's founder, Becca Heller, speak about her work. I have been a donor ever since. You can find a donation button at refugeerights.org"

THANK YOU! Until next week, walk at your own pace and don't touch your face.

Off we go: into the woods, toward the harbor, up the hill, through the old cemetery, and onto my newish pal Berg's house--or, his "almost-house," as he's not quite done building it. Berg needed to  set up a rope swing for his boys, and had a fun idea: I'd bring my daughter's bow and arrow over, we'd tie a fishing line to the arrow, then take turns trying to shoot it up over the arm of an old maple. This required me to walk a couple of miles with a bow and arrow strapped to my back. I may have (slightly) frightened a couple of people walking their dog.

This week, another Philanthvertizement (TM) in lieu of a sponsor. This one's from one of my personal icons of podcasting, the Slate Political Gabfest's David Plotz. (Especially love the way he says the word "effective.") David will be riding in this year's Pan-Mass Challenge and aiming to raise $5500 for the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute--in honor of his father, a veteran research scientist at NIH, and to support his friend's son Dmitri, who is one of thousands of children who benefits from the pediatric brain cancer research done by Dana-Farber.

What a wonderful thing to do! WALKING podcast listeners: will you join me and mobilize to get David to his goal? Here's a link to donate. It's even tax-deductible. Wouldn't it be great if we all just did that right now? Let's be...effective.

Not much to say about this walk: just putting one foot in front of the other. Particularly after the accursed misadventures of last week, this walk was a welcome, uncomplicated delight. It's a walk that unabashedly puts simplicity first: the sensibility of this walk is Straightforward-forward.

I'm noticing a boost in listenership after my appearance on the LiveWire Radio show this week, so all of you who are coming along on the walk for the first time have picked an exceptionally typical place to start. This is representative of what happens here at WALKING: walking.

This week's Philanthvertizer (philanthropic advertiser,) in lieu of a proper sponsor, is a woman who is so talented I accidentally just typed her name as "Avery Talented." Her actual name is: Avery Trufelman. Avery says:

"Rehabilitation through the Arts (RTA) is an extraordinary nonprofit. And, full disclosure, my mom does work with them. Basically they put on theatrical performances in maximum security prisons all around New York. They've changed the lives of the incarcerated people they work with. They also do the incredible work of letting the public into these prison facilities, to see what the living conditions are really like and to witness the immense heart and talents we've locked away. Intense, huh? Maybe your listeners will be moved to donate."