Welcome to Literary Friction. I'm Carrie Plitt and I'm here in Oxford, but on my screen is the lovely face of Octavia Bright in London.

She has a very high pony today and I'm loving it.

Hi, Octavia. Hi, Carrie. How are you? Well, me and my high pony are having fun with the headset.

I've also got on pretending to be an air traffic controller from the 1960s. It's great.

It's a whole look and I'm loving it. I feel very powerful. I've also got my sad lamp on and so I'm kind of bathed in this like pretty extraterrestrial seeming light. I'm fine. I'm absolutely fine. I'm bored of lockdown and I want to go on a holiday. But apart from that, I'm all right. How about how about you to be honest I'm finding the second

lockdown pretty tough it is kind I'm just hitting a wall this week I can't believe it's

only been two weeks it feels like it's been like 17 weeks I did not realize how much weather

and daylight made a difference in the first lockdown and And the darkness is just destroying my soul a little. It's heavy, man. It's really heavy. Yeah. But I'm coping. And I have to say that recording with you is always such a bright spot. And I'm not just saying that. No, it's the same for me. It really is. It it's it's wonderful to have time that we know we're

going to have like an interesting conversation yeah and we always end up talking for way too long

both before and after the recording which i think is a good sign isn't it yeah like for hours

sometimes um just on our little mics. So anyway, that's been

lovely. We had a very long session the other night for a number of reasons, and we were both so

cranky and tired and hungry, really hungry, because it was over dinner. And somehow it was still kind of wonderful yeah it was

really fun so yeah i'm feeling good about that also i think at this point it's time to say thank you to

eddie and john for making us dinner then not just that one night but um yeah on many many nights yeah on to the show we're thrilled

that will be welcoming the writer oteka yuagba on literary friction today we'll be talking to her about

her essay whites which examines her feelings in the wake of George Floyd's murder and the failure of

white allyship. It's an incredible, powerful comment on race in our society, and it's been

published as a beautiful little book this month. So in honor of whites, the wider theme of our

show today is the political essay. Do words have the power to change things? How do you make a good argument in writing?

Does the form of the essay lend itself particularly well to politics? Picking up from our discussion

of the form of the essay with Brian Dylan in 2017, I can't believe that was 2017. Me neither.

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