Overdue Podcast Interview

A list of literary works spanning 1,500 years. A six hour exam. Having to be able to Passage ID any excerpt from the list. 

This comprehensive exam is the final hurdle between Catholic U English majors and graduation. Having not taken a written exam for years due to the COVID-19 pandemic, this test felt exceedingly impossible for my senior class. 

We were reading every minute between classes, meeting on Sunday mornings, hungover and with church only hours away, and panicking every week during our Senior Seminar as our professor reminded us that the quote ID section is the most important area to prepare for. But even as we tried to read as much of this list as possible, there was still the question of remembering it, understanding it.

Then, in late September, my fellow English major Kierstin Shea told me about a podcast she’d found: Overdue.

“Overdue is a podcast about the books you've been meaning to read.”

This line rang in my ears the first time I listened to Overdue, having pulled up their “A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Stories, by Flannery O’Connor” episode. And after that first episode, I was hooked. Not only did listening to the hosts, Andrew and Craig, review and discuss these pieces of literature helped me pass my comprehensive exam (I did, thank you, guys), it also made me laugh out loud.

I started working my way through the backlog of their content⁠—this show has been running with an episode a week for just under a decade⁠—and I became obsessed. I would read a book they’d read just to hear them talk about it (The Handmaid’s Tale and The Color Purple now grace my bookshelf). After months of fascination with the podcast, I decided that I needed to talk to them about their opinions on literature, their experience as members of the book community, and the importance of creative writing in everyday life. So I emailed them, as they encourage listeners to do at the end of each podcast, and they agreed to an interview.

It was one of the best hours of my life.

Before I even hopped on the Zoom with these guys who I perceived as minor celebrities or my friends⁠—they did accompany me on a lot of walks and hung out with me while I baked⁠—I sat in front of my computer screen, stress-smiling like a maniac. 

When the Overdue guys joined the call, I, of course, was very smooth and suave, asking Craig the name of his hometown to see if we were from the same town in Pennsylvania. As it turns out, he worked at the Coldstone Creamery in the King of Prussia Mall, where I went growing up.

“There’s nothing much to do when you’re like 14 and don’t have a driver’s license, so you just go to the mall and just like stand there for a while,” I joked, sweating that they would not find me as funny as I found them. Thankfully, they laughed and, both now based in the Philadelphia area, commented on the excessively opulent nature of this mall.

“I like that the Mall is big enough that it has a nice neighborhood and a bad neighborhood, like there’s a wrong side of the tracks in the King of Prussia Mall,” quipped Andrew.

“It’s a never-ending class war; it’s very Star Bellied Sneetches,” I responded, praying that they, having done a Dr. Seuss episode of Overdue, would understand a book reference I make constantly that no one ever understands.

Naturally, they knew and understood my obsession. 

“I read the Sneetches, I would say,” Andrew said, pausing for a dramatic sigh, “for a while it was twice a day, and now I think we’re down to three or four times a week. Having a two-year-old is pretty wild.”

Once we moved on from ColdStone and Sneetches, we dove into the literary conversation.

Andrew Cunningham and Craig Getting met as freshmen at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, breaching the immense social divide of living on separate floors and ultimately becoming best friends. As a means of staying connected post-grad, they wanted to find a creative project to collaborate on. They settled on Overdue: a podcast where each week, one of the hosts reads a book he has never read before, and the other acts as a surrogate listener to discuss and ask questions. It was also inspired by Craig’s bookshelf being full of unread books he’d stolen from his high school. 

What is so impressive about Overdue is the way that it has grown. Since its inception, the show has gained thousands of followers, been invited to perform at festivals, and been featured in wonderfully bookish magazines. But despite the fact that, as Andrew said, they “definitely have more business meetings now than we did earlier in our friendship,” it has not changed their personal dynamic too much. Craig explained, “It goes really well because we compliment each other really well, but what started as a way, a reason to talk to a friend once a week is now a full-on collaborative project that has a life of its own.”

Though the friendship has remained unchanged throughout the growth of the show, Overdue itself has definitely shifted throughout the years, a change I was able to perceive more easily as a listener moving through the catalog non-chronologically. One of these areas of change is the way books are researched.

Andrew and Craig are very clear that they are not literary scholars⁠—Andrew works in tech writing, having majored in classics, and Craig studied drama and now works in theater. Through the show, they attempt to embody the average reader, giving their take on the experience of reading a book as a layman. But they are also looking to entertain, to inform, to speak intelligently, and so they put in research before each recording about the author and the novel, which is helpful if you’re using them as a study tool (like myself) or just want to enjoy a holistic conversation about a book (also like myself). Another way they have pushed toward this inclusive conversation is through the use of 3-Star Goodreads Reviews.

Andrew, pioneer of this segment of the show, described how reading reviews from other everyday readers allows him to see if they are responding to aspects of a book similarly: “It kind of makes me more confident in my viewpoint and helps me crystallize thoughts a little bit better when it comes time to talk about them for an audience.”

“At least for me, it is a helpful tool when we’re talking about more contemporary work that doesn’t have a body of scholarship to talk about or … the author is just younger in their career, so there’s less stuff to talk about that might be informing how we read the book,” Craig followed up.

This attention to the type of audience they are looking to reach and their consistent effort to be considerate and informed is part of what makes this show such a refreshing listen as it exists in an age frequented by absolute opinions and misinformation.

Another way that the show has changed over the years is how the audience impacts it. At the start of Overdue, though there was a consistent effort to move outside the “straight, old, white guy canon,” it still focused primarily on famous and/or lauded pieces of writing. But as they’ve received more fan recommendations and moved through large portions of the canon in 500+ episodes, it’s changed the content of what the two are reading for the show. 

“What’s been really fascinating about that part of the show is that people come forward with these intensely personal books to them, that they loved as a kid or are a lot more of their favorite book or genre author that might not be, you know, taught in a class somewhere or anything like that. So it’s been a really interesting experience to encounter those books, but it has changed part of the show, for the better, I think,” Craig said.

They also commented on the fact that the conversation inherently takes on a different tone when you know you are reading someone’s favorite book. 

“It does make you more inclined to find what the intent was and to try and put yourself in somebody else’s shoes and understand why they enjoyed a thing they enjoyed. And I think it does make the show more thoughtful and makes me more thoughtful as a reader,” Andrew added.

After more exposition on their kind and erudite approach to reading beloved fiction, Craig chimed in, “I love trash. You can tell me that I love trash sometimes, it’s okay. And I try to assume that other people can live that way, too.”

“That’s how I felt when you guys read Twilight,” I told them. “I kept listening… But I had to divorce myself a little bit.”

They laughed at my pain, and Andrew replied, “I really had a lot of fun reading and talking about those books, but also I feel like we as a society need to be able to say that a grown man-werewolf looking at a baby and being like, ‘I’m going to marry that baby,’ is a little messed up.”

Fair enough.

Another question I wanted to ask them was about Overdue’s integration into the online book community. 

“I feel like, we’re still like, ‘they let us in,’” Craig joked in response. He continued, “I think the biggest thing for me is like, particularly librarians and people who teach literature have been very welcoming to us as folks who did not go to school for this, and that’s a big thing. But I also know that we’ve connected with a lot of listeners for whom [reading] was a big part of their school experience, and now it’s not a part of their everyday lives.”

“Yeah, people in the book podcast community are uniformly lovely,” Andrew agreed. 

Now that Overdue has made a name for itself in the book community, I applaud Andrew and Craig for their willingness to spotlight lesser-known poetry and novels on their show, even if it is just during a break for sponsors. They did tell me how intentional this choice is, to be a supporter of small creators while avoiding “PR people casting a wide net and hoping that somebody bites.”

I, nonetheless, told them that “I’m just glad that you guys responded to my very small, specific net that I cast at you.” But even their agreeing to chat with me speaks to their welcoming nature—I’m pretty sure they gave up their lunch breaks to Zoom with me.

Though Andrew and Craig moonlight as podcast hosts, they are both involved with writing in their day jobs, Andrew as a tech writer and Craig as a director and theater educator. They have found ways to integrate creative writing into their lines of work without being a straight “author” as so many of us who love to write dream to be. I wanted to know their take on the importance of creative writing and the role it plays in their everyday lives and careers.

This enormous question was then met with an enormous pause. “Sorry, that’s a really LARGE question,” I apologized, and the silence was broken by chuckles into mic arms. The guys passed responsibility for answering this question first back and forth, and eventually Craig held onto it.

“So, for me,” he began, “there is immense importance to using narrative or recognizing the power of narrative both on a personal level and a macrosystemic level… recognizing the how and why a narrative functions and whether or not it’s effective is so important.”

He went on to describe how he works with high school students and med students to teach them how to break down story, which helps better equip them to listen to others and advocate for patients or colleagues.

“So creative fiction,” he continued later, “whether you’re writing it or whether you’re reading it, is an opportunity to stretch yourself a little bit.”

Andrew described his own job as relatively straight reporting, remarking, “it is not fiction writing by any stretch.” However, his liberal arts education and personal interest in creative writing and reading have given him a unique approach to the job. 

“Sometimes you can find a unique angle on a story just by virtue of thinking outside the box a little bit, especially when you’re writing a big, long feature or something. You know, writing about a laptop or some open source software or something, it can be pretty dry, but I think I am capable of and am always trying to bring something relatable and human to those stories.”

He also divulged a bit of the simultaneously frustrating and inspiring experience of being a writer when reading. “The other thing that being a reader improves about my writing is, like, sometimes you read a sentence and you just get a little mad that the sentence is so good.” Andrew’s eyebrows furrowed for a moment in false frustration as he imitated the moment of realization and asked himself, “‘Why can’t I write a sentence that’s that good?’” He laughed at his own joke (but he was not alone, I laughed, too), before explaining that that impressed frustration leads him to ask the question of what is a unique, funny way to put a thought, which makes his writing stronger. 

But Andrew also took a moment to reflect on the larger significance of what it means to put the written word out into the world. “When I am writing about product stuff, it’s important to be able to recognize the limitations of my own perspective and be practiced in seeking out different experiences and being, like, empathetic as a person. And, yeah, I think that that ties together my writing and then this stuff that we do for the podcast, and I think a lot of what fiction writers are doing when they’re trying to capture a larger thought or statement about humanity, is just trying to see outside yourself a little bit, if that makes sense.”

Hearing all of this from people who exist creatively outside of the sheltered walls of a university was, honestly, joyful. I mentioned to them my own research on the importance of reading and writing for pleasure in childhood, all the fruits of emotional intelligence and empathy that it bears later in life, and the importance of understanding narrative to understand human experience. 

“That was a reason why I wanted to do a book show specifically,” Andrew told me. “I read for pleasure a ton as a kid, and then I had kind of a tough time with just the amount of it and the deadlines of it in college, and I sort of fell out of love with reading a bit… Doing the show was partly an exercise in trying to find that spark and that enjoyment in reading again, and it has definitely done that.”

My final heavy question for them was about the nature of reading with a modern lens. Though their podcast has moved into a more modern literary sphere in recent years, they often have to engage with pieces of writing or authors that promote outdated ideals. So how do they speak about these books and deal with the morality of this issue we all struggle with?

“When it comes to the art-artist separation, our approach, generally, is to acknowledge that that controversy exists or that those bad opinions are held, but, at the same time, not to… we also try to leave room for the work to have value separate from the artist,” Andrew replied, citing the example of Ender’s Game, whose author, Orson Scott Card, has espoused homophobic and neoconservative views over the years. “That doesn’t mean that what Craig loved and experienced about that book is invalid. In the same way that J.K. Rowling digging in on TERFy, anti-trans stuff, if Harry Potter was important to you and was formative to you and it made you realize something about yourself, she does not invalidate that effect on you… we try to examine the totality of a thing, not let people off the hook but also not, you know, blanket cancel.”

This approach is incredibly valuable because there can so easily be a tendency to condemn a reader for having a connection to a controversial piece of literature that is important to them. While it is key to be able to identify these problematic elements and make efforts to combat them, Overdue’s lens does this without denouncing someone for nostalgia or enjoyment.

Craig also added that he is trying to get better about doing research on the books that they read. He brought up an episode they had recently done on the original Dr. Doolittle story, which has had the racist caricature excised from its later editions. He explained that when those “heinous” elements were present in older stories, there were typically people condemning such aspects at the time. Rather than make the excuse that it was socially acceptable then but not today, Craig has dedicated himself to finding those marginalized voices in the crowd. 

“That’s something that I’m trying to, when it’s relevant, work into our research section a bit more, just to educate myself and also lift up those voices from whenever that book came from.”

He also addressed that hosting a podcast brings with it the responsibility of being inherently promotional, and the possibility of inadvertently supporting an author who espouses poor ideals. They attempt to draw the line so that they can confidently say, “it is potentially worth talking about this book for whatever value it has; it is not worth people benefiting off of us talking about that book.”

Andrew agreed with Craig’s statement that they never want to “create the impression that we’re endorsing or glorifying their actions by reveling in it.” In addition, they do not provide links to purchase such books as they do for many of their reads, as they do not want the author nor themselves to benefit from the disenfranchisement of others.

As a listener, I must say that the Overdue hosts achieve everything that they laid out as their personal criteria for talking about controversial works and authors. I also give them props for being able to balance that ethos and make me laugh in the same episode.

In that same vein, I wanted to end the interview on a lighter note. Rather than ask them their favorite book, I asked them about the worst book they’d ever read.

Craig immediately responded with The Girl Next Door by Jack Ketchum, which he read for the podcast years ago. “I would strongly recommend that no one ever read that book,” he said before taking it even further, “Don’t even listen to that episode. If you want to support us, just download that episode and throw it away.”

Andrew said Grey by E.L. James, the Fifty Shades of Grey novel from Christian’s perspective, despite having never read it before. “This is a fake answer…[but] I don’t want to do that to myself; I know how mad it would make me.”

I then asked them one of my most controversial book questions: Is liking The Catcher in the Rye a red flag? 

Andrew came in hot with his opinion on the novel’s protagonist. “I mean, I hate Holden Caulfield, like in my bones I dislike him, and, you know, I’m not sure how much of that is the point of the book, but I associate that book very closely with him and his perspective, and man I do not like that kid.”

Craig began his answer more diplomatically, saying, “Okay, so, very conditional jerk answer, I think it might depend on what it is you like about it and how that impacts how you talk about that book.” He then compared people’s responses to Holden Caulfield with the public response to the Joker. “Do you like him because you love to be twisted, or are you interested in how we combat nihilism, or are you interested in a guy who wears a funny outfit and makes you laugh on a campy Adam West show? I don’t know, Holden Caulfield isn’t exactly the Joker, but I do think there is a comparison to be made… maybe if you think he’s a good, stand-up young man, that’s a red flag.”

“Joker in the Rye over here,” quipped Andrew, which took both of them out of speaking commission for 30 seconds.

I revealed that I actually love this novel for a plethora of literary reasons, which I am glad to report they respected. But of course, I did have to add that “I am wary of any man who wishes he was Holden Caulfield,” to which they both laughed and agreed heartily.

My final question was to ask if they ever had a nom de plume (pen name) prepared were they ever to be an author. Neither had one prepared, but we took the time to spitball a few names. I did, however, promise to strike those ideas from the record in case they ever needed to use them, and I could only reveal who it was 80 years in the future. Craig went so far as to verbally trademark his idea, though he was gracious enough to give me this quote for the article: “Just say I had a really good idea and no one’s allowed to have it.” So guys, he had a really good idea and no one’s allowed to have it.

I wrapped up the interview then, not wanting to take up any more of their time, though I could have talked to them for hours. Considering I’d been listening to their podcast for months, chuckling at their banter and imagining I was part of the conversation, it felt like catching up with old friends for a quick lunch: wonderful, but wanting. Thankfully, though, they post an episode every week to keep me up to date. 

So even if you don’t have the chance to talk back to them like I did, listen to Overdue. You will be right at home in the conversation. 

April 2022