Q: Where can we find your episodes?
A: Here’s a handy link to everywhere where we have our episodes posted! If your preferred podcatcher/website/scrying orb isn’t listed here, send us a line and let us know!
Q: When are new episodes released?
A: The episodes are posted on the second and fourth Saturdays of the month. We’ll keep you up to date on any delay on our Twitter, which is @tortallrecall. We read one book per month, and at this point are releasing two episodes per book. We are planning on taking about a month off in between reading each series. During our ‘breaks’ between series, we plan on posting various bonus episodes on more or less our normal schedule – if not even more frequently!
Q: Where can we contact you?
A: So glad you asked! You can email us at tortallrecall@gmail.com, you can tweet us at @tortallrecall on Twitter, and you can contact us on Tumblr at tortallrecall.tumblr.com. We have been working on developing a way to correspond with people who contact us by yelling their discontentments into the dark unfeeling night, but so far only Grace has been able to consistently receive these missives, much less successfully respond.
Q: Are there written transcripts of your episodes anywhere?
A: We have released official transcripts for some of our episodes, which you can find here. We’re committed to making our podcast accessible, but due to the conversational nature of the podcast and our personal commitments outside of Tortall Recall, our transcription pace is fairly slow. We will update the Tumblr and Twitter with updates related to transcription as the project develops.
Q: Are you going to read [insert other Tortall series]?
A: So far we have plans to read all the Tortall series published through 2011, in order of when they were published. As of writing this, we have finished up Song of the Lioness and are moving into The Immortals, Protector of the Small, the Trickster’s duology, and Provost’s Dog. We don’t have plans yet to read Tortall and Other Lands, the short story Student of Ostriches, or the Numair books, but they’re not out of the question. If you have particularly strong opinions on any of these, consider contacting us so we can measure interest.
Q: Are you going to read the Emelan series when you’re done?
A: We’d love to, in theory! Right now we only have plans for the Tortall books listed above, which should take us at least a year and a half. When we’re closer to finishing the Tortall books, we’ll let you know what our plans for continuing the podcast are.
Q: If you love the Tortall books, why do you critique them?
A: We do love these books, thank you for noticing! Six of seven of us read these books as children, and we started this podcast out of a desire to talk about how much we love them! Because we love them, we believe these books deserve a place as classics, not relics.
We also started this podcast because we want to be able to pick apart the way these books that we all loved sent us some bad messages, and work through the feeling of loving something that caused us to internalize negative ideas. Alanna fights the patriarchy to pursue her own interests despite incredible pushback, and that’s amazing! But at the same time, her cat condones the patriarchy in ways which are not challenged by the narrative! Absorbing narratives that do not actively refute colonialism, misogyny, cissexism, racism, etc. is harmful. Engaged, critical reading is, in our opinion, not optional – it is imperative.
Tamora Pierce’s work was, compared to what was being published at the time, incredibly feminist and progressive. Times have changed. Tamora Pierce has changed, maybe. The text has not changed. When a new reader finds these books, all they have is the text; they don’t know how the series progresses, or the cultural context in which it was written.
This is something that comes up with all kinds of media! As we’ve mentioned on the show, we were inspired by fantastic podcasts like Métis in Space and Witch Please, which also pair a critical lens and a love for the literature they cover. Through discussion among friends, we hope to find (or create) things we care about which do not exist in the original text, whether that’s representation and community for marginalized identities, or simply any critique of transphobia. Like, at all.
The bottom line is that our podcast is based in engaging with the books critically. It’s not wrong to love these books despite their flaws. But because we are presenting these books to a wide audience, we cannot let these flaws go unremarked upon. We hope that we talk about the good as much as the bad, but we will never ignore the bad to present only the good. This is the same way we would read the books with a friend we were recommending them to or with a future generations of Tamora Pierce readers. We see it as the way forward, for ourselves as readers and for the books that we love.
Q: Does Tamora Pierce know about your podcast / can I @ Tamora Pierce and tell her about your podcast / etc
A: IT IS FORBIDDEN SHE MUST NEVER KNOW
THIS SHOW HAS ONLY TWO RULES: DON’T SPOIL AMY AND TAMORA PIERCE CAN NEVER KNOW