• Backspace: Essays on Everything with Michelle Kennedy

  • By: Michelle Kennedy
  • Podcast

Backspace: Essays on Everything with Michelle Kennedy

By: Michelle Kennedy
Listen for free

  • Summary

  • Hi! I am Michelle Kennedy and I am an author, a mom of many, a lover of knits and a devoted reader and writer of the essay.

    The newly renamed Backspace features essays on life, love, parenting and more - a literary experience in the time it takes to wade through the pick up line at school - or get to the store. Join us every week for new essays and new discussions on great writing - and not so great writing.

    Read the essays at my website: mishkennedy.com

    Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/backspace-essays-on-everything-with-michelle-kennedy--6186916/support.
    2024
    Show More Show Less
Art Comedy & Humour Hygiene & Healthy Living Literary History & Criticism
Show More Show Less
activate_Holiday_promo_in_buybox_DT_T2
Episodes
  • George Orwell's Why I Write

    George Orwell's Why I Write
    Dec 18 2024
    Definitely tune into this one - have 20 minutes to kill waiting for a kid to come back from practice? Sitting in traffic? Driving to the store? This one is a bit longer - 20 minutes - but it's good. And the stories are fantastic - and hopefully I read it well enough for you to enjoy it.

    From the essay: George Orwell's Why I Write: "The great mass of human beings are not acutely selfish. After the age of about thirty they abandon individual ambition – in many cases, indeed, they almost abandon the sense of being individuals at all – and live chiefly for others, or are simply smothered under drudgery. But there is also the minority of gifted, willful people who are determined to live their own lives to the end, and writers belong in this class. Serious writers, I should say, are on the whole more vain and self-centered than journalists, though less interested in money."

    Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/backspace-essays-on-everything-with-michelle-kennedy--6186916/support.
    Show More Show Less
    22 mins
  • The Nature of the Fun by David Foster Wallace

    The Nature of the Fun by David Foster Wallace
    Dec 9 2024
    David Foster Wallace is one of those writers for me. He’s one I wanted to be like. There are others. But I have identified over the years with Wallace because he always seemed so sad. When I read that he had hung himself almost 20 years ago now, I remember feeling like I was sad, but not surprised.

    Having struggled with depression and suicidal thoughts myself over the years, it doesn’t feel strange to me when someone does it. Sometimes, I’m jealous. Not often anymore, as I feel like I’ve gotten past that particular hump. The desire to be gone is more rare for me now - maybe with the knowledge that it’s coming closer to the time when it will end anyway. How many years might I have left? 20? 30? Do I want 40? Do I want to be 92?

    That’s for another essay.

    David Foster Wallace was one of the more versatile writers and yet, I always feel like I’m on a front porch or cozy in a living room when I read his words. I feel like I’m being bestowed information I did not previously have.

    After he died, D.T. Max wrote this about him in The New Yorker.

    The Unfinished

    He was only forty-six when he killed himself, which helped explain the sense of loss readers and critics felt. There was also Wallace’s outsized passion for the printed word at a time when it looked like it needed champions. His novels were overstuffed with facts, humor, digressions, silence, and sadness. He conjured the world in two-hundred-word sentences that mixed formal diction and street slang, technicalese and plain speech; his prose slid forward with a controlled lack of control that mimed thought itself.

    “What goes on inside is just too fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely sketch the outlines of at most one tiny little part of it at any given instant,” he wrote in “Good Old Neon,” a story from 2001. Riffs that did not fit into his narrative he sent to footnotes and endnotes, which he liked, he once said, because they were “almost like having a second voice in your head.”

    The sadness over Wallace’s death was also connected to a feeling that, for all his outpouring of words, he died with his work incomplete. Wallace, at least, never felt that he had hit his target. His goal had been to show readers how to live a fulfilled, meaningful life. “Fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being,” he once said. Good writing should help readers to “become less alone inside.”
    I felt a lot less alone as a writer - as a person - and really, I laughed a lot because being the mother of eight children and the mother - I guess - of 17 books, I feel this essay so acutely.Please remember DFW with me and listen to The Nature of the Fun.


    Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/backspace-essays-on-everything-with-michelle-kennedy--6186916/support.
    Show More Show Less
    17 mins

What listeners say about Backspace: Essays on Everything with Michelle Kennedy

Average customer ratings

Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.

Audible.co.uk reviews

Amazon reviews
No Reviews are Available