Welcome to the Wintering Sessions with Katherine May. This week, Katherine talks to Ross Gay about finding delight in dark times. Ross’s practice of writing down a daily delight - a small surprise or pleasure that might otherwise go unnoticed - is the foundation of The Book of Delights, his bestselling essay collection. Here, he talks about the way that delight can sit alongside our fear, anger, frustration and grief, not to block them out, but to find a way to survive them. Along the way, we...

Welcome to the Wintering Sessions with Katherine May. This week, Katherine asks Aja Barber how we can change the way we buy clothes. Many of us have an uneasy feeling about the clothes we buy and wear. Although we know that there are ethical issues with their production, few of us understand how to change our behaviour, and make better choices. As a stylist and fashion consultant, Aja makes it her business to understand the whole supply chain, from raw materials to disposal. There are some...

Welcome to the Wintering Sessions with Katherine May. This week Katherine chats to writer Joanne Limburg about the ways that we can find connection in the experience of outsidership. While writing her astonishing new book, Letters To My Weird Sisters, Joanne sought out women from the past who were marked out as ‘weird’, from Virginia Woolf, who was unable to choose the ‘right’ ballgown, to Katharina Kepler, who was put on trial for witchcraft. Drawing on her Jewish heritage, Joanne urges us...

Welcome to the Wintering Sessions with Katherine May. This week Katherine chats to writer and poet Cole Arthur Riley, author of This Here Flesh and creator of Black Liturgies.   Unable to speak up as a child, Cole talks about how she learned to find her voice amid a family of gifted talkers and storytellers. Cole describes her father and grandmother as inspirational figures who nevertheless were marked by the generational trauma experienced by so many African Americans. But from this emerges...

Welcome to the Wintering Sessions with Katherine May. This week Katherine chats to journalist and writer Alexandra Heminsley, author of Some Body to Love. After infertility treatment, a challenging pregnancy and a sexual assault, Alex found her relationship drifting apart for reasons she couldn’t fully understand. But when her partner finally disclosed that they wanted to transition to being a woman, Alex had to come to terms with something she never expected: being part of a LBTQIA+ family....

Welcome to the Wintering Sessions with Katherine May. This week Katherine chats to poet and author Meghan O’ Rourke. In a fascinating conversation with Katherine, Meghan talks about the struggles she’s endured (and endures) with chronic illness. As she mentions in the episode, there is an invisible quality to many forms of illness which makes it very hard to navigate and manoeuvre through, and we hear all about the difficulties faced when consulting with doctors, dealing with it in our heads,...

Welcome to the Wintering Sessions with Katherine May. This week Katherine chats to Sara Tasker, writer, social media expert and coach. While you might expect a full on party-popper celebration of social media from someone like Sara - an expert within the realm, this is a very honest chat which takes many entirely relatable routes and tangents which surely many of us can relate to. Sara and Katherine also connect on matters of the neurotypical and neurodivergent, involving Sara's own ADHD and...

Welcome to the Wintering Sessions with Katherine May. This week Katherine chats to Gemma Cairney, presenter, curator of greatness and author of ‘Open: A Toolkit...’ and more. There's a strong chance you're familiar with Gemma through her prolific radio and broadcast career, but if not - as you've surely come to notice over the Wintering podcast - you're about to meet another new best friend. Gemma's been grinding and hustling since the early days of her media work which kicked off at the BBC,...

Welcome to the Wintering Sessions with Katherine May. This week Katherine chats to Aimee Nezhukumatathil, author of ‘World Of Wonders’ and more. An uplifting, soulful and inspiring chat with Aimee and Katherine, beginning with a foundation of wonder and never dropping the ball once. Moving from prose to poetry and immediately feeling boundaries being lifted, Aimee has put out some truly valuable work into the world and this is a perfect opportunity to get to the heart of it all. As always, it...

Welcome to the Wintering Sessions with Katherine May. This week Katherine chats to Elissa Altman, author of ‘Motherland’ and more. Katherine finds Elissa in that pre-Christmas zone, which serves as the perfect jumping-off point for a very upfront, candid and fascinating conversation on family. Specifically, Elissa's relationship with her mother. Like every family, it's a relationship which is unique and comes with its own inimitable history, and as such, informs where the two find themselves...

Welcome to the Wintering Sessions with Katherine May. This week Katherine chats to Maggie Smith, poet, writer and editor from Columbus, Ohio. You may know Maggie's tremendous work via her poem 'Good Bones', which she has a difficult relationship with. The poem is often referenced in times of crisis, which she thinks of as a 'disaster barometer' - she break downs this fascinating dissonance in her chat with Katherine, which reaches a wide range of topics including metpahor, the 'tasting'...

Welcome to the Wintering Sessions with Katherine May. This week Katherine chats to Cheryl Strayed, author of ‘Wild’ and so many more. A luxurious chat from the beginning til the end, this is a wonderful chance to get to know Cheryl a little better and hear the voice behind the books. It’s a true comfort, which folds in everything from the power of walking and what it can do to you, the unfinished walk, the male narrative and damage on all sides, finding the ‘off’ button for our brains and...

Welcome to the Wintering Sessions with Katherine May. This week Katherine chats to Jennifer Pastiloff, a speaker, teacher, and author of ‘On Being Human’. In a warm and honest chat with Katherine, Jennifer perfectly lays the table for where she finds herself at this point in time, as a yoga instructor, public speaker and best selling author. With an attitude of ‘I Got You’ - extended to a community which she has cultivated with care over time - she has learned to transform her own feelings of...

Welcome to the Wintering Sessions with Katherine May. This week Katherine chats to Jackee Holder, coach and author of 'Writing With Fabulous Trees', among many more. Jackee Holder is a writer, walker, coach, interfaith minister and daughter of the windrush. In this uplifting conversation, she talks about the capacity of life to uplift us, her love of libraries, and how a tree helped her to treasure her name. Hear Jackee expand too on her introvert / extrovert sides, rituals and body prayers,...

Welcome to the Wintering Sessions with Katherine May. This week Katherine chats to author Michelle Adams. Michelle Adams is best known as the author of Little Wishes, Between the Lies and My Sister. In this episode, she talks about a sudden and unexplained illness that disrupted everything she knew about herself, and how vital her support network became during that time. In other areas of this open and honest chat, Michelle also expands on her love of podcasting over the written interview,...

Welcome to the Wintering Sessions with Katherine May. This week Katherine chats to Angela Barnes, podcaster, comedian and regular panel guest on Mock The Week (and much more!). Angela Barnes has zero tolerance for anyone reassuring her that she's pretty - it talks over her lived experience, and does nothing to change her self-perception. Here, she discusses living with Persistent Depressive Disorder, which has made her whole life feel like the drizzly English climate, but which has also made...

Welcome to the Wintering Sessions with Katherine May. This week Katherine chats to Josie George, author of 'A Still Life: A Memoir'. Josie George has always lived with a complex of medical conditions that are difficult to name, but which leave her permanently in pain and having to carefully manage her mindset and energies in order to cope with everyday life. Here, she talks about the joys she finds in small things, and the vibrant appreciation for life that her restrictions have given her. An...

Welcome to the Wintering Sessions with Katherine May. This week Katherine chats to Georgina Lawton, author of 'Raceless: In Search of Family, Identity, and the Truth About Where I Belong'. For most of her life, Georgina Lawton was aware that she didn't look like her white family, but by her teens, she was no longer able to believe her parent's line that she was a genetic 'throwback' to a Black ancestor. In her memoir, Raceless, she writes about the painful process of forging a Black identity...

Welcome to the Wintering Sessions with Katherine May. This week Katherine chats to Tanya Shadrick, author of 'The Cure For Sleep'. A few days after giving birth, Tanya found herself in an ambulance, barely clinging to life. But surviving that terrifying experience changed everything. In this conversation, Tanya talks about how facing death made her bolder, more certain of her ambitions, and more determined to become a writer. And it also left her able to help other people who were nearing the...

Welcome to the Wintering Sessions with Katherine May. This week Katherine chats to Zeba Talkhani, author of 'My Past Is A Foreign Country'. Growing up as an Indian Muslim in socially-repressive Saudi Arabia, Zeba Talkhani learned her feminism young, unable to stop questioning the restrictions on her thoughts and personal freedoms. But after writing a memoir of her experiences, she encountered a backlash that she could never have expected. Here, she talks about how she came to terms with the...

Welcome to the Wintering Sessions with Katherine May. This week Katherine chats to Sara Ryan, author of 'Justice For Laughing Boy'. After Sara Ryan's autistic son, Connor, was sectioned and admitted to a residental mental health unit, there seemed to be no way to get him out again. And then, one morning, he died after having an epileptic seizure in the bath. Convinced that negligence was to blame, Sara began a campaign that not only brought the local authority to justice, but also put...

Welcome to the Wintering Sessions with Katherine May. This week Katherine chats to Marlee Grace, author of 'Getting To Center'. In this frank and wide-ranging conversation, Marlee Grace talks about the process of finding a life that makes you happy. Drawing on her book 'Getting to Center', she talks about finding love, living with addiction and the ongoing quest to find balance in life that's led to her decision to leave Instagram (at least for a while). It's fascinating to hear Marlee's take...

Welcome to the Wintering Sessions with Katherine May. This week Katherine chats to Nicola Slawson, journalist and founder of 'The Single Supplement'. Through her newsletter The Single Supplement, Nicola Slawson has become the poster girl for a happy life lived alone. But much of her success lies in her ability to write honestly and with balance about the single life - and here she talks about a period of extreme loneliness after taking a dream job in Berlin. This is a story of finding your...

Welcome to the Wintering Sessions with Katherine May. This week Katherine chats to Michele Harper, author of 'The Beauty In Breaking'. Michele Harper's career as a physician is a true vocation - the result, she says, of a childhood spent with an abusive father. In this conversation, she and Katherine talk about the nature of her calling to help, and her experience of racism in the workplace, where she has found herself both on the receiving end, and taking the role as a defender of her Black...

Welcome to the Wintering Sessions with Katherine May. This week Katherine chats to Kerri Ni Dochartaigh, author of 'Thin Places'. Kerri talks in detail about the aftermath of growing up in Derry at the height of the Troubles, as the daughter of a Protestant father and a Catholic mother. Forced to come to terms with trauma and survivorship guilt, Kerri found healing in the dark magic of the Irish landscape and Celtic mythology. In a wide ranging conversation, she and Katherine cover ground...