Happy Solstice, everyone! I don’t know about you, but I am ready for the days to start getting longer. I swear it’s as dark as the bottom of the ocean here for most of the time right now. I’m tired of looking out the window, feeling like it’s midnight, and learning it’s only 4:30pm.

On another note, did I mention the podcast? My fellow former nonfiction editor at Solarpunk Magazine Ariel and I hijacked the magazine’s Solarpunk Futures podcast about midway through the year. The Editors-in-Chief had been using it to interview some of the authors of fiction published in the magazine. But it got to be too much work for them, so they put it on hiatus. Meanwhile, Ariel and I were bursting with ideas of people to interview about the work they were doing to make the world a better place to live in NOW. So we used their platform to start our podcast, Solarpunk Presents.

You can listen to the first season’s episodes here: https://solarpunkpresents.com/season-1/. I’ll put the link to Episode 8, which is a really great conversation I had with Prof. Lisa Dilling about how communities can build resilience to climate change, in just a few minutes. Then, on Monday Dec 26th, I’ll add the link to our final episode of season 1, which is a discussion Ariel and I had with each other about all things solstice (or at least all things that we could think of).

It has been so fun and informative talking to people, we’ve decided to keep going with the podcast, even though we decided to part ways with the magazine, which just wasn’t getting enough nonfiction submissions to justify a single nonfiction editor, much less two of them. We’ll launch the podcast independently (i.e., giving the Solarpunk Futures Podcast back to Solarpunk Magazine) in January. Stay posted here or at https://solarpunkpresents.com for announcements about that.

If you like what you hear and would like to support us (since, never mind our time, the podcast host, the equipment, and the Zoom accounts we need to interview people and edit together the episodes, cost money), we’ve set up a Patreon. Check it out now, while the posts (which we’ve just started with) are still public. https://www.patreon.com/solarpunkpresents`

Thanks!