I'm Christopher Leiden. This is open source. We speak of the mystery of Herman Melville or the misery of Melville.

The American masterpiece man from Moby Dick alone. He is our Shakespeare, our Dante, though he fled the writing of

prose for the last half of his life and in death the New York Times misspelled his name. This podcast is a sort of demonstration of another way, a better way to crack the riddle of Melville.

Read the book aloud with someone you love and jot down every question that comes to your mind.

Before you know it, you'll have written your own novel on a few hundred Post-it notes.

Our guests, Christopher Batche Bachelor and Jennifer Hable call their novel Day's work and it's a marvel

You call it a novel which is to say not criticism exactly or biography or what about autobiography what about

auto fiction there are a lot of auto fictional elements in the book for sure most

notably I did become obsessed with reading about Herman Melville during the pandemic like our narrator did and you know a lot of the elements of the marriage that's depicted in the book

resembles Chris and my marriage,

although quite a bit of it is made up as well.

I think we're sort of trying to depict the truth of the marriage through fictional means if that makes sense.

Interesting. Can you beat that, Chris?

I mean the way I lurk around the house and around the kitchen is probably pretty close to

memoir.

Jen's a poet and came at this originally through poetry.

So that was on the table.

Literary biography was on the table.

We were once, after reading, we were ambushed by non-fiction writers who were adamant. the is interesting but we just thought since there was some tiny bit of drama in the

narrator's quest and that she wasn't entirely us that it was a novel.

For readers like me the book comes through as a conversation in short sentences composed by two writers who

chance to be husband and wife leaving post-it notes so to speak in a sort of

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