Let's Have a Renaissance: The DateKeepers Podcast with Itto and Mekiya Outini

In this episode, we speak with Mark Brazaitis about his adventures in Guatemala, how not to build a grain silo, avoiding prison while abroad, and why so few publishers are taking advantage of readily available free media opportunities. Mark is the author of nine books, including The River of Lost Voices: Stories from Guatemala (winner of the 1998 Iowa Short Fiction Award), The Incurables: Stories (winner of the 2012 Richard Sullivan Prize and the 2013 Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award in Prose), and American Seasons: A Novel (Main Street Rag, 2024). A former Peace Corps Volunteer, he holds an MFA from Bowling Green State University and now teaches English and directs the Creative Writing Program at West Virginia University.

We recently received an angry email demanding that we answer one simple question: why do we interview busy, talented people and then scrap the recordings? In this episode, we pull back the curtain and give you a glimpse of what goes on behind the scenes here at Let’s Have a Renaissance. Join us for a trip down memory lane in the company of some of those busy, talented people whose time we’ve been wasting. Enjoy!

In this special episode, painter, graphic novelist, and animated filmmaker Roland Becerra takes us on a guided tour of his most immersive, visually striking, and psychologically unsettling works: a hybrid painting-film set in Bridgeport, New Jersey, in which the witch is but a foil for the real antagonist; a series of paintings in which ghosts manifest as masked partygoers at a frenzied bacchanal; an animated film in which a mysterious flower spreads a plague that turns its victims into lotion-zombies; and more. Roland has exhibited paintings and digital images around the US, while his films have been screened worldwide, at such events as the YETI FilmFest in Iceland (2024), the Rock Horror Film Festival in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (2024), and the Sundance Festival in Park City, Utah (2009). He holds an MFA from Yale and currently teaches at the Boise State University School of Design and Visual Studies in Boise, Idaho.

In this episode, our first ever Halloween special, we read and discuss three of our stories, selected just for the occasion: “From the Rat’s Throat,” originally published in The Argyle; “House Divided,” recently published by Jersey Devil Press, and “Why I Don’t Deserve to Be in Jail This Halloween,” first published by Midwest Weird last Halloween.

In this episode, we speak with composer Huck Hodge about whether music fundamentally is “made of” time, the creative faculties that one hones by reading and communicating in a second language, and his dream encounters with the demonic and divine. Huck received the Charles Ives Living, the largest music award conferred by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, in 2018. His other standout honors include support from the MacDowell, Guggenheim, Bogliasco, and Fromm Foundations, the American Academy in Rome, Copland House, New Music USA, and others. He was educated at Columbia University and the Staatliche Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst in Stuttgart, Germany, and he now teaches and chairs the composition program at the University of Washington in Seattle.