What does a forty-year-old San Francisco literary journal have to teach us about loneliness, wealth, belonging, and how to survive an age of authoritarianism? A great deal, it turns out.

In this episode, host Hugh Leeman sits down with Oscar Villalon — managing editor of ZYZZYVA, the acclaimed independent literary journal publishing West Coast writers and artists since 1985 — for a wide-ranging, deeply humane conversation about the purpose of literature in the 21st century, the displacement of the creative class from San Francisco, and why young people are quietly returning to print.

Villalon traces ZYZZYVA's history and mission, explains why he imagines his ideal reader living in a rent-controlled apartment by choice, and makes the case that a literary journal exists to surface a community that's already there — not to manufacture on ...