s3e23 Slipping and Searching for Healing in the Streets of New York, Cal Hoffman’s Novel Memoir
Cal Hoffman, Lan Duong
s3e23
August 7, 2025
Our featured novelist is Cal Hoffman, author of Easy to Slip. Our featured poet is Lan Duong, contributor to Watermark, a landmark anthology of Vietnamese American writing. New music and poetry by Jay Rodriguez Sierra and Martha Cinader.
CREDITS– HOST: Martha Cinader, FEATURED SPOKEN WORD: Lan Doung, Martha Cinader. GUESTS:Cal Hoffman, Lan Duong NEW MUSIC: written and arranged by Jay Rodriguez Sierra. ORIGNAL SOUNDTRACK, MIXING, MASTERING, SOUND DESIGN: Jay Rodriguez Sierra.
FEATURED GUESTS
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Cal Hoffman – Author
Read more: Cal Hoffman – AuthorCAL HOFFMAN is a writer, educator, and actor. He graduated from Catholic University and attended the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art in London, as well as the MFA Fiction Writing Program at Columbia University. He has taught English and creative writing to children of immigrants, private school students, and young people in foster care.
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Lan Duong – Poet
Read more: Lan Duong – PoetLan Duong is Associate Professor in Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Southern California. She is the author of Treacherous Subjects: Gender, Culture, and Trans-Vietnamese Feminism and coeditor of Southeast Asian Women in the Diaspora: Troubling Borders in Literature and Art. Her poetry has appeared in Watermark: Vietnamese American Poetry and Prose, Bold Words: Asian American Writing…
FEATURED BOOKS
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Dandelion Wine – Ray Bradbury
Read more: Dandelion Wine – Ray BradburyThe summer of ’28 was a vintage season for a growing boy. A summer of green apple trees, mowed lawns, and new sneakers. Of half-burnt firecrackers, of gathering dandelions, of Grandma’s belly-busting dinner. It was a summer of sorrows and marvels and gold-fuzzed bees. A magical, timeless summer in the life of a twelve-year-old boy…
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Easy to Slip – Cal Hoffman
Read more: Easy to Slip – Cal HoffmanSam Kovner reads messages on walls and hears voices in the hall, and wonders: if you find yourself losing your mind, how do you get well? Winter, 1976, Columbia University. Hearing voices and seeing hateful writing on walls, early admission Sam Kovner walks the New York streets, sleepless thirty-six hours.
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I Never Promised You a Rose Garden – Joanne Greenberg
Read more: I Never Promised You a Rose Garden – Joanne GreenbergAfter making an attempt on her own life, sixteen-year-old Deborah Blau is diagnosed with schizophrenia. With the reluctant and fearful consent of her parents, she enters a psychiatric hospital many hours from her home in suburban Chicago. Here she will spend the next three years, trying, with the help of a gifted psychiatrist, to find…
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Nothing Follows – Lan P. Duong
Read more: Nothing Follows – Lan P. DuongThe title of this debut collection, Nothing Follows, is reappropriated from a government document establishing the beginning of a refugee family’s time in the United States. At every coordinate of their lives, the refugee family provides affidavits, letters, and reams of paperwork as they work to beseech those in power to grant them “family reunification” visas…
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The Sympathizer – Viet Thanh Nguyen
Read more: The Sympathizer – Viet Thanh NguyenThe Sympathizer is a sweeping epic of love and betrayal. The narrator, a communist double agent, is a “man of two minds,” a half-French, half-Vietnamese army captain who arranges to come to America after the Fall of Saigon, and while building a new life with other Vietnamese refugees in Los Angeles is secretly reporting back to…
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Watermark Vietnamese American Poetry and Prose
Read more: Watermark Vietnamese American Poetry and ProseEdited by Barbara Tran, Monique T.D. Truong and Luu Truong Khoi, Watermark: Vietnamese American Poetry & Prose (Asian American Writers’ Workshop, 1998) heralds a new era for Vietnamese American literature. Here, for the first time, the most innovative contemporary Vietnamese American writers explore thematic and stylistic territory previously overlooked in other collections, which have traditionally…
SUBMISSIONS
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