Martha Barnette - FRIENDS WITH WORDS

[00:00] Cindy: Welcome to Thoughts from a Page, a member of the Evergreen Podcasts Network. I'm Cindy Burnett, and I am so glad you're here. I personally select and read every book featured on the show so I can bring you thoughtful spoiler-free author interviews.

[00:24] Whether you're deciding what to read next or looking for deeper insight after finishing a book, you're in the right place. I hope these conversations will enrich your reading life. In addition to the podcast, I write a monthly column, Buzz Reads, featuring my top five picks for each month which is linked in the Show Notes.

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[01:05] I am so grateful.

[01:06] Today, Martha Barnette joins me to chat about Friends with Words. I am a huge word nerd. I love anything related to word origins, grammar, dictionaries, anything of the sort. So I was really excited to read this one and it definitely did not disappoint.

[01:21] Martha is a longtime journalist, dynamic public speaker, and co-host of the popular radio show and podcast Away with Words. She lives in San Diego. I hope you enjoy our conversation.

[01:33] Welcome Martha. How are you today?

[01:35] Martha: Hey, I'm doing well. How about you, Cindy?

[01:37] Cindy: Doing great and I'm really looking forward to chatting and I'm always a little more anxious when I'm interviewing a fellow podcaster or radio show person as you. And you've been on the air for 20 years, so I feel a lot more pressure.

[01:50] Martha: Oh, don't feel pressure at all. You're wonderful. And you also have a mellifluous voice, so that works really well.

[01:57] Cindy: My kids always laugh when people tell me that because people tell me that regularly that I have a great podcasting voice and they're like, really?

[02:06] I don't think they feel like they get to hear that voice all that often.

[02:10] Martha: Yeah, no, I'm sure people just, just listen for the fun of it. On, on. I hear people all the time tell me, I listen to you as I go to sleep and I'm like, am I boring?

[02:21] Am I a sleep aid?

[02:23] But I think some people like the voice.

[02:24] Cindy: You're like, thanks, I think.

[02:26] Martha: Yeah, right. Exactly.

[02:28] Cindy: Well, why don't you first give me a quick synopsis of Friends with Words, and then we can talk more about your show and the book.

[02:34] Martha: Okay.

[02:35] Cindy: Yeah.

[02:35] Martha: Friends with Words is a book about the wonder of words themselves. It's about the joy of language, which encompasses a whole lot of things,

[02:45] a lot of things that we talk about on my show, like word origins and regional dialects and old words and new words and slang and words that ought to exist but maybe don't, but should.

[02:57] Anyway, people send us suggestions for words that should exist, like, you know, if your favorite restaurant closes, what's the word for that?

[03:06] One of our listeners suggested melencholy, which I just love. I still use that word today when I hear about a restaurant closing. So there's a whole lot in the book about words themselves.

[03:18] A book for fellow word nerds. But I also added a lot of memoir because I was writing the book and people were telling me, you have so many great stories about how you fell in love with language or how you've been managing to do the show for two decades now,

[03:34] which is kind of shocking to me. I didn't realize it until I sat down to write the book, and I thought, oh,

[03:40] 20 years at this.

[03:42] Cindy: That's a long time. I've been doing this show five years, and I feel like that's a long time.

[03:47] Martha: Mm. So you're celebrating your lustrum, in other words.

[03:50] Cindy: Exactly. And one of the things I can't wait to talk about with you is whether every conversation ties back to words. Because for me, as a reader, I feel like almost every conversation ties back to some book I've read or some book I wanna read.

[04:02] And I'm just constantly saying, oh, I read a book about that. And I would bet with words, it's even more that way.

[04:08] Martha: Oh, gosh, yes. And I'm so lucky that I've been able to do Away with Words for all this time. Because,

[04:15] Cindy, there was a time in my life before I was doing the show where every word would set me off on some etymological romp, you know, and I could stop down conversations cold 

[04:29] With saying, hey, did you know that the word cocktail comes from the name of an old kind of horse when people used to **** their tails to dock their tails, and.

[04:39] And, I mean, that could stop down a dinner party conversation really quickly.

[04:44] So I just feel incredibly lucky that I've been able to find this community of fellow word nerds and blab about words once a week.

[04:56] Cindy: Well, let's talk a little bit about your show. It's called Away with Words. Will you tell me more about it?

[05:00] Martha: Yeah. Again, it's what we call a call out show,

[05:04] which was modeled after Car Talk. In fact,

[05:07] a lot of people know Car Talk,

[05:09] the funny show that airs on NPR stations about cars.

[05:15] And the former producer of our show actually traveled to Boston and hung out with the Car Talk guys for a week and learned how to do this kind of show.

[05:24] So the show sounds live. We make no secret of the fact that it's not live.

[05:30] It's pre recorded. And so that gives us time to screen calls and figure out what'll work well on the show. And so actually what happens is that the producer calls out to different people who have been selected for the show.

[05:46] And we're looking for a diverse audience, diversity of age, diversity of backgrounds, and diversity of questions. Because my co host, Grant Barrett and I have done live shows before on the BBC and elsewhere.

[06:01] And you know, when people are calling in with questions, sometimes it's not that interesting because you hear the same questions over and over again. Or, you know, a little kid calls and wants to know the origin of a naughty word.

[06:13] And

[06:14] it just doesn't work as well as a call out system.

[06:19] So that's what we use. And then the producer lines up the callers each week and lines them up like, I like to say, like planes circling O' Hare Airport. And then we just go through the show and record it as if it's live.

[06:32] That's called live to tape in the public radio biz.

[06:37] Cindy: So people submit questions online or through some method,

[06:41] and then your producer or you go through them, decide which sound interesting, which would create the diverse background, diverse questions, and then reach out to them and say, okay, at 2:00pm on Tuesday, please be available.

[06:52] Martha: Exactly. That's the way it works.

[06:54] Cindy: Great. And so then they call them. That person presents their question. Do you interact with them?

[07:00] Martha: Not before we're actually recording the call. So we're not interacting with them before they're talking as if they're on the air.

[07:07] But it does give us time to research the questions. I like to tell people we're not as bright as we sound because we end up bringing a lot of information.

[07:17] Because that's another reason not to do that kind of show live. Because if you're being asked about etymology,

[07:23] you want time to go dig up those primary sources and compare them and craft an answer that is not only legitimate, but makes sense.

[07:34] Cindy: Especially if you are looking for a variety of questions, things that people aren't asking all the time. Of course, you're not going to know the answers to all of those.

[07:41] Martha: No, exactly. Although I have to say that Grant and I do a lot of live appearances around the country, and often after we do our little presentation, the best part of it all is the Q and A, because everybody has a question about language.

[07:57] I don't care who you are. You stop mid sentence sometimes and you think, where did that word come from? Or why do we use that phrase?

[08:05] Or you have a grandma who used to say something that doesn't make sense,

[08:10] like why did she say I swanee when she was exclaiming about something? Well, we've heard these questions. You know, we've been doing it for a long time. We've heard these questions before.

[08:21] And so often the best part of our presentations, our live presentations, are the Q and A section, because people bring great questions, and we do know the answers to a lot of them.

[08:34] Well.

[08:35] Cindy: And you have a regional section in your book. And recently in my family, one word that came up that we were debating was a flat of water, because we've used that term forever.

[08:44] And then Caroline, my oldest, was using it with some friends, and none of them had ever heard that term.

[08:48] Martha: A flat of water. Mm.

[08:51] Cindy: Like if you take a case of water, but a flat of water instead.

[08:54] Martha: Oh, that's fascinating. Um, see, that's, that's one that I don't know. I mean, I'm thinking about it. Flat is used in,

[09:02] in other contexts. Like people in the National Puzzlers League refer to certain kinds of puzzles as flat. And it's different words arranged along,

[09:14] you know, as if they're on a flat surface. But I don't know that one. And that makes me very excited because it means I've got something to research after we finish talking.

[09:23] Cindy: Well, good, because I was so curious because it's something we've used forever, and I don't know where I got it from. We've all used it, and then Caroline's friends. I'm familiar with it, but I feel like when I asked a few people, they knew it as well.

[09:35] But I don't know, it's interesting how words are different like that.

[09:38] Martha: Oh, absolutely. Yeah. That's really fascinating. I'm thinking of, like, a flight of drinks, but I don't know about a flat of water. And, 

[09:47] and again, I just can't emphasize enough how excited I am to hear a word that I don't know about.

[09:53] Cindy: So what are your favorite types of questions to get on the show or in your live appearances?

[09:58] Martha: Oh, man, there are just so many. I love it when people bring us their linguistic heirlooms. You know, that thing that's been passed down in their family maybe like the word flat, I don't know.

[10:10] But words that have been passed down in their family,

[10:14] you know,

[10:15] words are so personal to people and either passed down from older relatives or words that bubble up from little kids.

[10:24] I love learning the words that little kids have come up with and the family adopts them. It becomes part of their familect, their individual lexicon of vocabulary. You know, a kid misunderstands the word cabinet as have in it, which makes a lot of sense, actually.

[10:43] You know, I'm looking for something and it's in the have in it. And some little kid made that mistake calling it a have in it. And their parents called us because that's what that family uses now instead of cabinet.

[10:56] And we heard from another listener whose daughter referred to the 16th President of the United States as Abraham LinkedIn and now I just love that. I mean, you're going to hang on to that word even as that kid grows up, you know, even as that kid becomes an adult.

[11:12] Families hang on to those family words like that. And I think those are completely charming. So I enjoy those too.

[11:20] Cindy: Well, and it really must be interesting for you now with the advent of social media and particularly TikTok and all of these words that just bubble up in the social media arena.

[11:30] Martha: Yeah, that's been really exciting to watch because they're bubbling up constantly much faster, I think, as they're getting distributed much faster than they used to be. And one of the words that I really got a kick out of that I saw recently was the term stinge watching.

[11:47] Do you know this term?

[11:49] Cindy: I don't.

[11:50] Martha: Well, it's like binge watching, only it's the opposite. It's when you get really stingy because you are watching a series and you don't want it to end. I guess maybe there's stinge reading too, but we don't talk about binge reading so much.

[12:05] But stinge watching is like binge watching, only you don't want the series to end, so you're watching it more and more slowly. Maybe you space out the episodes that you watch because, you know, you just don't want AP Bio to end.

[12:20] Or I still haven't finished Blackish, which I really love because I don't want to see those kids in the sitcom grow up.

[12:28] Cindy: I was thinking about both Paradise and The Pitt. Two shows recently that were so good and we did binge watch them, but then they were done and I was really sad, so I should have stinge watched them.

[12:39] Martha: Yeah. And don't you feel the same way about books like you get toward the end and you're turning the pages more slowly or you're just taking breaths and putting the book down and you don't want it to end?

[12:50] Cindy: Oh, absolutely. I'm actually in the middle of a series right now that's a little bit older and it is so good. And I've been that same way. I have to kind of slow myself down a little bit because I'm going to be sad when it's done.

[13:01] Martha: Yeah, yeah. Maybe there should be a whole other word for that. Maybe your listeners can come up with one.

[13:07] Cindy: Exactly. Well, what about a favorite word or a favorite expression or an origin story that you have really enjoyed? I mean, you talked a little bit about the family words, but what about actual words?

[13:17] Martha: Oh, wow. Well, gosh, there's so many of those. One of the terms that I was surprised most people don't seem to know anymore is the word spam. Like when mail goes to your spam folder.

[13:31] Why do we call it a spam folder? Do you have any idea about that?

[13:36] Cindy: I don't. I get a lot of email there, but I do not know why it's called that.

[13:40] Martha: Okay.

[13:42] Well, I've talked to so many people who don't know the origin of spam, but it goes back to the old show Monty Python's Flying Circus. And there was a sketch in 1970 where this couple goes into a restaurant, they want to order breakfast, and the guy asks what's on offer that day?

[14:03] And the person behind the counter gives this list of breakfast items to eat. And it's a long list, and just about everything includes spam.

[14:14] The person says, well, we have egg and bacon, egg, sausage and bacon, egg and spam. Egg, sausage, bacon and spam. Egg.

[14:21] I forget how it goes, but it goes on and on like that. And there are so many instances of the word spam. And then at that point, for some reason, there are all these Vikings in the restaurant.

[14:32] I know this is, it's a wacky show, but there are all these Vikings in the restaurant that break into song and they're singing lovely spam, Wonderful spam. And so you just get inundated in this sketch with spam.

[14:47] And this was, you know, 1970.

[14:49] A lot of college students love this show. And a lot of college students were also early adopters of computers. And so it makes sense that they started referring to unwanted email and unwanted messages as spam because they recalled this crazy sketch on Monty Python.

[15:09] Cindy: The only Monty Python I've ever seen is the Broadway show Spamalot. I'm a huge Broadway person and I've seen Spamalot, which was very funny. And it has Spam in it as well.

[15:18] Martha: Oh, well, there you go. I didn't know that.

[15:20] Cindy: Yep, it's. It's Camelot, but they make it Spamalot instead. Yes, and it's. It's very funny.

[15:27] Do you have any other book-related words that you could tell us the etymology of, Martha?

[15:32] Martha: Oh, yes. One of the loveliest words in the entire English language, in my opinion, is the word anthology.

[15:39] Because the word anthology comes from the Greek word anthos,

[15:44] which means flower. And you see this root in words like chrysanthemum, which literally means golden flower, or anthurium, which in its most literal sense is a flower with a tail.

[15:57] So an anthology is a beautiful literary bouquet. Isn't that gorgeous?

[16:03] Cindy: Oh, that is gorgeous. And I would have never guessed that. I love that you're telling us that.

[16:08] The other one that you should tell my listeners that I think they'll be very interested in is blurb.

[16:13] Martha: Yeah. The word blurb goes back to the early 1900s, when a humorist named Gillette Burgess, who was known for things like writing that poem about the purple cow that we all know, was promoting one of his books.

[16:28] And the way that he did it was very clever. He promoted it at this national gathering of booksellers by printing up this fake jacket copy. And it was this gushing copy, this just totally hyperbolic copy that was praising the contents of this book with absolutely breathless prose.

[16:48] And in giant letters on this jacket copy was the pronouncement, yes, this is a blurb.

[16:56] All the other publishers commit them. Why shouldn't we? And then below all of this breathless coffee was this picture of a woman with her hand cupped on the side of her mouth.

[17:08] And below all of that was a picture of a woman with her hand cupped to the side of her mouth as if she's shouting. And the caption there was Ms.

[17:17] Belinda Blurb in the act of blurbing. And it was just absolutely ridiculous. But it was so over the top that of course, it grabbed people's attention and it did very well in the sales department.

[17:35] Cindy: I've always been fascinated with blurbs. It's an interesting concept to me because first, it's something that it takes a lot of time for other authors to do, and then sometimes somebody kind of random is blurbing a book.

[17:46] So, you know, I can't always figure out exactly how they've selected the blurb. So it seems more mainstream these days in terms of matching up with the books better than it used to.

[17:54] But also it's a big conversation in the book world whether blurbs will continue, are they really effective? It's just really interesting. And so I was happy to see that definition in your book.

[18:04] Martha: Yeah, I like blurbs. I enjoy reading them and they do help me make decisions about, you know, whether I'm going to read a book or not. I know some people, as you suggested, have exactly the opposite reaction to it because sometimes there are people who just seem to blurb everything or there are blurbs that are less relevant.

[18:24] But I don't know. I personally like reading blurbs, and it also gives me ideas for other books to read when I see what this person has also written.

[18:33] Cindy: I do read them a little bit more now because I'm more involved in this world and I'm curious to see which authors I know have blurbed other books, but I don't really pay much attention to what the blurbs say.

[18:42] But on that note, I did see that Ellen Jovin had blurbed Friends with Words, and I loved her book, Rebel with a Clause.

[18:49] Martha: Yeah, that book, Rebel with a Clause, is a wonderful book about Ellen Jovin's adventures as the grammar table lady. She takes a grammar table, just a card table, and she sets it up in public places and says, come talk to me about grammar.

[19:05] And people do. And the wonderful thing about her book, too, is that her husband is a videographer and they have put together a fabulous documentary. I haven't seen it yet, but it's airing in cities around the country.

[19:20] If you get a chance to see Rebel with a Clause, all the reviews I've seen of that have been fantastic. You can watch the trailer of Rebel with a Clause online.

[19:29] And just that little taste of it made me think, my gosh, this is a film that has heart and also a lot of humor.

[19:37] So I can't wait for it to be showing in my area. But as I said, they're going all around the country and people seem to love it. And the other thing that's really cool about the showings that she's doing is that it's date night for word nerds,

[19:52] or it's a place to go and meet word nerds. Because these are your people. You know, you can commune with a lot of people who also love language and also love books.

[20:02] So. So I can't. You know, I guess I'm blurbing her film and her book right now.

[20:08] Cindy: I interviewed her when the book came out, and she was just delightful. And then we kept trying to meet up because my daughter goes to school in New York City, but I was never in New York when her table was there.

[20:16] And then she came to Texas, but I wasn't in Texas when she came, so I was sad that I missed her. But I'm dying to see the documentary as well, because she was so much fun.

[20:23] And I really love grammar. I think it's just fascinating.

[20:27] Martha: Yeah, I couldn't agree more.

[20:29] Cindy: And she had this amazing Twitter account that she no longer operates where she would do all these grammar quizzes. And I always participated in all of that. I thought it was a lot of fun.

[20:37] I'm definitely a nerd.

[20:39] Martha: I bet you aced those.

[20:41] Cindy: It was fun. Let's talk more about your book. How did you decide to write it?

[20:45] Martha: You know, I was thinking about how much fun I have sharing the joy of language and the wonder of words every week on the show. And I thought, how can I do more of that?

[20:55] And I just thought, well, I haven't written a book yet. I've written four previous books, three of them on word origins. And I was kind of missing being able to wrestle with words, you know, in private.

[21:10] I mean, one of the funny things about my doing the show is that, as I describe in the book, I used to have a horrible public speaking phobia. I mean, just the worst in the world.

[21:21] If you had told me 20, 25 years ago that I would be doing a radio show that reaches hundreds of thousands of people every week, that I would be speaking in front of audiences, I would have told you you were out of your mind.

[21:36] But I started doing the radio show. It was kind of one of those leap and the net will appear kind of things,

[21:42] and I couldn't get enough of it. And I got over the speaking phobia partly by doing improv,

[21:49] but I missed the writing.

[21:52] I missed being able to think about words and that beautiful, sober accretion of a sentence, as Eudora Welty said about reading Latin. I just. I missed, you know, that word wrangling, that wrestling with words on a page and taking a sentence and rewriting it and rewriting it until you make it sing.

[22:13] I. It was nice to stretch those muscles for a change.

[22:17] Cindy: And was it hard to decide how to structure it and what you wanted to include and what you didn't want to include?

[22:23] Martha: Yeah, it was hard to decide how to structure it. 

[22:28] Because there are two threads in the book, you know, there's all the fun stuff about words and all the stories about words that I wanted to be able to share.

[22:38] But again, I had stories myself that I wanted to share about. And I just think story is so key to learning about anything. And I had stories about,

[22:51] You know, my roots being raised in part by my Aunt Mazo, who was born in a log cabin in western North Carolina and was very much a proud hillbilly.

[23:03] And so those were some of the cadences and the vocabulary and kind of the soundtrack of my childhood was the Appalachian dialect, which to me is just gorgeous.

[23:16] I mean, when I. When I hear somebody from.

[23:18] From Appalachia now 

[23:21] it just.

[23:21] I don't know, I have a visceral reaction. The hairs on the back of my neck stand up because I think it's such a gorgeous dialect and gorgeous vocabulary and just the music of that dialect, I adore.

[23:36] And I felt like I needed to write about my Aunt Mazo and my dad.

[23:40] Cindy: Well, in the regional sections of the book were some of my favorite. Because it's fascinating how words will appear in one area and not even be known in another,

[23:49] isn't it?

[23:50] Martha: I love the calls that we get. I call them two headed calls because I cannot tell you, Cindy, the number of times that we've gotten a phone call from a listener and they say, you know what?

[23:59] I grew up using this word tump, and I've used it my whole life. And then I moved someplace else and I used the word tump, and nobody knew what I was saying.

[24:09] Everybody looked at me like I had two heads. This happens again and again because American English is so rich with dialects that have developed in different parts of the country.

[24:20] And to me, it's one of the most delicious things about talking about language is finding out the words that are in your part of the country and maybe no place else are the pronunciations.

[24:33] It's a big,

[24:34] beautiful tapestry of English we have in this country, and I just love celebrating it.

[24:40] Cindy: I agree with that completely. Well, what about the title? It's so easy for me to remember because I sit here and go, okay, Words with Friends backwards.

[24:48] So, Friends with Words so that's helped me remember it every time. How did you all come up with it?

[24:53] Martha: I'm so glad you asked that, Cindy, because initially I didn't like the title at all. But I also know that having written four other books, I have never once, not once won a battle over a title with the marketing department.

[25:09] But the truth is, I've really come to love this title, Friends with Words, because,

[25:14] you know, I've been friends with words for just about as long as I can remember.

[25:18] And as you said, you know, you just reverse Words with Friends and it becomes Friends with Words. I originally wanted to call it Into the Words because I thought, wow, that'd be like Stephen Sondheim, you know, and you put something on the cover like going into the woods and you're going in to look for buried treasure,

[25:34] you know, digging up these etymologies. It'll be great. But they didn't like that title. They said it's just not going to fly. And so I ended up just sending the publisher just.

[25:44] I was just, you know, throwing jelly against the wall, just this and that and this. But it's really hard to find a title that involves words that hasn't been taken already.

[25:55] But I finally. Friends with Words was just one of the many, many, many titles that I sent to them, and they loved it. And I didn't even remember sending it to them.

[26:05] But. So this is a happy result, I think, of my losing a battle.

[26:11] Cindy: Well, I like it and it's very easy for me to remember, which sometimes it's hard to conjure up titles when there's so many out there. So with this one, I just immediately reverse Words with Friends and I have it.

[26:22] Martha: Yeah, you know.

[26:24] Cindy: Yeah, I know titles are difficult and I get that.

[26:28] Martha: Oh, they're, they're really difficult because, you know, you. You just have a couple of seconds to catch a reader's interest and.

[26:36] Yeah, I think my idea was too esoteric. But I really like Friends with Words now. It's really grown on me. And I think the cover is super fun.

[26:47] Cindy: I agree. All right, Martha, before we wrap up, what have you read recently that you really liked?

[26:52] Martha: Well, I really loved Orbital by Samantha Harvey.

[26:57] It won the Booker Prize a couple of years ago. And it's just this gorgeously imagined, deeply imagined book about the moment to moment experience of living on a space station.

[27:10] And it's not so much sci-fi as it is what she describes as a space pastoral that is nature writing, but about space. And it's just a gorgeous meditation on circling the earth in the.

[27:27] vast blackness of space. And you're circling this beautiful orb. If you need something to take you out of this world,

[27:35] I highly recommend that book. I also really enjoyed recently Clear by Carys Davies. She's a Welsh writer who now lives in Scotland.

[27:45] And this book takes place in the mid 18th century, during the notorious Scottish clearances,

[27:53] where tenant farmers were driven from their homes. And the Minister takes the job of informing the very last inhabitant of one of these remote islands off the coast of Scotland that he's got to leave.

[28:06] And what I love about this book is that it features the language of Norn, which is an extinct language that was spoken for many years on those islands off the coast of Scotland.

[28:18] And it's got an actual glossary there. And it's just fascinating to me to watch the Minister try to communicate with the last inhabitants on this island. They have to sort of invent words and learn each other's language.

[28:36] It's really beautiful the way that that is rendered. And then one more that I'll share just for the hardcore word nerds out there is Gabe Henry's book Enough Is Enuf

[28:49] And that last Enough is spelled E N U F Enough is Enuf. And the subtitle is Our Failed Attempts to Make English Easier to Spell.

[28:58] And it's all about exactly that. Because I didn't realize that there was this whole spelling reform movement that included, for a brief time, Mark Twain, Teddy Roosevelt tried to reform English spelling.

[29:11] Noah Webster, of course, was successful in doing some of that. But English spelling, as we all know, is a hot mess. And people have tried to impose changes on spelling, but for the most part, we have not been successful.

[29:25] And this book is also really funny. There are a lot of great stories in it. So I would recommend Enough Is Enuf by Gabe Henry.

[29:35] Cindy: Okay. That Gabe Henry book sounds phenomenal. I love those types of books that are a deep dive into some specific subject. And especially if it involves words or books or anything like that, it's usually a great fit for me.

[29:46] Martha: Yeah, I think you will enjoy it.

[29:49] Cindy: Good. Well, Martha, thank you so much for taking the time to come on my show. This has been so much fun.

[29:54] Martha: Oh, it's my pleasure, Cindy. And thank you for what you do for authors and all of us book lovers. I really appreciate it.

[30:01] Cindy: Absolutely.

[30:04] Thank you so much for listening to my podcast. I would love to connect with you on Instagram or Facebook, where you can find me at @thoughtsfromapage. If you enjoy the show and have a moment to rate it or subscribe to it wherever you listen to your podcasts.

[30:16] I would really appreciate it.

[30:18] It makes a huge difference. And please tell all of your friends about Thoughts from a Page. Word of mouth does wonders to help the show grow.

[30:25] The book discussed in this episode can be purchased at my Bookshop storefront and the link is in the show notes. I hope you'll tune in next time.