Host Megan Labrise highlights two of the best conversations of 2024.

Happy holidays, Fully Booked fans! On this week’s special episode, we reflect on our seventh year of podcasting with excitement and gratitude: To the authors who shared their insight and inspirations. To Kirkus’ editors, who kept us abreast of the most exciting titles published each week. To producer Cabel Adkins, who makes every episode sound its best; and recording engineer Chelsea Hayden, who ensures our sessions run smoothly. And to you, our listeners, for supporting this work we love to do.

Selecting just two interviews from a year’s worth of stellar conversations is never easy. But each of the following captured something special that stuck with me long after we hung up our headphones:

I had a ball discussing Colored Television (Riverhead, Sept. 3) with Danzy Senna on our Best September Books episode. The award-winning novelist and essayist (Caucasia, You Are Free,New People, etc.) joined me from Los Angeles to discuss her hotly anticipated novel, which has since graced a panoply of year-end best lists (the New Yorker, the Washington Post, the Paris Review, the Los Angeles Times, Vulture, etc.) and the National Book Critics Circle’s fiction award longlist. We talked about Colored Television’sprotagonist, Jane, a struggling novelist living in LA and agreed she isn’t grappling with her identity so much as deciding whether and how to monetize it. We explored the novel’s humor—whether comedy is hard for Senna to write—and the hot wire of anger undergirding the very funniest bits. We touch on what it’s like to have a poet for a mother (with apologies to ours), the essential loneliness of art-making, the necessity in an artistic partnership of protecting one another’s solitude, scarcity mindsets, and moral ambiguity.

Back in the spring, J. Drew Lanham and I took a deep dive into Joy Is the Justice We Give Ourselves (Hub City Press, April 2). Lanham (Sparrow Envy, The Home Place) is an ornithologist, naturalist, professor, poet, and MacArthur fellow, and his latest book profoundly mixes poetry and prose in a clear-eyed examination of the racism that people of color face while attempting to enjoy the great outdoors. We spoke about depicting birds metaphorically and allegorically; the importance of rhythm and rhyme in poetry, prose, and conversation; the importance of the Piedmont, which covers about one-third of South Carolina (Lanham’s home state); the origins of a few fabulous words; and the overwhelmingness of modern living. He shared a bit about what it’s like to work with stellar Southern publisher Hub City Press, and we ended with what it feels like to be outside surrounded by birdsong.

Fully Booked is produced by Cabel Adkins Audio and Megan Labrise.