Sometimes, when I am walking my dog, driving to campus or cleaning my room, I turn on an episode of the Say More podcast. I have been following Olivia Gatwood and Melissa Lozada-Oliva since I was in high school and were still performing on the Button Poetry stage. When they talk to each other about their lives, careers or political opinions, I feel that I am having a conversation in tandem with them. That I too, am living a life, experiencing the beginnings of a career, and am forging strong political opinions.
In middle school, my English teacher introduced me to spoken word poetry through a video of Phil Kaye, a Button Poetry legend, in my opinion, performing “Repetition.” At 13, I was already passionate about words and literature. Kaye became my hook into spoken word, just as Mrs. H sparked my love for literature.
As the years passed, I followed Button Poetry’s YouTube channel, especially drawn to Gatwood’s “An Ode to the Women on Long Island,” with her vocal delivery replaying in my head for days.
Discovering Gatwood changed my life. Watching her spoken word performances changed the way I read literature pieces aloud in class, and watching interviews on her writing changed the way I thought about poetry as a form. Following Gatwood’s poetry, I discovered the Say More podcast, co-hosted with fellow Button Poetry alumni poet and novelist Melissa Lozada-Oliva. The hook remained.
Through COVID-19, while navigating the first two years of my degree solely online and transitioning into adulthood, I listened to the podcast. I have thought about menstrual products and the impact they have on the environment, about Roe v. Wade and the popularity of birth doulas and midwives, about prison abolition and Angela Davis and whether rehabilitation is universally possible, about literature and food and the emerging popularity of autofiction as a genre form and whether one’s early thirties is too late to have biological children.
The Say More podcast has made me think about it all – Gatwood and Lozada-Oliva have made me think about it all.
The podcast, which started in late 2018 and has released episodes as recently as June 2024 (albeit with a prolonged two-year hiatus in between), is one of a kind in how it provides information. The hosts discuss topics in ways that encourage their audience to engage with their conversations critically and reflect on them in terms of their own lives. The way that Gatwood, a 2015 graduate of Pratt Institute’s fiction program, and Lozada-Oliva, Columbia University’s 2024 Our Word Writer in Residence, provide information is not only accessible to their listenership but thought-provoking too.
When the hosts say more, it makes me think more.
When Gatwood talks about learning how to garden and cultivate plants from frequently watching her mother work in the garden, I think about helping plant pansies in small wooden pots with my own mom while growing up. I think about what it might look like to grow herbs in a kitchen windowsill, to grow tomatoes, carrots and potatoes in a garden — to have a home of my own one day.
When Lozada-Oliva talks with interviewee Tamara Santibañez about the comfort of watching something so formulaic as Law and Order: Special Victims Unit (SVU), I think about the inherently exploitative nature of the show, of how I had to stop watching it because the content made me paranoid for my own safety. I think about relating to the comfort Lozada-Oliva and Santibañez find in watching a show they have already seen, but at the same time, I wonder if consuming a show like SVU inherently requires the viewer to engage in more layers of critical thought than a re-watch marathon of The Office might.
By structuring their conversations in this way, I believe Gatwood and Lozada-Oliva are creating a space for their listeners to, in turn, reflect on the episode topics themselves. This opens up avenues for listeners to consider these conversations in terms of their own lives, to think critically about what they are listening to, to make me think about whether I agree, whether I don’t, whether I have additional relevant information to add to the conversation, whether I have similar (or dissimilar) lived experiences.
So, sometimes, when the nights are long and the days pass by all too quickly, I turn on an episode of the Say More podcast. Gatwood and Lozada-Oliva chat with each other, and with me. And while they do, while I think about what they are saying and what I would say back, I am learning not only about what they think, but about what I think too.
