Project Narrative
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Project Narrative is a education podcast hosted by Project Narrative. It has 53 episodes, with the latest published March 2026.
The Project Narrative podcast is built on the idea that storytelling is one of humanity’s greatest inventions, a way in which we both seek to understand the world and to change it. The podcast features scholars of narrative in conversation about short narratives that engage in that work of knowing and intervening. In each episode, a scholar reads a narrative aloud and then discusses it with the host of the podcast, Jim Phelan, the director of Project Narrative. The conversations range across a wide array of topics: the guest’s reasons for selecting it; the sources of its appeal, including the pleasures it offers and the challenges it presents; the claims it makes about understanding some part of the world and about doing something as a result.
education ·en-US ·53 episodes
Episode 53: Jim Phelan & Maria Mäkelä — Julio Cortázar’s “Axolotl”
Episode 52: Jim Phelan & Simona Zetterberg-Nielsen — Omar El Akkad’s “Factory Air”
Episode 51: Jim Phelan & Nikki Grimes — excerpts from Nikki Grimes’s Ordinary Hazards
Episode 50: Jim Phelan & Rhona Trauvitch — Ken Liu’s “The Bookmaking Habits of Select Species”
Episode 49: Jim Phelan & Jan Alber — Robert Olen Butler’s “Jealous Husband Returns in Form of Parrot”
Episode 48: Jim Phelan & Catherine Belling — Susan Onthank Mates’s “Laundry”
Episode 47: Jim Phelan & Marta Figlerowicz — Chapter 1 of D.O. Fagunwa’s Forest of a Thousand Daemons, “The Author Meets Akara-Ogun”
Episode 46: Jim Phelan & Gary Weissman — Shalom Auslander’s “Smite the Heathens, Charlie Brown”
Episode 45: Jim Phelan & Kent Puckett — Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”
Episode 44: Jim Phelan & Kelly Marsh — Caryl Phillips’s “Growing Pains”
Episode 43: Jim Phelan & Stefan Iversen — OpenAI’s “AI, Metafiction, and Grief”
Episode 42: Jim Phelan and Daniel Punday — Charles Yu’s “Problems for Self-Study”
Episode 41: Jim Phelan & David Richter — Katherine Anne Porter’s “Theft”
Episode 40: Jim Phelan & Robert Caserio — Elizabeth Bowen’s “I Hear You Say So”
Episode 39: Jim Phelan & Eyal Segal — Sholem Aleichem’s “Baranovich Station”
Episode 38: Jim Phelan & Amy Elias — Lemony Snicket’s “The Lump of Coal”
Episode 37: Jim Phelan & Aaron Oforlea — James Baldwin’s “Going to Meet the Man”
Episode 36: Jim Phelan & Suzanne Keen — John Cheever’s “The Death of Justina”
Episode 35: Jim Phelan & Christopher González — Junot Díaz’s “The Books of Losing You”
Episode 34: Jim Phelan & Dorothee Birke — Ali Smith’s “Text for the Day”
Episode 33: Jim Phelan & Brian McAllister — Juliana Spahr’s “Gentle Now Don’t Add to Heartache”
Episode 32: Jim Phelan & Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan — Katherine Mansfield’s “The Fly”
Episode 31: Jim Phelan & Jakob Lothe — Nadine Gordimer’s “Is There Nowhere Else We Can Meet?”
Episode 30: Jim Phelan & Brian Richardson — Ilse Aichinger’s “Mirror Story”
Episode 29: Jim Phelan & Dorothy Hale — Chapter I of Henry James’s The Ambassadors
Episode 28: Jim Phelan & Matt Seybold — Chapter XVIII of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn
Episode 27: Jim Phelan & Sarah Copland — Bernardine Evaristo’s “ohtakemehomelord.com”
Episode 26: Jim Phelan & Lindsay Holmgren — Ursula Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”
Episode 25: Jim Phelan & Rita Charon — George Saunders’ “Puppy”
Episode 24: Jim Phelan & Henrik Zetterberg-Nielsen — Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart”
Episode 23: Jim Phelan & Susan Lanser — Sayed Kashua’s “Herzl Disappears at Midnight”
Episode 22: Jim Phelan & Erin James — Rachel Carson’s “A Fable for Tomorrow” from Silent Spring
Episode 21: Jim Phelan & Yoon Sun Lee — Excerpt from Maxine Hong Kingston’s “No Name Woman”
Episode 20: Jim Phelan & Paul Dawson — The Proliferation of the Term Narrative in Public Discourse
Episode 19: Jim Phelan & Marco Caracciolo — Charles Yu’s “Systems”
Episode 18: Amy Shuman & Mary Hufford — Tending Sensibility through Narrative
Episode 17: Jim Phelan & Faye Halpern — Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Black Cat”
Episode 16: Jim Phelan & Amanpal Garcha — Salman Rushdie’s “The Firebird’s Nest”
Episode 15: Jim Phelan & Simone Drake — Scotia Brown’s Oral Narratives of Everyday Racism
Episode 14: Jim Phelan & Jared Gardner — Chris Gethard’s “Career Suicide”
Episode 13: Jim Phelan & Sarah Iles Johnston — The Myth of Arachne and Athena
Episode 12: Jim Phelan & Leigh Gilmore — “Neck” by Maggie O’Farrell
Episode 11: Jim Phelan & Frederick Aldama — “The Continuity of Parks” by Julio Cortázar
Episode 10: Jim Phelan & Ashley Hope Pérez — “Report on Heaven and Hell” by Silvina Ocampo
Episode 9: Jim Phelan & Sean O’Sullivan — “Black Box” by Jennifer Egan
Episode 8: Jim Phelan & Brian McHale — “Chicxulub” by By T. C. Boyle
Episode 7: Julia Watson & Jim Phelan — Alice’s Walker’s “Beauty: When the Other Dancer is the Self”
Episode 6: Karen Winstead & Jim Phelan — Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur
Episode 5: Amy Shuman & Jim Phelan — Narratives of Waiting
Episode 4: Angus Fletcher & Jim Phelan — Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried”
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