(bright music) - Utah Humanities has a new literary podcast, "Check Your Shelves."

Our guest today, Kase Johnstun is here to tell us all about it.

Hi, Kase, thanks for being here.

So tell me how you came to start the literary podcast.

- Sure, absolutely.

I had done a literary podcast called "LITerally," with a capital LIT, you can still find it out there, for about eight years before joining Utah Humanities, where we interviewed authors across the state and across the country.

So when I came to Utah Humanities, we just kind of shifted it over with a few different goals, but it was an easy, it was an easy change, and we're glad to have it.

- Oh, great, so tell me who you've interviewed, who you plan to interview, what kind of guests you'll have.

- Sure, last year we used it before the Utah Humanities Book Festival to interview authors that were coming to Utah, this year, now the book festival has passed, we're just interviewing authors across the state, historians, librarians, novelist, poets, anything that fits the Utah Humanities mission.

- Okay, and so there mostly Utah?

- Mostly Utah, yeah, yeah, 'cause there's a lot of conversations to be had about Utah, about what it is to be human.

And there are complex relationships in Utah.

And so we kind of explore that through poetry and nonfiction and fiction.

- Wonderful, and there are a lot of great writers here.

- We got a lot of great writers in Utah.

We're really, really lucky.

- Yeah, and so I would assume that's your mission and how this helps you serve your mission.

- Yeah, absolutely, so with books, and it doesn't matter if it's poetry or nonfiction or fiction, we really see the books as vehicles, and the authors as drivers of these conversations.

And like I said, it doesn't matter what genre it is, we're all talking about being human.

Poetry talks about it in a different way than nonfiction does.

And fiction explores it in a completely different way than poetry does.

So the authors come in and it's us just extending that conversation outward beyond the book festival, beyond the in-person things that we have so we can talk about it all year long.

- That's great, that's great.

Well, congratulations for starting it, and good luck, thanks for being here.

- Well, thank you again.

- And if you'd like to know more about that podcast of the Utah Humanities, "Check your shelves," it's a literary podcast of Utah Humanities, just go to utahhumanities.org, utahhumanities.org.

I'm Mary Dickson, thanks for watching "Contact."

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