I've been meaning to do a post on podcasting ever since I read author Joe Cottonwood's insightful comments about it on The Well, but time and organizational skills are not on my side these days. I promise I'll get to it because it's something emerging writers should know about. Meanwhile, allow me to turn you on to the rich, earthy voice of Joe's Clear Heart Blog: The Heart of a Carpenter. This from "Changing Light Bulbs, Part One", in which he revisits St. Louis 1968 and reflects on "a pleasant job in a strange year":
First day, in the stifling St. Louis heat walking across campus to our assigned building, Franklin asked me how I'd spent my summer.
"Long story," I said.
"Go ahead," Franklin said, stopping under the shade of a tree. "We got all day."
Students were hustling around us, heading for class. Hair was longer this year, skirts shorter, attitudes ... goofier.
I gave Franklin a brief synopsis of my summer. It included being turned down for a summer job at Jack-In-The-Box - thank God! - hitchhiking to California and somehow winding up in a hippie commune in Big Sur, hitching back, a Hells Angel, a man who owned 7 brothels, a stolen truck, a night alone in the middle of the desert, a drunk cowboy, a day in the Winnemucca, Nevada jail, a Mormon missionary, hopping a freight train, joining my girlfriend in Colorado and driving her beat-up old VW bug to a ghost town in New Mexico and then to Vancouver, Canada and then across Montana to Madison where at a party we met Miss Wisconsin who was tripping on LSD, and then to Chicago just as the National Guard was pouring in for the Democratic National Convention, and then to Washington DC to see our parents, and back to St. Louis. And so here I was. "What about you, Franklin? How'd you spend your summer?"
Click here to read the fully fleshed post and here to subscribe to Joe's Clear Heart podcast.
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