Hello, everyone, and welcome to Speaking with Joy, a podcast to fill your soul, challenge your mind, and make you brave.

I'm your host, Joy Clarkson, and an evangelist for all things good, true, and beautiful.

So make yourself a cup of tea, find somewhere comfortable, and let's dive in to this week's

episode.

Whatever your end may be, accept my amazement.

May I stand until death forever at attention for any or least instruction or

enlightenment. I even feel sure you will assist me again, master of insight and beauty.

Hi everybody and welcome back to Speaking with Joy. I delivered the last episode of my series on Aggressively

Happy interviews with people about the themes in my book, Aggressively Happy, a realist

guide to believing in the goodness of life, a few weeks ago and took a bit of a break from

podcasting, if not from life. I've been busy helping with the launch of the music

issue over at Plow Quarterly and getting back into some of my academic nonsense. I tease, of course,

but no, I've been really enjoying getting to prison at some conferences and work in some research.

And I'm just now getting round to restarting

the podcast. As I've mentioned in the past, I always have a backlog of wonderful interviews with

people that I just have to edit and put up here. So over the next few weeks, I'm going to start

sharing a few of those. And I'm really excited to share those with you.

But before I did, I just wanted to do two things. One was to thank you all for your enthusiasm in my book launch, and then to read you a poem to start off this new kind of new series of episodes.

So first, let me just say thank you to everyone.

Over the past two months, my book launched in February, February 15th, the day after Valentine's.

And so it's been out now for nearly two months. And what a whirlwind it has

been. Launching a book is a really strange thing because before, like the time it usually takes

...