This week, Jonathan and Gary are joined by multiple award winning writer and critic Amal El-Mohtar, whose first story collection Seasons of Glass and Iron appeared earlier this year, and whose novella The River has Roots has won Nebula and Locus awards for 2026.

We talk about our favorite stories in the collection, a diverse range of writers including Patricia McKillip, J.R.R. Tolkien, Hope Mirrlees, Virginia Woolf, and Charle de Lint, and about Amal’s own experiences as a writer of Lebanese descent living in Canada and Glasgow.

We hope that what the discussion lacks in focus, it makes up with Amal’s sharp insights as a writer of fiction, poetry, and criticism (in her occasional New York Times Book Review columns).

Many podcasts far more professional than ours have offered discrete segments covering different topics, so this week we decided to carefully organize the episode—wait, no we didn’t; we’re just rambling again. But we do begin with a small tribute to Jane Yolen, both a great writer and a great friend, which leads into some musings on how reputations are made and sustained. We then touch upon the recent Nebula Awards, the role of small presses like Subterranean, and some exciting new books we’re reading, including Jacly Moriarty’s Time Travel for Beginners. By our standards, all this is carefully planned and laser-focused.

Jonathan and Gary are delighted to welcome the wonderful Molly Tanzer, whose new novella And Side by Side They Wander is just out this week.

Although it involves apparently benign alien visitors, a post-apocalyptic post-United States, corporate overreach, and a fair bit of space opera, the novella's main focus is art, who really owns it, how we interact with it, and whether even a molecularly exact reproduction is ever the same as the original. Molly also shares with us what it's like to revisit the world of C.L. Moore's classic pulp hero Jirel of Joiry in a new series of stories, and what she has planned for the future.

As always, it's a wide-ranging discussion which at times almost gets downright philosophical.