Something Rather Than Nothing Podcast Episode 300!!! We talk ABOLITION. Calvin John Smiley, [https://www.cjsmiley.com/] Ph.D. is an associate professor of sociology at Hunter College-CUNY. His research and scholarship broadly focus on issues related to justice, inequality, and race. Smiley is the co-editor of Prisoner Reentry in the 21st Century: Critical Perspectives of Coming Home (Routledge, 2020). He is the author of the award-winning Purgatory Citizenship: Reentry, Race, and Abolition (University of California Press, 2023), which explores how system-impacted individuals navigate and negotiate the reentry experience with diminished legal rights and amplified social stigmas. Further, he is the author of Defund: Conversations Towards Abolition (Haymarket Books, 2024), which considers how #defund can bridge the divide between reform and abolition, becoming a catalyst to help organizers realize abolitionist visions. Finally, Smiley has published in an array of peer-reviewed journals and public outlets. Beyond his academic work, Smiley is committed to public sociology and praxis. He has been a regular contributor to several news and talk show outlets. Additionally, he is the founder and director of Till Everything Better LLC, which works with system-impacted youth through restorative justice practices within New York City youth detention facilities. Finally, Smiley is the Project Director for the CUNY New Paths and Administration of Children's Services (ACS) program to offer system-impacted youth college-credit courses. 

Katie Marie [https://www.instagram.com/cosmically_kt/] is a Cherokee/Choctaw educator, Indigenous Wisdomkeeper, and decolonial guide who works at the intersection of healing, community, and education. Enjoy this ranging conversation into matriarchy, wellness of being, Indigenous futures, our planet, Art & Philosophy! Something Rather than Nothing [https://www.somethingratherthannothing.com/]

Annabel McConnachie [https://www.backstage.com/u/annabelmcconnachie/] (she/her) is an actress, writer, singer, dancer and content creator. She is originally from Sydney, Australia but is currently based in New York City. She is best known for her work in the critically acclaimed miniseries 'IKEA Heights - The Next Generation'. Her much anticipated new play 'Archive of My Own' [https://www.broadwayworld.com/off-off-broadway/article/Annabel-McConnachie-Will-Star-in-ARCHIVE-OF-MY-OWN-Staged-Reading-at-The-Tank-20250306] made its stage debut in a moved reading at the Tank. THANKS FOR LISTENING!

Sophia Hembeck is a bilingual writer and artist based in Edinburgh. She has published three books (Things I Have Noticed, 2020 & Things I Have Loved, 2023 & Thiings That Are Different Now, 2025) which are compromised of her essays and short prose as well as artwork that she specifically created for the books. They are part of her poetic-memoir trilogy." She's a fierce advocate for literary essays and teaches essay writing classes for writers of all levels. You can buy her books here. [https://museletterpublishing.com/] Instagram: @sophiahembeck [https://www.instagram.com/sophiahembeck/]

This episode was recorded and captured LIVE on Independent Bookstore Day (April 26, 2025) from Browsers' Bookstore in Albany, Oregon.  Pete Dryden: Photographer, [https://www.petedrydenphotography.com/] cabinet maker, professional overthinker. Hiding out in Albany, Oregon—dodging small talk, chasing meaning in the grain and the frame. Restless mind, calloused hands, too many questions and never enough quiet. Abe Richmond: Owner of Browsers' Bookstore [https://browsersbookstore.com/]. If spotted in the wild, he is reading totally tubular titles. We talk about bookstores, Edward Abbey, Kathy Acker, Morrissey, Hunter S. Thompson and so much more. Celebrate Independent Books & Bookstores!!!

About Craig Randall [https://www.craigrandallwriting.com/home] - I've loved stories and literature and writing for as long as I can remember. For just as long, I've also struggled with anxiety and depression. They have loomed over me, all my life, threatening to steal away whatever hope and joy i've worked so hard to build. All my work, the fiction and the poetry, was born out of this struggle as I worked to overcome and deal the hardships these struggles brought on. There's so much to the story, which I will write about later. In the mean time, just know you're not alone. You are brilliant and strong and are not a product of whatever's held you back. You got this! We got this! Oh, one of my main hopes is let men know it's okay to feel, it's okay to express, it's okay that we're not always sure how, but real strength is found in taking that step forward and bearing ourselves to those we love. We can all feel whole!

Shippentower is named Co-Captain of the Oregon Ravens Football Team! Kola Shippentower is an enrolled member of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation. She has co-founded and is the Director of The Wisáwca Project - Enough Iz Enough, a non-profit organization working together for change, for better communication and involvement. Kola has developed a Safety Plan to be utilized by anyone in identifying safety methods, contacts, and procedures to keep one safe whether in an abusive relationship or a plan to track a missing person. She is a professional fighter and brown belt in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu.  Welcome back to the show Kola!!! And we talk women's football and MMIW . . . Oregon Ravens [https://oregonravens.com/] SRTN Website [https://www.somethingratherthannothing.com/]

Meghan Lamb [http://meghanlamb.com/about.html] is the author of Mirror Translation (Blamage Books, 2025), COWARD (Spuyten Duyvil, 2022), Failure to Thrive (Apocalypse Party, 2021) All of Your Most Private Places (Spork Press, 2020) and Silk Flowers (Birds of Lace, 2017). Her work has also appeared in Quarterly West, DIAGRAM, Redivider, and Passages North, among other publications. She currently teaches creative writing through the University of Chicago, Story Studio, Hugo House, and GrubStreet. She is the fiction editor for Bridge Books and the nonfiction editor for Lover's Eye and Nat. Brut. Music here [https://violetfistula.bandcamp.com/]

Raechel Wolfe [https://www.instagram.com/r_the_wolfe/] is a multi-disciplinary artist based in Portland, OR, whose work spans film, writing, modeling, and Creative Direction. She made waves by creating FINK, the world's first Instagram-exclusive short film, and was a founding member of the core team behind Buckman Journal. Raechel continues to push creative boundaries, now adding curator to her dynamic portfolio. Featuring co-host and model/artist Jenny Peterson. For Your Eyes Only [https://www.foryoureyesonlyart.com/]

elle nash is an electrifying writer based in glasgow, scotland this is about her book 'deliver me' -  At a meatpacking facility in the Missouri Ozarks, Dee-Dee and her co-workers kill and butcher 40,000 chickens in a single shift. The work is repetitive and brutal, with each stab and cut a punishment to her hands and joints, but Dee-Dee's more concerned with what is happening inside her body. After a series of devastating miscarriages, Dee-Dee has found herself pregnant, and she is determined to carry this child to term. Dee-Dee fled the Pentecostal church years ago, but judgment follows her in the form of regular calls from her mother, whose raspy voice urges Dee-Dee to quit living in sin and marry her boyfriend Daddy, an underemployed ex-con with an insect fetish. With a child on the way, at long last Dee-Dee can bask in her mother's and boyfriend's newfound parturient attention. She will matter. She will be loved. She will be complete. When her charismatic friend Sloane reappears after a twenty-year absence, feeding her insecurities and awakening suppressed desires, Dee-Dee fears she will go back to living in the shadows. Neither the ultimate indignity of yet another miscarriage nor Sloane's own pregnancy deters her: she must prepare for the baby's arrival. Something Rather Than Nothing Podcast [https://www.somethingratherthannothing.com/]

Vanessa Stockard recently visited the podcast for the 3rd time! Vanessa Stockard was born in 1975 in Sydney and spent her formative years in a small country town in the Mid North Coast of New South Wales.  At 12 she returned to Sydney as a boarder at Abbotsleigh.  After graduating from the College of Fine Arts (COFA) Sydney in 1998 with a BFA, Stockard launched head first into the avant-garde art scene in the bohemian village of Glebe. Stockard is one of the most dangerous artists on the Australian, and by extension, international scene.  Her ethereal works of art are a window into the soul of a talented and complex artist, one whose legacy is bound to resonate well past her generation.  The existential nature of her painting viscerally questions our concepts of social relationships and reality. Twenty years of introspection and experimentation, ranging over a number of media, have forged Vanessa's style and vulcanised her craft, enabling her to reveal complex misdemeanours, while simultaneously demanding the viewer's self-reflection.  She deals with isolation and sadness with intimate care and attention. Vanessa is unhindered by failure, always continuing the discovery of things previously unseen, revealing work that is fresh, unlaboured and penetrating.  The deceptive everyday nature of her subject matter belies hidden depths of relationship, feeling and emotion.  One could describe her process as absence of thought, a freedom of construct, not unlike the stream of consciousness associated with authors such as Hemmingway and Thomas Wolfe. If light and shade were students, she would be their master.  This skill, combined with a naturally deft hand and a determined use of perspective, imbue her subjects with gravitas.  The artist refers to set design elements that often alter and morph as her piece progresses.  She has said she feels grounded from her ability to draw from the benign surrounds of familiar life, infusing these images with a meaning that yields a meditative satisfaction. Stockard's oeuvre features many pieces developed without any direct visual reference but rather from memory, often incorporating domestic pets such as cats and dogs.  Juxtaposing the anthropomorphic nature these animals are given by our society, she infuses the personification of virtue and vice into the everyday canine and feline status quo of our pets.  Cats with their fluffy comical exteriors glint with an instinctive urge to kill and cruelly torment their prey, dogs with their providence of happiness, loyalty and friendship are flung back onto Churchill's menacing metaphor for depression. The Kafkaesque mindset behind such works is reminiscent of the existentialist authors like Sartre and Camus.  Absurdism appears with cake imagery and its relation to a childlike nostalgia for happiness which may never be real, but rather imaginary, unattainable and unachievable.  It's been said "pain is inexhaustible, it's only people who get exhausted…" One can never "have it all", to be both the artist and patron.  To intrinsically understand those things around us that others overlook is what we want from our artists, our creatives.  They give voice to the profound mystery of the world around us, surrounded as we are with consumerism, pointless greed, deceit and dissatisfaction.  There's no pretension here in these paintings, just spontaneous insight and beauty.  Some art is said to speak volumes, but these works are more like innocent and delicate poems, whispering untold truths with an economy of words. Something Rather Than Nothing Podcast [https://www.somethingratherthannothing.com/]

Aaron Keuter [https://aaronk.tv/] is an editor, motion designer, animator, and visual effects artist in Portland, Oregon. SRTN [https://www.somethingratherthannothing.com/] is a worldwide podcast that features the greatest creators you can find.