Hey, it's Francis Lamb, host of the splendid table.

And you know, I just want to tell you that our show is a great place to come to for some holiday sanity.

We're getting cooking help from amazing people this holiday season,

including Chef Kristen Kish, Errik Prepare, Aberber-book authors, Jocelyn Jelk Adams, Dan Pelosi, and Amy Felon.

We have cooking, eating, and gifting ideas for anyone you're going to have at your table.

But listen to the splendid table wherever you get your podcast.

Talk to you soon.

Today's moment of pause is a shortened version of an interview with Minnesota public radio's

Carrie Miller.

The full version of this interview is available in the Big Books and Bold Ideas

podcast feed and as a video on our YouTube channel

visit slowdown show.org for more information. I'm Major Jackson and this is a special episode of The Slowdown. of the slowdown. Tell us a little bit about your experience with Gwendlin Brooks.

Oh yes, Gwendlin Brooks.

Early Hero who's aesthetic of writing about her neighborhood.

And one of my friends said, you know, you can pick up a Gwenden-Brookes volume

and you pretty much are reading about a four block radius around

Brondville where she lived. That was inspiring to me early on as a project of wanting to write about North Philadelphia

and Germantown in my home city, which is to say you can write about the people, you can be very

particular about which streets, you can in a way divine the everyday or divine the people in your life. You don't have to write poetry

with capital peace subject matters, you know. The moon. Time, the moon time the moon exactly so I did get to meet her after hosting her in

Philadelphia for a reading and she was she had just won the Jefferson Lecture Award which is the

highest art award that Congress gives artists and she famously did not like to fly. She took the train in that kind of old

...