This episode of Across The Margin : The Podcast features an interview with Dr. Elaine Lawless who has devoted her career to ethnographic research in the fields of folklore, religion, and women’s and gender studies. She is the author of ten academic books and numerous articles. Her work has included studies of women’s literature, human rights, social justice and violence against women. Only Girls Bleed, her first novel, and the focus of this episode, draws on women’s storytelling and opposing cultural beliefs to illustrate how the political wars concerning abortion can tragically affect and “limit the free movement” of women and girls in the U.S. today. She has also co-produced two documentary films: Joy Unspeakable and Taking Pinhook. In 2003, she founded and produced the Troubling Violence Performance Project, with Professor Heather Carver of the University of Missouri Theatre Department.

Only Girls Bleed was inspired and informed by Elaine’s many years of ethnographic research on the lives and stories of women facing crisis and discrimination. The novel features the harrowing journey of a Missouri mother and her ten-year-old pregnant daughter seeking an open reproductive clinic following the Supreme Court decision that rescinded the landmark Roe v Wade decision. Gripping and emotionally charged, Only Girls Bleed is a haunting portrait of a mother’s fierce love and the lengths she’ll go to protect her child; a brutal reckoning of the reality of a country which refuses a woman’s right to choose, in even the most harrowing circumstances; and a tribute to community and female solidarity.

Grab a copy of Only Girls Bleed by Dr. Elaine Lawless here.

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This episode of Across The Margin : The Podcast features an interview with writer, editor, and musician Sam Sodomsky. Currently, Sam is a senior editor at Pitchfork. Since 2016, he has worked at the publication in various positions across reviews, news, and video, where he launched the "Shop Talk" series that involves interviewing the staff at record stores. As a freelance writer, Sam’s work has appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, Rolling Stone, Uncut, Bandcamp, and The Independent. The Bird Calls is the name Sam started using in 2006 to write, record, and perform singer-songwriter music with vocals and guitar. He has made a n abundance of albums since then, but Sam only started counting them officially around 2022 when I started releasing with the label Ruination Record Co. Sam’s latest album, Take Leave, is the focus of this episode.

Listen to, and grab a copy of Take Leave by The Bird Calls here!

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This episode of Across The Margin : The Podcast features an interview with poet and film producer Janet R. Kirchheimer. Janet is the author of How to Spot One of Us, a collection of poems about the Holocaust and her family (Clal, 2007). She is also the producer of the award-winning film AFTER: Poetry Destroys Silence, a cinematic performance documentary in which contemporary poets, both Jewish and non-Jewish, confront the Holocaust and its aftermath and discuss the responsibility of the spoken word to respond. The first of its kind, where poetry and cinema combine and transcend, AFTER is an exploration of poetry written about the Holocaust and unthinkable trauma in general. In it, contemporary poets talk about the importance and necessity for poetry in a world that still grapples with genocide. Rather than seeing the devastation, AFTER shows how poets respond to catastrophe and write in its aftermath. The film is ultimately about human resiliency, the power and courage to forge new lives, and the value of poetry in looking to the past to help create a better future. Named one of the best films of 2024 by Rogerebert.com, AFTER won Best Feature Documentary at the 2025 Montreal Independent Film Festival. It is a film that, dazzlingly, interlaces sequences of music, archival footage, personal photographs, and documents to offer a modern chronicle of poets examining history and the current day. AFTER serves as both a model and a warning for an increasingly divided and violent planet.

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