Hereby Monsters is a podcast about facing the unknown. I, uh, I start to float, float away from the earth. Have you ever smoked crack before? We're all kind of frantically searching for meaning. They have the neurotransmitters. I think we're all jugglers in some way. Yo, we're not broken. Crazy delinquents. We're in our last day, young man. Listen to Hear Be Monsters.

The podcast about the unknown.

On the KCRW iTunes page.

Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannon Foundation.

Boots.

Where we're we be without boos?

Where would we be without good?

No, Timber.

It's a rhetorical question, sir, but where would we be without books?

From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblad, and welcome to Bookworm.

My guest is Alison Green.

She's written a book called The Ghosts Who Travel With Me.

It's a literary pilgrimage through Brodigan's America.

Now there's some background here. Once upon a time, in 1967, the writer Richard Brodagan

published a book called Trout Fishing in America.

It came out, was widely regarded as a beautiful book,

poetic, strange, hippie literature.

It grew popular very quickly. hippie literature.

It grew popular very quickly.

Essentially what it was saying is something that appears in the book, that America is a state of mind.

Brodigan is looking for that America.

It's there to his mind in visions of paradise, visions of wilderness, visions of trout fishing,

...