Memento Morbid

<div> <p><strong>Grave dirt makes the best mud pies… <br></strong><br>Leila Taylor, writer, designer, cultural critic and Creative Director of Brooklyn Public Library, joins Joanna Ebenstein for a rich, wide-ranging conversation about the Gothic as both a cultural form and a lived sensibility—one that moves through memory, history, music, and space.</p><p>Drawing from her acclaimed books <em>Darkly: Black History and America’s Gothic Soul</em> and <em>Sick Houses: Haunted Homes and the Architecture of Dread</em>, Taylor explores how Gothic feeling is not confined to aesthetics or subculture, but emerges through lived experience: in architecture that unsettles, in histories that refuse resolution, and in the emotional residue of place. </p><p>She reflects on growing up as a “spooky kid” in Massachusetts, playing funeral in a cemetery with friends—lying in open graves, performing rituals of death, and making mud pies from “grave dirt.” These early encounters with mortality become a lens for understanding how we learn to live alongside death, even as children.</p><p>The conversation moves through Black Gothic traditions, literary and musical influences—tracing back to  Billie Holiday’s <em>Strange Fruit</em> and moving into Joy Division, The Cure, and Siouxsie and the Banshees—as well as Gothic literature from <em>Frankenstein</em> to <em>Wuthering Heights</em>. Taylor also reflects on haunting media, brutalist architecture, and theories of residual memory, sound, and haunting.</p><p>📢Listeners! You are invited to share your own offerings: voice notes on death, dying, ritual and the beauty of finitude. Include your first name and location if you want them shared- you might be featured in an upcoming episode. Send your offering via WhatsApp to <a href="https://wa.me/message/GFWDJDKM26K3F1%20">+44 2921 690468</a>.</p><p>💀 Memento Morbid is produced by Overcoat Media in partnership with Morbid Anatomy.</p><p> Host: Joanna Ebenstein<br> Series Producer: Jess Gunasekara<br> Studio Engineer: Fernando Robleto Vargas<br> Additional Production and Sound Design: Katie Hill<br> Production Coordinator: Janice Jardine<br> Executive Producer: Steven Rajam<br> Artwork: Lauren Seeley</p><p> <a href="http://substack.com/@mementomorbid">substack.com/@mementomorbid</a></p></div>

<div> <p><strong>What Does It Mean to Become Someone Else?<br><br></strong>Award-winning actor and producer Paul Giamatti joins Joanna Ebenstein for a wide-ranging, eerie, and often amusing conversation about monsters, performance, and the porous boundary between life and death.</p><p>From childhood fascinations with werewolves and classic horror to the uncanny psychological states accessed through acting, Giamatti reflects on a lifelong obsession with transformation—of bodies, identities, and consciousness. He recounts a genuinely unsettling ghostly moment during a production of Hamlet, explores the idea of acting as a form of possession, and considers why theatre can feel more spiritually charged than film.</p><p>The conversation weaves through late-night radio and the hypnotic voice of Art Bell, Giamatti’s cult television series <em>Lodge 49</em>, esoteric book collecting, and the strange intimacy of voices in the dark.</p><p>Thoughtful, curious, and quietly uncanny, this episode asks what it really means to inhabit other lives—and what those experiences might reveal. </p><p>📢Listeners! You are invited to share your own <em>offerings</em>: voice notes on death, dying, ritual and the beauty of finitude. Include your first name and location if you want them shared- you might be featured in an upcoming episode. Send your offering via WhatsApp to <a href="https://wa.me/message/GFWDJDKM26K3F1%20">+44 2921 690468</a>.</p><p>💀 <em>Memento Morbid</em> is produced by Overcoat Media in partnership with Morbid Anatomy.<br>Host: Joanna Ebenstein<br>Series Producer: Jess Gunasekara<br>Studio Engineer: Fernando Velazco Vargas<br>Additional Production and Sound Design: Katie Hill<br>Production Coordinator: Janice Jardine <br>Executive Producer: Steven Rajam<br>Artwork: Lauren Seeley</p><p><a href="https://substack.com/@mementomorbid">substack.com/@mementomorbid</a></p></div>

<div> <p><strong>What Happens to a Body After Death?</strong><br>Mortician, author and death care reformer Caitlin Doughty joins Joanna Ebenstein for a candid, curious and surprisingly funny conversation about what really happens to our bodies after we die and why modern Western culture would rather not think about it.</p><p>From Caitlin’s early days working in a crematory to founding Order of the Good Death, they explore death positivity, funeral industry myths, human composting, bone rituals and the strange ways we hide mortality from view.</p><p>Are we the weird ones in history when it comes to death? And what might change if we looked at it directly?</p><p>📢Listeners! You are invited to share your own <em>offerings</em>: voice notes on death, dying, ritual and the beauty of finitude. Include your first name and location if you want them shared- you might be featured in an upcoming episode. Send your offering via WhatsApp to <a href="https://wa.me/message/GFWDJDKM26K3F1%20">+44 2921 690468</a>.</p><p>💀 <em>Memento Morbid</em> is produced by Overcoat Media in partnership with Morbid Anatomy.<br>Host: Joanna Ebenstein<br>Series Producer: Jess Gunasekara<br>Studio Engineer: Fernando Velazco Vargas<br>Additional Production and Sound Design: Katie Hill<br>Executive Producer: Steven Rajam<br>Artwork: Lauren Seeley</p><p><a href="https://substack.com/@mementomorbid">substack.com/@mementomorbid<br></a></p></div>

<div> <p><strong>Memento Morbid<br></strong><em>Fascinating, poignant, and surprisingly life-affirming conversations about death, the human condition, and life’s great mysteries.<br></em><br>Join <strong>Joanna Ebenstein</strong>, founder of Morbid Anatomy, for <em>Memento Morbid, </em>a series of surprisingly life-affirming conversations around topics that tend to be deemed morbid. Meet a wide range of fascinating individuals including death workers, artists, New York Times bestselling authors, a practicing witch, Hollywood actors, and a former crematorium worker- all exploring the rituals, stories, and delightfully strange ways humans confront the unknowable. Each episode is curious, insightful, and often striking, revealing the beauty, humor, and meaning we can find in life by confronting death head on. </p><p>📢Listeners! You are invited to share your own <em>offerings</em>: voice notes on death, dying, ritual and the beauty of finitude. Include your first name and location if you want them shared- you might be featured in an upcoming episode. Send your offering via WhatsApp to <a href="https://wa.me/message/GFWDJDKM26K3F1%20"><strong>+44 2921 690468</strong></a>.</p><p>💀 <em>Memento Morbid</em> is produced by Overcoat Media in partnership with Morbid Anatomy.</p><p>Host: Joanna Ebenstein<br>Series Producer: Jess Gunasekara<br>Studio Engineer: Fernando Velazco Vargas<br>Additional Production and Sound Design: Katie Hill<br>Executive Producer: Steven Rajam<br>Artwork: Lauren Seeley</p></div>