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Hello and welcome back to BigMood, LittleMood. I'm your host, Daniel Levery.

With me in the studio this week is Elisa Gonzalez, a poet,

essayist and fiction writer. Her first book, Grand Tour, will be out this month.

Thank you for having me, Danny. I'm so excited. I'm so excited for you to be here too.

I didn't want to do anything that would mar the beautiful

brevity of your bio, which I can't tell you how strongly I admire.

But you're also my summer camp friend, my primordial sister,

the other half of my soul wandering about in the world.

Yeah, we're basically like that Aristophanies play, but we've found each other.

Yeah, or that one song from Headwig that everyone was singing in high school.

I didn't go to high school. Oh, that's right.

So, Elisa and I met at summer camp. We were at a writer's residency together,

and pretty quickly bonded over Midwestern evangelical childhoods,

and variations on the sort of like evangelical subculture that we both somewhat grew up in.

But yours was a little bit more bumpy, fractious, interesting, secluded, Gothic.

I was going to say reclusive or perhaps hermetic, I don't know, but Gothic would work too.

Yeah, all of those. Yeah, you were homeschooled and I was just in school school.

So, we got to compare some really interesting notes, and then you went to real college,

and I went to fake Christian college. So, we sort of switched places for the end of our education,

...