You can listen to the professional left wherever you get your podcasts on Netroots Radio or at our website,

proleftpod.com, where you can also contribute to this podcast. There's a PayPal button at our website,

or you can mail us a letter and or contribution at Post Office Box 913, Springfield, Illinois, 62791.

This is the podcast for September 16th, 2025.

It's not safe for work.

Recorded live from the Cornfield Resistance,

where it's been a big week in local fascism.

It's the professional left with Drift Glass and Blue Gal.

Okay. and BlueGal. Today we're going to exercise our writer's privilege and begin by sneaking in a lesson for

free that every professional writing coach will charge you $150 to hear.

And that is that in every kind of writing,

concrete, specific details, juicy details can make or break a story. It's true. It's true. I know it seems like a paradox, but it is in fact true. The deeper the essayist or the fiction writer or the screenwriter goes into the specifics about the time and the place and the physical elements of the story, the sea, smell, touch, hear elements of the story. The more universal its appeal will be.

Here are three very short examples from three famous short stories

that are mandatory reading. From Rudyard Kipling's outstanding story, The Gardiner,

quote, then there came to her as next of kin, an official intimation, backed by a page of a letter to her in indelible pencil, a silver

identity disc, and a watch, to the effect that the body of Lieutenant Michael Terrell

had been found identified and re-interred in Hagenzeal Third Military Cemetery. The letter of the row and the grave's number in that row

duly given, unquote.

You can hear all the detail in there.

Just very specific.

This is from one of my favorite Chekhov stories, The Lady with the Dog.

Quote, it was said that a new person had appeared on the seafront, a lady with a little dog.

...