In this Pod, we ask how much of who we are lives in the body: its limits, its beauty, its pain and pleasure, the way it ages, and the way it can change before we are ready.

Most of us live somewhere between trusting our bodies and fighting them. We get older. We get sick. We change shape. We lose strength and sometimes find it again. We feel hunger, desire, fear, exhaustion, joy, pain. We carry the visible and invisible marks of what has happened to us. Some days the body feels like home. Other days it feels like a stranger we are somehow bound to.

And our bodies are never only ours. Other people read them constantly. They notice age, gender, race, health, beauty, size, ability, and difference, often before they know anything about who we are. We may be loved through our bodies, judged by them, protected because of them, or made vulnerable because of them.

Together, we’ll explore what it means to live in a body that carries us through the world, changes over time, and is constantly being interpreted by other people. We will talk about beauty and shame, illness and care, pleasure and aging, strength and dependence, and the deeper question underneath it all: what stays “us” while the body keeps changing?

Preparation between sessions is designed to take under two hours. 

For this Pod, we will draw our conversation catalysts from the range of sources below, including poems, essays, short stories, memoir excerpts, visual art, and film or television. The final selections may shift slightly in response to the interests, questions, and energy of the group. 

The first session readings will be shared three weeks before the start of the Pod. 

Sources we'll draw from: 

• Lucille Clifton, “won’t you celebrate with me” (poem)

• Walt Whitman, excerpt from “I Sing the Body Electric” (poem)

•  Diane Ackerman, excerpt from A Natural History of the Senses (essay) 

• Galway Kinnell, “Saint Francis and the Sow” (poem)

• Alice Walker, “Beauty: When the Other Dancer Is the Self” (essay) 

• Nathaniel Hawthorne, “The Birthmark” (short story) 

• Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Yellow Wallpaper” (short story) 

• Carmen Maria Machado, “Eight Bites” (short story) 

• Franz Kafka, “A Hunger Artist” (short story) 

• Nikolai Gogol, “The Nose” (short story) 

• Barbara Kruger, Your Body Is a Battleground (visual art)

• The Twilight Zone, “Eye of the Beholder” (television episode)

• Virginia Woolf, “On Being Ill” (essay) 

• Susan Sontag, excerpt from Illness as Metaphor (essay)

• Lucy Grealy, excerpt from Autobiography of a Face (memoir)

• Jean-Dominique Bauby, excerpt from The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (memoir or film) 

• Nancy Mairs, “On Being a Cripple” (essay) 

• Audre Lorde, excerpt from The Cancer Journals (memoir) 

• Harriet McBryde Johnson, excerpt from “Unspeakable Conversations” (essay) 

• Eula Biss, “The Pain Scale” (essay) 

• Octavia Butler, “The Evening and the Morning and the Night” (short story)