I'm Christopher Leighton and this is open source with a podcast you've got to lean into with us

The subject in a word is despair both public and private the poets and spiritual seekers Christian Wyman and his wife Daniel Chapman are back to go to us,

each with a new book.

Their project is staring into the abyss in the Nietzsche formula to see

if the abyss stares back or talks back. And I think it does. Listeners, you be the judge. Christian Wyman, it's good to see you be the judge Christian Wyman it's good to see you again and to read your new book

Zero at the Bone subtitled 50 entries against despair It's more interesting too because the woman who broke your life open in love most of 20 years ago is in on the conversation and it's more urgent when we can all feel a certain

despair out there coming on like a cold front. Some say an epidemic of

loneliness or melancholy.

Can you say, Christian Wyman,

how despair out there in a society

connects with despair of the heart?

Can we connect to several despair?

Oh, yes, I think we do. I mean, I think there are different kinds of despair.

This book emerged largely out of existential despair, but it touches on all kinds of different

despair, environmental despair, racial despair, political despair, different forms of spiritual despair. I think that we tend to get overwhelmed

when we think of despair as only a public thing. It can seem absolutely

overwhelming and there's the sort of monolithic thing. It can seem absolutely overwhelming and there's a sort of

monolithic thing that we can't do anything about and one of the answers in my

life for me has been to preserve and protect a space in your own soul where you can know that you have a soul and can

fortify yourself in some way against that but also make yourself fit to do battle with it if you need to.

Danielle Chappen, you've written a memoir about your Tennessee family called Holler, a poet among Patriots.

And meantime, you're making a remarkable life in sickness and in health and parenting

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