They are playful and grave by turns, close to our everyday lives, and they arrive without answers. Shaun considers why such small things ask so much of our attention in a time when we are worried with more than can possibly be absorbed, and why these figures, held out like water or bread, refuse to be absorbed in the chaos. The episode closes with a few final figures from the Chinese.

A Writer’s World airs on the first and third Sundays at 5 p.m. on KWNK 97.7FM, or anytime at kwnkradio.org. Please support your local independent bookstore: in Reno, The Radical Cat; in Las Vegas, The Writer’s Block.

Shaun considers Short’s spare narrative gift, the devastating poems to his mother and father, and a voice that, like the ancient poets of China and Japan, fills the room with the things of his awareness rather than his presence among them. The episode closes with Short reading “Brothers Playing Catch on Christmas Day,” reprinted with permission of the Press.

A Writer’s World airs on the first and third Sundays at 5 pm on KWNK 97.7FM, or anytime at kwnkradio.org. Please support your local independent bookstore: in Reno, The Radical Cat; in Las Vegas, The Writer’s Block.

Mile after mile, they find the angels of the highway. A receptionist who runs to her car for a Goodnight Moon stamp. A stranger named Liz who flags down help for a broken spoke. A teacher who opens the pool showers so three cyclists can wash the miles from their skin. What unfolds is a meditation on how this land was settled, how it turns into this century, and the goodness Shaun found nearly everywhere. The episode closes with a few lines written on the highway itself.

A Writer’s World airs on the first and third Sundays at 5 p.m. on KWNK 97.7FM, or anytime at kwnkradio.org. Please support your local independent bookstore: in Reno, The Radical Cat; in Las Vegas, The Writer’s Block.

Out of that journey came Bob’s book Arctic Circle, six years in the making, and a friendship Shaun carries forward here. Alongside it, a meditation on Barry Lopez, the longest land migration on Earth, and the people who come into our lives to change what we thought it meant to be human.

A Writer’s World airs on the first and third Sundays at 5pm on KWNK 97.7FM, or anytime at kwnkradio.org. Please support your local independent bookstore: in Reno, The Radical Cat; in Las Vegas, The Writer’s Block.

In this episode of A Writer’s World, guest host David Winkler reflects on T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, the long and forbidding poem he once wanted to throw against a wall. What changed his mind was not a professor or a critic but the poem itself, and the slow discovery that poetry is first of all about sound, not semantics. Drawing on Eliot’s famous opening lines about April breeding lilacs out of the dead land and stirring dull roots with spring rain, David traces the music of the enjambment, the lilac as a flower of resurrection from Whitman to the Greeks, and the gravitational pull of inertia that spring rain refuses to indulge.

Recorded on Easter Sunday, the program closes by reading The Waste Land less as a flag of defeat than as a benediction, an invitation to cultivate wonder even in seasons of bleakness.

A Writer’s World airs on the first and third Sundays at 5 p.m. on KWNK 97.7FM, or anytime at kwnkradio.org. Please support your local independent bookstore: in Reno, The Radical Cat; in Las Vegas, The Writer’s Block.

What unfolds is a meditation on what art is for in a chaotic time, why we still read the ancient Chinese masters, and what Gibson, who refused to ask permission to write from her own authority, leaves the rest of us to wrestle with. The episode closes with an excerpt from her poem “Every Time I Ever Said I Want to Die.”

A Writer’s World airs on the first and third Sundays at 5 p.m. on KWNK 97.7FM, or anytime at kwnkradio.org. Please support your local independent bookstore: in Reno, The Radical Cat; in Las Vegas, The Writer’s Block.

A Writer’s World airs on the first and third Sundays at 5 p.m. on KWNK 97.7FM, or anytime at kwnkradio.org. Please support your local independent bookstore: in Reno, The Radical Cat; in Las Vegas, The Writer’s Block.

Shaun reads from Tsvetaeva’s early work and returns to a central question the poems keep pressing: what do we do when we need to be more than what we were given, and how do we hold on to humanity when fear becomes the daily climate? He also draws a line to contemporary witnesses, including Ilya Kaminsky, and reminds us that literature forged in friction carries a particular kind of clarity.

The episode closes with Margaree Little reading “I trust this book to the wind,” a poem by the same name, used with permission, that releases its words into the world like a bottle into waves.

A Writer’s World airs on the first and third Sundays at 5 p.m. on KWNK 97.7FM, or anytime at kwnkradio.org. Please support your local independent bookstore: in Reno, The Radical Cat; in Las Vegas, The Writer’s Block.

First, Shaun reflects on Baron Wormser’s posthumous collection, James Baldwin Smoking a Cigarette and Other Poems (Slant Books). Moving through a wide field of literary and spiritual references, Wormser’s poems insist on presence, humility, and the discipline of seeing the world as it is, without surrendering tenderness.

Shaun then turns to Steve Gehrke’s Visitation, poems written in the realities of illness and dialysis, and the daily work of staying alive. The episode closes with Gehrke reading “The Hole,” a striking meditation on suffering, mercy, and what remains when the machines fall silent.

A Writer’s World airs on the first and third Sundays at 5 p.m. on KWNK 97.7FM, or anytime at kwnkradio.org. Please support your local independent bookstore: in Reno, The Radical Cat; in Las Vegas, The Writer’s Block.

Shaun then turns to A Walled Presence by Justin Evans (Hobbled Creek Books, 2025), a quieter collection of meditations shaped by flowers, Latin names, prayer, and the discipline of attention. Where Esquinca’s poems refuse silence, Evans’s work invites stillness, asking us to sit with image, impermanence, and the small revelations of the natural world.

The episode closes with Esquinca reading her poem “The U.S. Mexico Border Replaces Itself,” used with permission.

A Writer’s World airs on the first and third Sundays at 5 p.m. on KWNK 97.7FM, or anytime at kwnkradio.org. Please support your local independent bookstore: in Reno, The Radical Cat; in Las Vegas, The Writer’s Block.

Over the next five days, those lines become lyrics. Lyrics become songs. With the musicians’ careful guidance, nine men shape melodies that sound like their lives: country, ballad, love song, sorrow, remembrance, and the ache of being more than what is seen.

By the fourth night, the room fills with the people who run the facility: the warden, deputies, guards. Phones rise to record what no one planned for, not just a performance, but a shift in the air. In the aftermath, a letter from the warden asks the question that changes everything: what would restorative justice look like on this yard?

Shaun calls this moment postscriptural, a time when the obvious lessons can no longer be taken for granted, and dignity becomes an act of leadership. The episode closes with Devin singing from “The Redeemer.”

A Writer’s World airs on the first and third Sundays at 5 p.m. on KWNK 97.7FM, or anytime at kwnkradio.org. Please support your local independent bookstore: in Reno, The Radical Cat; in Las Vegas, The Writer’s Block.

Shaun closes with the final stanzas of “Pity the Nation” by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, a reminder that the work of writers and witnesses still matters, especially when speech is threatened and freedoms erode.

A Writer’s World airs on the first and third Sundays at 5 p.m. on KWNK 97.7FM, or anytime at kwnkradio.org. Please support your local independent bookstore: in Reno, The Radical Cat; in Las Vegas, The Writer’s Block.

At the heart of the episode is a line Shaun carries like a compass: “If we must walk holding grief in one hand, then let us walk holding hope in the other.” The Sierra becomes more than a backdrop here. It becomes a teacher, a witness, and a reminder that the “news of the natural world” still offers meaning, humility, and a way back to ourselves.

A Writer’s World airs on the first and third Sundays at 5:00pm on KWNK 97.7FM, or anytime at kwnkradio.org. Please support your local independent bookstore: in Reno, The Radical Cat; in Las Vegas, The Writer’s Block.

This is a meditation on travel, memory, and the kind of welcome that cannot be bought, a reminder of what it means to live in relationship with others, with the land, and with time itself.

🎧 A Writer’s World airs on the first and third Sundays at 5 p.m. on 97.7FM KWNK or stream anytime at kwnkradio.org.

📚 Support your local independent bookstores:

In Reno, visit The Radical Cat

In Las Vegas, visit The Writer’s Block

📚 Support your local independent bookstores:

In Reno, visit The Radical Cat

In Las Vegas, visit The Writer’s Block

🎧 A Writer’s World airs on the first and third Sundays at 5 p.m. on 97.7FM KWNK or streams anytime at kwnkradio.org.

📚 Support your local independent bookstores:

In Reno, visit The Radical Cat

In Las Vegas, visit The Writer’s Block

“He was always facing the prospect of silence, and through an alchemy we may never know, he kept writing.”

In this episode, Shaun Griffin reflects on the enduring resonance of Federico García Lorca, Spain’s most beloved modern poet, whose surreal verse and tragic death have come to symbolize both resistance and beauty under authoritarianism. From walking the hills of Granada to reading The Dream of Apples, a new translation by Rebecca Seiferle, Shaun explores how Lorca’s poetry lives on through flamenco, queer expression, and the eternal pull of duende.

Shaun shares not only his personal pilgrimage through Lorca’s Spain, but also how these new translations allow Lorca’s voice to ring with modern urgency. What does it mean to listen to a poet who defied silence in the face of fascism? How do we carry forward that courage today?

This episode closes with Seiferle reading “Suspension Bridges,” a haunting reminder of all that we are and all we might still become.

🎧 A Writer’s World airs on the first and third Sundays at 5pm on 97.7FM KWNK or streams anytime at kwnkradio.org.

📚 Support your local independent bookstores:

In Reno, visit The Radical Cat.

In Las Vegas, visit The Writer’s Block.

Inside the prison library, men who had spent decades behind bars found themselves writing lyrics, offering feedback, and collaborating on original music. They explored not only melody and structure, but a path back to themselves. Shaun shares the atmosphere of quiet transformation - of tolerance not as ideology, but practice - and ends the episode with “Life’s a Melody,” a poignant song composed in the workshop.

This is a meditation on art as possibility, even in the most confined of spaces. It’s about what happens when we listen.

🕊️ Featuring gratitude to Nevada Arts Council, the Department of Corrections, and the volunteers and musicians who made this space of expression possible.

🎧 Tune in to A Writer’s World on the first and third Sundays at 5pm on 97.7FM KWNK or stream at kwnkradio.org.

Hello, listeners. Welcome to A Writer's World. This is Shaun Griffin, a poet and writer, hopes to share some part of that world with you here on KWNK.

It's a big subject and we'll see where it leads. For several weeks, I have been thinking about the long journey of a family. Immigrants who would not choose this place, but who came here for work.

And I have been thinking about their literary rootedness in this place, what it gave them, what it enabled them to do with their pens. Together, these writers have explored something of our definition in this vast open land and relinquished their roots to start over here. And they have done so with the plum.

I am not trying to be coy. It is the Laxalt tradition I am referring to. The family name, of course, intimidates and casts a shadow that few writers would choose.

And it is probably silly of me to try and discuss this tradition, but I must. Close listeners to this show, which cannot number more than a few, will know I reviewed Gay Burza's new novel last week. And that got me thinking.

It is the sum of this tradition from which he drew his inspiration. He has come from the well of this family's origins, their beliefs, their still cannot name despite its many inheritances. Burza's novel is many things, but at its core, it is about the underdog, the person who gets left behind.

And it is scored with our humanity. That is the thread that ties Gabe, his mother Nikki, her brother Bruce, and grandfather Bob together. They are incapable of writing anything without our shared humanity.

They simply do not know how. A very long time ago, I was in Bob's creative writing class and listened with my peers to the notes that his wife Joyce, also a literary influence here, helped him and us understand his mini-journalism-cum-noveless predecessors. Crane, London, Steinbeck, Hemingway, and others I have forgotten.

There were good writers in the room, but we knew there was something else there, too, a quality of mind we could only imagine, one that would take us far from the written page to its dreamed conclusion, something very few writers attain, but Laxalt did. When I asked him how he wrote a man in a wheat field so seamlessly, he looked at me, and after much silence said, I don't know. I remember John Gardner's image of the novel, quote, the vivid and continuous dream, and that's what it was, a dream we slipped into and did not leave for many pages, an allegory of right and wrong, something else that defines these four writers, a core belief in what is sacred and what is profane.

To a person, it bled through every page they have created, and when Bob finished reading from Joyce's scrupulous notes on the old man in the sea, he would stop, look up, and quietly search our eyes. Are there any questions? And none of us could respond, having felt like we had just gone to church. This was the tradition he aspired to, journalist come novelist, a tradition so well defined by then that it seemed plausible to a young writer like Bob.

He quietly passed out the reviews of his books from the Times, comparing him to the giants he hoped to emulate, and his early novels and non-fiction stuck with us. In a fair world, which of course is almost forgotten, they would be read in high schools and colleges. They would be understood to be of the American grain, the immigrant story, the story of leaving something you love for something unknown.

Years later, I would visit Bob and Joyce to listen and try to learn from them. Joyce lit a cigarette and looked at Bob. Now what? Meaning, what are you going to tell him now? For some reason, they let me into their hob nailed family, and I watched as Bob's health ebbed.

Each visit, it felt like he was handing me his last book, and I read them when they emerged, stories of the many years abroad in the Basque homeland in Africa, and back home in Carson, stories that were anchored in this broad landscape of survival, yes, but of living without a compass, which is all of us, is it not? He insisted on the expression of living with this contradiction, this not knowing. That is why the prose is compelling. This human we are trying to live is without easy explanation.

The red bow is always just out of reach. We are unfinished. We are lapsed from the ideal, and yet that is the transitory condition of being here, being without answers and living fully despite this conundrum.

I watched this dilemma play out in Bruce's poems, born of much the same material that Gabe explored in the Silver State, the confines of the legal profession. His proximity to good and bad, so close sometimes you could not tell the difference. I watched him do this even as he slips from view, and the book he left us was a careful examination of his losses, which became our losses, what we are willing to proffer in the name of justice, of taking a stand when it seems too much to bear.

Of course, like when I asked Bob how he wrote his seamless novel, Bruce similarly could not convey the origin of his poems. Rather, he looked at me and asked instead, how are you doing, Sean? And Pam, his spouse and caregiver, acknowledged the silence. They came from that place deep inside.

Much as the prose of his sister, Mickey, in her beautiful memoir of growing up in the house that fiction built, The Deep Blue Memory. I must have read the interior of that book a dozen times. It is threaded with a love of family, tradition, isolation, that only immigrants know.

And some would say almost all of us are immigrants, but this was a singular testimony, her way of lengthening the rope from the homeland to the small town on the eastern Sierra, to her father's father and his wife, to her own father and mother, to the voices she heard beneath the table where the coffee was served and the iodine relief of family was etched in every room. The book is part memoir, part fiction, but it is more than a simple category will allow. It is a room within which to navigate this future she inherited.

This reality of living with the grand examples of that humanity that permeated so much of their experience. Like Bruce and her son, Nikki is also a lawyer and her ability to articulate the details of that place, that brown room, that conversation, that melancholy belief in a future nearly damned by its isolation. All of this became the backbone of her story.

Her willingness to be vulnerable when it would have been so much easier to construct a narrative of hiding, of slipping from view. Instead, she gave us a close-up of living with the ancestors, the many voices of politics and persuasion, of carrying on without knowledge of how or if it might happen. Very much like the Joads, very much like the man in the boat trying to find his great catch.

So that when I got to Gabe's novels I could see the threat emerge, this humanity, this willingness to be vulnerable, when the understory was really about imperfection, living without a cornerstone, a method of carrying on but carrying on because. His first book was a triumph of vast separatist idealism, what the young people hoped to find in Etta or something like it. And of course he would go there.

He had to plumb his roots. He had to know what his father and grandfather were made of, where they were made, that bloodline that could not express himself in the fiction of expectation. I'm sure he was met with many ideas of what to write, and equally difficult how to write his way out of the shadow of his family.

But he chose instead to write of the depths that they forged. He returned to the well. It is not so surprising that his books became metaphors for how we treat the underdog, how we behave with, quote, the least of these.

I am not a literary critic or a scholar, but I do know that Gabe and his predecessors are cut from the same cloth. They know right and wrong. They understand who loses and how.

They have lived with the repercussions of silence, of political fallout. They have held big banners in this small state, and yet it is to their words they return. Gabe's narratives are rife with the fallen and the idealists.

They are approximations of what we might become. And what better way to acknowledge the long story from which he emanates. Taken as a whole, the Laxalt literary tradition is one of abiding dignity, of learning to be absolved of the idea of freedom.

To a person, they ask the reader to examine their core belief system to find the humane idea with which they are willing to live. And I am certain that is why their books have lasted. They have found the thread from which we build our curious, magnanimous spirit, even and especially when it seems so difficult.

That place without definition that all of us can define. That human we aspire to be. This concludes our program on the Laxalt literary tradition.

Please join us in the collective ethersphere on the first and third Sundays at 5 p.m. for our next meditation on words. Or stream it at kwnkradio.org. And please support your local independent bookstore. And we know that's the radical cat, and in Las Vegas that's the writer's block.

They're open and we need them. Thank you, be safe, and spread a little kindness wherever you are.