Podcast on Episode 898 for Tuesday the 1st of July 2025.

This Mentor lives by J. R. Dawson and John Wiswell, read by John Bell, produced by Eric Valdez

and selected by guest editor Devon Martin. Rated PG.

Good morning, good day, good afternoon and good evening, and welcome to Podcastle, the Flying Castle of Fantasy Fiction. I'm your host, Matt Dovey, and it is my absolute and joyous privilege to open a special podcast event through this month of July 25.

Disability, Pride and Magic.

We have five stories for you in total, including today's, from authors J. R. Dawson, John Wiswell,

Gillian Knox, Christine Lucas, Cat Rambo and E.M. Fault, as read by some of the very best

narrators we know, and all selected

by special guest editor, our very own excellent human slash colony of uncooperative cells, Devin

Martin. It's a topic close to my heart, as you know from probably a good half of my

outro runs these past few years, and Devin is one of the most thoughtful people I know as well as

someone close to the topic too so I am very excited indeed to walk through these stories

with you and see what they've selected for us.

Before we do though I'm afraid I have to deliver some sad news to you all.

Eleanor is, through real-life circumstances, being forced to step down

as co-editor for bullshit bureaucratic reasons that are unfair, nonsensical, but too important

to ignore. I'm afraid we must leave it as vague as that. I personally am absolutely gutted

by this because Eleanor is my oldest writing friend and it

still amazes the both of us that we ended up here together. We first met online through

Critters.org as we were each starting out, struggling to muster some semblance of craft

and understanding of writing so we could do this thing we wanted to do. I just checked back

and I joined Critters in April 2013 and my first email from Eleanor for it was only five weeks later.

...