Maxine Hong Kingston, winner of the National Medal of Arts and National Humanities Medal, reveals a life without music, having no feeling for the sounds that mysteriously thrilled everyone around her, devoting her ear instead to seeking out the rhythms of literature, penning nine books including The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts. It wasn’t until her son Joe developed as a musician that she began to revisit the many songs she had walked past but never touched. She and her husband Earll Kingston join Sunny in the studio.

Jeff talks to Elisa Gabbert about her new book The Word Pretty, cancel culture, karaoke, growing up in Texas and nostalgia-as-musical-memory, among other topics.

Music from the Elisa Gabbert episode of The Steer, as heard on www.Dublab.com and KZUT 99.1 FM Los Angeles. Artists include Interpol, Peter Gabriel, Ratatat and Miley Cyrus, among others.

Music from the Charles Valle episode of The Steer, as heard on www.Dublab.com and KZUT 99.1 FM Los Angeles. Artists include The Spinanes and Godspeed You! Black Emperor.

Jeff talks to long time Fence Magazine editor Charles Valle about the details of editing a literary journal for 15+ years, musical taste as one grows older, and the cultural experiment that is Ian Svenonius, among other far-flung topics.

Music from the Jenny Chu episode of The Steer, as heard on www.Dublab.com and KZUT 99.1 FM Los Angeles. Artists include Alan Menken and Mariah Carey.

Portland-based writer and activist Jenny Chu talks with Sunny and Jeff about growing up as a restaurant baby and what that term means exactly, her love of Disney musicals, and and the nature of nostalgia vis-à-vis romantic and familial relationships.

Music from the Ed Skoog episode of The Steer, as heard on www.Dublab.com and KZUT 99.1 FM Los Angeles. Artists include The Dixie Cups, Aaron Neville, Ernie K-Doe and Irma Thomas, among others.

Ed Skoog jaws with Jeff and Sunny about New Orleans music and New Orleans life, how and why he started playing banjo, Big Star, and the myriad of direct and indirect musical references in his amazing poetry collections Mister Skylight, Rough Day and Run the Red Lights.