In this episode we will be talking to Jim Haynes. Jim was born in northern Louisiana and when he was young he spent several years in the oil company town of San Tomé in Venezuela. In 1956 he served in the US military and stationed with a unit in Scotland. After his service he decided to stay in Edinburgh where he started the first paperback bookshop in Britain called The Paperback Bookshop. In the 60’s Haynes relocated to London and he became deeply involved in the underground cultural scene, co-funding the alternative paper “International Times”, and launching “Suck” in Amsterdam, a newspaper to promote sexual freedom. In 1969 he moved to Paris where he taught Media Studies and Sexual Politics for 30 years, and in 1970 he organized the Wet Dreams Festival held in Amsterdam. This festival explored the boundaries between art and porn, voyeurism and participation, exploitation and liberation. In 2017 Haynes was awarded an honorary PhD from Edinburgh Napier University.

Today we bring you an exclusive interview with Maggie McKinley, president of the Norman Mailer Society in Chicago. The Norman Mailer Society is a non-profit literary society dedicated to American author Norman Mailer. The Society promotes his legacy holding an annual meeting of scholars and enthusiasts, publishing The Mailer Review, Project Mailer, and The NMS Podcast, awarding the Robert F. Lucid Award for the year's best scholarship, and encouraging continued interest in his work through all forms of media. Maggie McKinley is an Associate Professor of English at Harper College in Illinois, where she teaches courses in composition and American literature and also serves as department co-chair. She is the author of Masculinity and the Paradox of Violence in American Fiction (Bloomsbury, 2015) and Understanding Norman Mailer (U of SC Press, 2017), and her work has appeared in Philip Roth Studies, Studies in American Jewish Literature, and The Mailer Review, among other places. She is currently editing two collections for Cambridge University Press: Norman Mailer in Context and Philip Roth in Context.

Today we bring you an exclusive interview with Britt Carpenter. Britt is the founder of Philly Unknown, a Philadelphia-based non-profit organization that assists homeless people in the city, many of them living with opioid addiction. Britt has been doing this for more than 10 years but today his job has become very difficult because of the pandemic. During our interview we talked about Kensington, a forgotten and impoverished neighbourhood in Philadelphia that Britt helps out in a daily basis, the opioid crisis in America, his appearance in 2018 in a documentary film from Voice of America, the challenge that faces his community with gentrification, Black Lives Matter, and the future of his organization. I’m really proud of this interview, Britt is very charismatic and I felt really good during our conversation. I guess this is also one of the reasons why I started this podcast: to meet interesting people all around the world and to make some friends, in the end it is all about creating some connections.