This week, Spud leads The Crü down the winding rabbit hole of Roland Barthes' famous essay, The Death of the Author. We delve into a healthy debate over whether or not authorial intent actually matters, and how that answer changes if it's a reader asking it vs. a literary critic. Who decides what a story means, and can that meaning change over time?

Then, of course, we share our own stories based around the week's prompt, and promptly (no pun intended) discuss the author's intent, leading to a weird Hegelian dialectic on the topic. From Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable: Spondulicks. A slang term for money, dating from the mid-19th century. Its origins are uncertain: one suggestion is Greek spondulikos, the name of a type of shell used as an early form of money.

Like this weeks episode and wish you could read as well as listen? Subscribe to our Substack for a summary of our opening discussion, a story from the episode, and a writing prompt!

Be sure to follow us on Instagram (if that's your sort of thing). Please do send us an email with your story if you write along, which we hope you will do.

Episodes of Radio FreeWrite are protected by a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-ND 4.0) license. All Stories remain the property of their respective authors.