top of page
NBN Podcast Episodes Hosted by G. P. Gottlieb
Memoir
June 17, 2025
Not From Here: the Song of America
Leah Lax
When Leah Lax was asked to write an opera to celebrate local immigrants, she began by spending a year listening to accounts of upheaval, migration, and arrival told her in confidence by people from around the globe. She felt she had discovered America, found its great beating heart.
May 20, 2025
The Murmur of Everything Moving
Maureen Stanton
Maureen Stanton’s new memoir, The Murmur of Everything Moving (Columbus State University 2025) opens when she was in her early twenties, working at a bar saving for a backpacking trip through Europe.
Buy Book
March 4, 2025
Song So Wild and Blue: A Life with the Music of Joni Mitchell
Paul Lisicky
Paul Lisicky remembers when he first heard Joni Mitchell on the radio, and when he found one of her records in a bin at Korvettes.
October 22, 2024
The Adventures of Cancer Bitch
S.L. Wisenberg
It’s 2006, and S. L. Wisenberg is teaching writing at one of Chicago’s great universities and living a busy life when she’s gobsmacked by a sudden cancer diagnosis. In small but powerful journal entries, she bemoans friends who’ve died, expresses disdain for her body, worries about her future, recalls previous adventures, and jokes about the seriousness of her illness.
June 25, 2024
Life Span
Molly Giles
Molly Giles looks back at moments of her childhood, her mistakes and missteps, getting pregnant at eighteen, marrying her boyfriend and having a second child, divorcing, marrying a second time but failing to find the happiness she knows she deserves. As the decades passed, she edited many well-known novels and popped out four story collections, two novels, and this brutally honest memoir.
February 20, 2024
Secrets of the Sun
Mako Yoshikawa
Mako Yoshikawa's Secrets of the Sun: A Memoir (Mad Creek Books 2024) contains a host of essays about her difficult, brilliant father. Shoichi Yoshikawa grew up in a wealthy family in 1930s Japan, but his mother died when he was five, and he died alone on the eve of Mako’s wedding.
September 5, 2023
I Surrender: A Memoir of Chile's Dictatorship, 1975
Kathleen M. Osberger
In 1975, Kathleen Osberger, who’d just graduated from Notre Dame University, flew to Chile to teach in a Catholic school in Santiago. She was assigned to live with several religious women, and when she arrived, was told that they would sometimes shelter dissidents who were wanted by the secret police.
June 27, 2023
Set Adrift: A Mystery and A Memoir
Sarah Conover
When racing yacht “The Revonoc” went down in the Bermuda Triangle’s Sargasso Sea during a freakish storm in January of 1958, the sailing world was dumbfounded. The boat and five people on board, all well-known in the sailing world, completely vanished.
June 6, 2023
Dreaming in Spanish
Sara Alvarado
Sara Alvarado tells the story of growing up in Madison, studying Spanish, and escaping alcoholism, substance abuse, men, and sexual assault by moving to Puerto Vallarta in Mexico.
March 21, 2023
The Field
Victoria Garza
Victoria Garza begins her poetic memoir with her ten-year-old self learning that her little sister and cousin have died in a car accident. She painstakingly recalls lovely moments with her sister as they faced their parents’ divorce, their new lives surrounded by family members, their Mexican American culture and celebrations.
April 4, 2023
The Wandering Womb: Essays in Search of Home
S.L. Wisenberg
As a child, S. L. Wisenberg worried about being outside, not being able to breathe, and Nazis coming through the window of her Houston home.
November 22, 2022
Hysterical
Elissa Bassist
For two years author Elissa Bassist saw over twenty medical specialists for pain that none of them managed to diagnose or resolve. Some of their treatments led to other medical problems but never relief. Then an acupuncturist suggested that she simply needed to take control of her voice, and Bassist was shocked when it worked.
November 1, 2022
Maybe It's Me: On Being the Wrong Kind of Woman
Eileen Pollack
Eileen Pollack covers her life in snippets or by delving into history, but the overall picture is of an extremely talented writer, a brilliant woman with a degree in physics and a long list of respected publications who is still somewhat bewildered to find herself alone.
July 27, 2021
The Thin Ledge
Daniel Shapiro
Daniel Shapiro was a successful attorney in his early forties when his wife, Susan, suffered a brain bleed and a diagnosis that her future was uncertain. Stunned, and with three young children, the couple made the most of the few years that followed, before a massive second hemorrhage changed everything.
bottom of page