Hello, I'm David Kern.

I'm Karen Swallow Pryor.

And yes, that is Karen going second.

Heidi is not here.

She is in Greece still.

Well, I guess the day you're listening to this,

she probably is on her way home,

on a flight over the ocean.

But as of this recording she's uh still

gallivanting around around g around greece is galivanting the wrong word is that too negative

karen you think i don't know i think it sounds lovely more hiking she sent a picture of i think

the acropolis and some you know old ancient temple so she's having a great time

she and her son Jack are exploring the world together which sounds pretty cool so Karen and I are

holding down the fort here on close reads as we discuss the scarlet letter we're going to be discussing

chapters 14 through 19,

and we'll see how long we go. This is kind of an open-ended conversation. We'll have

plenty of time with Heidi on the next episode, and then of course we'll have the Q&A episode

after we finish the book. So this is kind of the penultimate discussion on the,

well, not on the book itself, because the Q&A still counts. But you know what I mean?

This will be our, we've got one section of reading after this, which we'll discuss next week.

Karen, first of all, how are you?

I'm good. I'm getting into summer mode and here in Virginia and it's lovely. We've had a very cool spring for us, which has been nice, but we're also getting, I don't know if you are, but we're getting a little bit of that haze and smoke from the Canadian wildfires. So that's weird.

...