In this episode of the Project Narrative Podcast, Julia Watson and Jim Phelan read and discuss a particularly moving piece of life writing, Alice Walker&#8217;s &#8220;Beauty: When the Other Dancer is the Self,&#8221; first published in Ms. Magazine and then in Walker&#8217;s collection of nonfiction, In Search of Our Mothers&#8217; Gardens in 1983. Julia Watson is an Academy Professor Emerita of Comparative Studies and a former Associate Dean of Arts and Sciences at the Ohio State University and a Core Faculty Member of Project Narrative.

Episode 8: Jim Phelan & Brian McHale — “Chicxulub” by By T. C. Boyle

The Project Narrative podcast is built on the idea that storytelling is one of humanity’s greatest inventions, a way in which we both seek to understand the world and to change it. The podcast features scholars of narrative in conversation about short narratives that engage in that work of knowing and intervening. In each episode, a scholar reads a narrative aloud and then discusses it with the host of the podcast, Jim Phelan, the director of Project Narrative. The conversations range across a wide array of topics: the guest’s reasons for selecting it; the sources of its appeal, including the pleasures it offers and the challenges it presents; the claims it makes about understanding some part of the world and about doing something as a result.