Welcome to That’s ProbLITmatic, the podcast that examines unhealthy and problematic relationships in literature.

Thank you so much for queueing up this preview of That’s ProbLITmatic.  

If you'd like to join us as a guest co-host, please email [email protected].  You don’t have to be an “expert” to become a guest co-host on That’s ProbLITmatic.  You don’t need to be a behavioral health professional or hold any specific degrees to qualify. Most adults can recognize toxic behavior, and we all have valuable contributions to make to the public discourse. Host Lacy Phillips believes that if you’re a consumer of literature, you’re already fully qualified to critique that literature. The bottom line is, if you can read the text and express your thoughts clearly on why the relationships in it are problematic, we’d love to have you record an episode.

There are always going to be titles that come on the market and make a big splash because of the awful relationships that the main characters have.  Those would be the Twilights and the 50 Shades of Greys and the Gone Girls of the world.  But more often, the reading public is presented with borderline cases, behaviors that straddle the line between persistence and harassment, or that create dramatic tension through methods of emotional manipulation that should be considered major red flags if they were to happen in real relationships.  Those are the types of things we’ll be exploring with our guest hosts in upcoming episodes.

That’s ProbLITmatic will always aim to be appropriate for all audiences. We feel it’s especially important for young adult readers to learn to recognize toxic behaviors when they see them on the pages of their favorite books.  Our hope is that these discussions can help readers of all ages be able to recognize and hopefully avoid toxic behaviors in their lives.  We don’t want to give parents or educators any reason to prevent minors from listening to our discussions, so there will be no cursing or explicit language on the podcast ever.

Each of our episodes will be edited with the considerations of classroom instructional time limitations in mind.  We’ll be aiming for right around a half an hour per episode.  It's our hope that one day that That's ProbLITmatic will become a classroom staple, a resource for literature instructors, maybe even a domestic violence prevention tool.  We can even envision a day when school librarians can label the books in their collections with a That’s ProbLITmatic warning sticker so young people know they can go online and look up an episode that details exactly how Estella and Pip are so deeply terrible.

We may not have a new episode to drop every First Friday of the month, but we will always upload episodes on a Friday, so be sure to look for our upcoming discussions of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, and George Orwell's 1984, among others.

Thanks to “Pictures of the Floating World” for composing and performing our theme music.

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