Writer & Podcast Creator Kelly Daniels: The Moon Under Water
If you’re in Washington, D.C. this Saturday, April 26, Gemini Wahhaj and Kurt Baumeister will discuss their second books, Katy Family (stories) and Twilight of the Gods (novel) respectively, at Politics and Prose Bookstore, 5015 Connecticut Ave NW, 6 PM, April 26.
If you're in Chicago, on May 15, will be in conversation with novelist Deborah Shapiro about his new book, The Golden Hour: A Story of Family and Power in Hollywood, at Exile in Bookville, 410 S. Michigan Ave, Ste. 210, 7 PM CT. Free, in-person event - registration and more information here.
The Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction (short story collections - 40,000-75,000 words, double-spaced pp) is open for submissions through May 31.
This Sunday, April 27, 3:30 PM, Los Angeles Times Festival of Books: come to the short story panel with Lena Valencia, Robin Romm, Daniel A. Olivas, and Ben Shattuck. Tickets/reservations are available here. (They’re marked required, but unticketed attendees will be allowed into the auditorium after the ticketed attendees are admitted).
Bookish subscriptions are currently 25% off. May’s agent list will be posted on May 7. A preview of April’s can be viewed here.
—
Today’s interviewee is writer and “pubcast” creator of The Moon Under Water, Kelly Daniels. Last month during the AWP Conference, I met with him and his co-pubcaster, Steve Jones, to tape an episode that focused on Shirley Jackson’s celebrated short story, “The Lottery” (first published in The New Yorker in June 1948).
Other topics rose up out of the mist as we talked, including Seinfeld’s final episode. Kelly and Steve have an enviable knowledge of pop culture and literature, as well as a magpie’s taste for eclectic subject matter.
Kelly is the author of two books, the excellent memoir Cloudbreak, California and the novel A Candle for San Simón (on my TBR pile), and is a professor of creative writing at Augustana College when he’s not reading dystopian fiction and discussing it with Steve and their Moon Under Water guests. Steve is a data migration specialist, Seinfeld series finale fan, and Mickey 17 debunker.
Christine/Bookish: "Pull up a bar stool and join us in George Orwell's favorite pub" is your tagline - tell us more about the premise of The Moon Under Water.
Kelly Daniels: Our new tagline is “better-than-average bar talk.” It’s true we often discuss Orwellian dystopian narratives, but that’s more habit than essence. Really, the podcast is a celebration and endorsement of getting out of our houses, away from our screens and virtual personas, and hang out, bodily, with our fellow humans. It began, in my mind, as a reaction against the proliferation of Zoom meetings and social media.
My novel [A Candle for San Simón] came out in August 2020, so you can imagine how my “book tour” went. During Covid, I was one of those people who got so stir crazy I volunteered to return to in-person teaching as soon as possible. I drove 45 minutes from home to a small town to get the vaccinations early, not because I was terrified of the illness, but because I figured as soon as I was vaxxed up, I’d be able to return to the world. Even after we started emerging from our cocoons as the pandemic trailed off, I despaired over how many of us seemingly chose to no longer participate.
And so I decided to make a podcast whose first rule was that we only recorded in person, out in the world, preferably in bars.
The name came next. I’m a big Orwell fan, his essays especially. One is titled “The Moon Under Water,” a loving description of his favorite pub. What starts as mere depiction grows into a statement of values focused on democratic spaces, zones where everyone is welcome (until you get thrown out for being a drunken ass), and where civil conversation thrives.
One aspect of Orwell’s pub, for example, is that the music shouldn’t be too loud for talking. Another is that women and children are welcome, which wasn’t always the case back in those days. At any rate, we try to offer the listener a kind of “best of” bar talk, best of in that we focus on a single, hopefully interesting topic, and we do our homework.
But it’s still bar talk, in all its improvisational, free association, messy glory. If “The Moon Under Water” essay represents Orwell’s ideal pub, then our podcast aims to create ideal bar conversation. Listeners can always join that conversation by writing us at theguys@themoonunderwaterpubcast.com. Patrons of the bars where we record sometimes interject themselves into our recordings, often to hilarious (or annoying) effect.
I’m also inspired by Orwell’s relentless honesty, even when telling the truth ostracized him from his own community. He was a member of the Communist Party who recognized Stalin for the monster he was. It would have been easier for him to keep quiet, but he spoke up, at considerable personal risk. We don’t talk current politics on TMUW (there’s no shortage of podcasts that do that), but we always try to tell the truth as we understand it, and we never (not yet at least) edit out even the dumb or embarrassing stuff. Who has time for that anyway?
CS: If I'm not mistaken, you've been recording and publishing episodes of for about a year and a half now? Would you say a bit more about what spurred you to create TMUW?
KD: A year and a half, huh? That’s depressing. You’d think we’d have more to show from the effort by now.
It took me a while to find a co-host. I tried out a few different co-hosts, and I even recorded several episodes that were never released, but a combination of personality conflicts and unreliability sank those early efforts.
Then I started recording episodes with a student named Phoebe Fuller, and those episodes make up the first season. She was great. One listener said the first season works well as a teaching tool for lit classes. Phoebe is a talented student, and the conversations were fun, but the teacher/student dynamic wasn’t really what I was after, in terms of an excuse to horse around with a buddy, and ultimately this early effort felt like an unpaid extension of my teaching.
So I let the podcast rest for a while, and was ready to just let it go. That’s when Steve, who I knew casually as the spouse of a coworker, met me at a minor league baseball game one day and pitched himself for the job. I was skeptical but figured we could meet and record an episode or two at a bar near my house as a low effort audition of sorts.
Our first episode was kind of stiff, and Steve, who works in the corporate world, was clearly surprised that I had offered him zero training or even words of advice before hitting record, but the product showed promise, and what’s more, we had fun. I knew we could actually make something worthwhile when we recorded the episode on Ted Chiang’s sci-fi novella, “The Lifecycle of Software Objects,” in which Steve’s knowledge of technology taught me things about this story I could never have figured out as a mere lit professor.
And now we’re still recording. Our one rule is that it’s got to be fun, and so far, it has been.
CS: You're a novelist and college professor, and Steve is a data migration specialist. How do you think your different areas of expertise inform and distinguish The Moon Under Water from other lit-adjacent podcast?
KD: Steve first showed his unique contribution to the podcast in the Ted Chiang episode described above. More generally, our different skills and dispositions work as checks and balances, pulling the podcast away from the edges of specialization and toward a central common ground.
When talking lit, Steve embraces the everyman role, which tethers me to what we might call reality. [Sometimes] I want to dive into difficult, experimental literature, and the expression on Steve’s face or his slow response to texts tells me that he, along with the rest of humanity who don’t have advanced degrees in literature, aren’t going to be into that level of lit nerd stuff. The final effect is that we tend to gravitate toward a bipartisan middle ground, which seems to honor Orwell.
Even beyond subject matter, however, I find Steve’s take on texts refreshing. In the Ted Chiang story mentioned above, he explained to me that the title, “The Lifecycle of Software Objects,” is all programmer jargon. Just that simple fact blew the story up for me. Also, when we rather unfavorably reviewed the recent film Mickey 17, he pointed out a disqualifying plot hole. He said something like, “the data guy in me” recognized it immediately.
(The movie is about a guy who is literally expendable, and is constantly put into deadly situations, and after he is inevitably killed, his body is reprinted and his memories, personality, etc, are uploaded into the new body. A recurring theme is people asking him what it’s like to die. He tries to answer, and tends to say something like, “It’s scary.” But Steve pointed out, there’s no way he would remember dying, since his last upload would have occurred days, if not weeks, before his actual death.)
More generally, we offer a different perspective from the people Steve and I usually hang out with, and this difference creates a useful friction. Life is boring when you only talk to people who think exactly like you do.
One unresolved difference that doesn’t feel useful or pleasant concerns music. Steve doesn’t like Van Halen (not that he could name a single song by them), but if pressed, he prefers the Sammy Hagar lineup (I don’t think he’d ever heard of David Lee Roth until I asked him which he preferred.) If that’s not bad enough, he also claimed, on air without irony, that only the later Metallica records are worth listening to. If the podcast falls apart for artistic differences, you’ll know why.
CS: What are three episodes which will give listeners the flavor of the wide-ranging conversations you have with featured guests?
KD: Perhaps the best way to get to know the podcast is to look through our episodes and find ones where we talk about a text you know and love (or hate). Our titles are descriptive, so check them out. We tend to go on thematic runs, like Hunter S. Thompson and his lasting influence, which includes an episode on Denis Johnson, recorded in Iowa City’s the Vine Tavern, where the story under discussion is actually set.
Aside from the episode you appear in (& video here), we had a wild ride with poet Kimberly Ann Priest, talking about old black-and-white Hollywood films in the basement of an L.A. bar called CDMX, which stands for Ciudad de Mexico. Here’s the audio link, and here’s the video.
Our first ever guest-appearance episode was with another poet, Sarah Kain Gutowski. We didn’t even have a topic that time, but just talked to her about her work and whatever came up. I’ll admit we self-medicated our nervousness away (we’d just started podcasting) with too many IPAs. Some listeners found it amusing (video link).
Finally, I’ll recommend an episode without a guest. It’s an early one and we went it alone. The subject is Blade Runner, a truly great movie, which we compared to the source novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (video link).
—
Kelly Daniels grew up on the road, living for stints with his parents in a Hawaiian commune, a lonesome desert cabin, and in an old delivery van outfitted with bunks. As an adult, he set off on his own, traveling extensively through Europe, Mexico and Central America, picking up jobs along the way, jobs such as production manager of a furniture factory (Guatemala), newspaper reporter (Mexico), and bartender (all over). He is the author of the memoir Cloudbreak, California, and his short stories and essays have appeared widely in literary reviews. A regular contributor to The Sun magazine, he lives with his wife and son in Le Claire, Iowa, and is a creative writing professor at Augustana College.
—
Coda: A place recently opened in the "Lightning on the Page" retreat I’m leading for Foreword Retreats in Bordeaux, France, May 18-24. More info here.