Episode 386 — Alex Mar

Otherppl with Brad Listi

Brad Listi

Arts, Society & Culture, Books

4.8 • 554 Ratings

🗓️ 28 October 2015

⏱️ 95 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Alex Mar is the guest. Her new memoir, Witches of America, is available now from Farrar, Straus, & Giroux. Alex showed up in the car of a journalist. She was, I think, fresh from the airport, and a journalist had picked her up and interviewed her on the way to my house. Busy author. She got out of the journalist's car and walked back to my garage and sat down and talked to me for an hour about witches and Paganism and magic and religion and the occult. I often worry, when an author is on an extended tour, doing a ton of media, that I'll catch her in a state of fatigue, that she'll be "all talked out" by the time she gets to me. (This can happen.) Fortunately, this wasn't the case with Alex, who was totally game and has a truly incredible story to tell. I hold journalists, and particularly those who work deep in the field, in the very highest regard. It's a noble line of work. Alex has spent much of the past five years doing just that, and Witches in America is the very fine result. Today's monologue is (spoiler alert) pretty long. The podcast got a mention in the New York Times this past Sunday, and it meant something to me. I talk about that, and about the origins of this show and the people who inspired me to create it, and so on. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey folks, today's episode is brought to you by tweaked audio. Do you need some new earbuds? Do you need some new
0:05.3	headphones? Do you want to improve your listening situation? Go to tweakeda audio.com and enter the promo
0:11.6	code other people, O-T-H-E-R-P-P-L. Enter that promo code and get 33% off of any purchase at tweakeda audio.com. These are earbuds.
0:24.5	These are headphones. You can listen to things with them. Go and get some. Oh, my God.
0:31.3	You are not alone. You have found other people.
0:37.1	You and I have a friend in common.
0:39.6	Every stupid thing that a writer could do I've done.
0:42.4	I think it's really beautiful.
0:44.0	Jesus, what a struggle, you know?
0:46.4	It was incredible.
0:47.6	It was like your head exploded, seeing what was really there.
0:50.8	And now here's your host, Brad Listing.
0:53.6	Just one person at just one time. All right, guys, here we go again. This is it. This is other people. This is me sitting here talking. This is you over there, crouched in the ready position. How's it going? I'm Brad Listy. I'm in Los Angeles. I am sitting here in Los Angeles with Halloween imminent. This is the Halloween episode.
1:17.4	I've decided that. And Halloween, of course, is coming up just a few days from now,
1:22.9	Saturday. And with this in mind, I have procured some Halloween sound effects.
1:29.6	My guest today is Alex Marr. She has a new book of nonfiction out from Farrar, Strauss, and Jureau.
1:35.1	The book is called Witches of America. It's a riveting account of Alex's five-year journey into the occult.
1:39.0	She is, among other things, a journalist and a filmmaker.
1:43.7	And she spent a couple years making a documentary film called American Mystic.
1:45.5	Perhaps you saw that.
1:54.1	And she also wrote this book, both of which deal with witchcraft, paganism, magic.
1:59.4	Just had a great time talking with her.
	...

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