In the first episode of season two, I have the pleasure of speaking with writer, editor, and playwright May Ngo. I talked to May about the process of writing her first novel, the whiteness of crime fiction, the traumas of academia, and how pregnancy is a Tower moment.

One Halloween night, six friends decide to take a moonlit walk through the woods.

Only five come back.

You are going into a state of trance and time just kind of goes and there's this sort of animal channel between the head and the hand and it's wonderful.

I really like reading a book where character’s got an obsession, almost, and you start to learn a bit about that obsession when you read a book like that.

Hard- boiled fiction is also really afflicted with this twisted, and very American, casual bigotry. And it makes me so mad because there are so many great lines and so much extensive writing that Chandler did, and these movies just have so much beautiful writing in them but just have these big problems.

Welcome to season one of Ceremony, a podcast about storytelling, seasonality, rituals, and dreaming new worlds into being.