In this episode, novelist and twitter comedian Kristen Arnett and Desert Companion editor Scott Dickensheets discuss the value of satire in the middle of a pandemic.

Kristen Arnett is the NYT and Los Angeles Times bestselling author of the debut novel Mostly Dead Things. She is a queer fiction and essay writer. She was awarded Ninth Letter‘s Literary Award in Fiction and is a columnist for Literary Hub. Her work has appeared at North American Review, The Normal School, Gulf Coast, TriQuarterly, Guernica, Electric Literature, McSweeneys, PBS Newshour, Bennington Review, Tin House Flash Fridays/The Guardian, Salon, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. Her story collection, Felt in the Jaw, was published by Split Lip Press and was awarded the 2017 Coil Book Award. She was recently a Shearing Fellow at the Beverly Rogers, Carol C. Black Mountain Institute. Her next two books (Samson: A Novel and With Foxes: Stories) will be published by Riverhead Books.

Scott Dickensheets is the deputy editor of Desert Companion, the magazine of Nevada Public Radio. Before that, he top-edited the alt-weeklies Las Vegas CityLife and the Las Vegas Weekly, served as managing editor of Las Vegas Life magazine, and worked in a number of positions at the Las Vegas Sun. Dickensheets has edited, co-edited, or contributed to eight volumes of the Las Vegas Writes anthology series, and was an assistant editor of Nevada: 150 Years in the Silver State, the official book of the Nevada sesquicentennial.

DISCUSSED

Diminutive explainers, timing, absurdity, unconnected events, survival instincts, grief, funerals, Trevor Noah (comedian), coping mechanisms, contrast, humorless people, dinner parties, missing old routines