Hello and welcome to Psychic Teachers. I'm your host Deb Bowen and my lovely co-host Samantha

Fay is off tonight but I am thrilled and absolutely honored to have with me a wonderful

guest tonight. I have Mary Mahoney who is the host of a podcast called Chakters that

I can't wait to tell you about. Welcome Mary.

Thank you. Thanks so much for having me, Deb.

I'm so glad you're here. So folks, a flyback Mary invited me and Samantha to be on her,

one of her launch programs actually of her chapters podcast to talk about books we love because

if you're a regular listener to our podcast you know we're always talking about books.

And it was so wonderful because Mary and I found this wonderful common ground with a

children's book that we both love so much called The Witcher Blackbird Pond and we just

went off on this whole long tangent about that book for a very long time didn't we Mary?

Yes we did. I know it was great. It was just wonderful and so Mary is a historian and

she studies the history of bibliotherapy, bibliomeating books and the use of books as medicine

and we're going to talk a lot during this hour about what Mary means by books as medicine.

She has a hugely broad interest in reading and in its history. And so what she does with

her chapters podcast is that she aims to tell stories of readers' lives who the books that

have meant the most to them. And she interviews folks and I'm going to get her to talk a little

bit later about the kind of people she interviews and what she asks them to do as they come on

to her chapters podcast to talk about her books, the books that they love. So that's just wonderful.

What Mary is doing with this great podcast and I hear tell it's growing and doing really well,

is that right Mary? That's right. We're really encouraged and we're excited about where it's going.

Great. Wonderful. Okay. So we kind of start Mary by asking you kind of where you got the idea to do this

...