Page Count

Ghost Hunting Overnight at the Thurber House

In this supernatural spectacular, Laura is joined by her spouse, Peter, for an overnight ghost-hunting expedition at the Thurber House in Columbus. Do they experience any paranormal phenomena? Do they resurrect hazy, decades-old memories of the film Ghost? Do they demonstrate a stunning lack of knowledge about everything from religious philosophy on ghosts to Star Wars, the mechanics of night vision cameras, and beyond? Furthermore, does Laura get freaked out by steam and dress forms and filing cabinets? Does she almost break the recorder by emitting an ear-shattering scream? Finally, just why is the Thurber House, former home of renowned humorist James Thurber, considered haunted? You’ll have to listen to find out. Boo!
 
After joining Laura and Peter on their ghost-hunting adventure, learn more about James Thurber by listening to Page Count’s earlier audio tour of the Thurber House. Then, view photos of the house on the accompanying blog post, “Inside the Thurber House.”
 
Page Count is produced by Ohio Center for the Book at Cleveland Public Library. For full show notes and an edited transcript of this episode, visit the episode page. To get in touch, email ohiocenterforthebook@cpl.org (put “podcast” in the subject line) or follow us on Instagram or Facebook.

AWP 2026 Recap

Laura sits down with Tiffany Graham Charkosky, Director of Arts and Culture at Cleveland Public Library, to recap the 2026 Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP) Conference in Baltimore in early March. From exploring the bookfair, meeting up with writing friends, attending panels and offsite readings, pushing their social batteries to the limit, and more, they get into it all. Come for the conference recap, but stay for Laura’s inexplicable digression into her interest in the Devil. Enjoy.
 
Page Count is produced by Ohio Center for the Book at Cleveland Public Library. For full show notes and an edited transcript of this episode, visit the episode page. To get in touch, email ohiocenterforthebook@cpl.org (put “podcast” in the subject line) or follow us on Instagram or Facebook.

Literary Screening: Heated Rivalry with Sonia Feldman

Grab your ginger ale, your hockey pucks, and your intense sense of longing, because we’re heading to the cottage. Cleveland author Sonia Feldman joins us to discuss the Heated Rivalry phenomenon—the hit show and its cultural impact, the art of adapting romance novels, and what it means to be girls who love boys who love boys. We also turn to another form of queer love found in Feldman’s forthcoming debut literary novel, Girl’s Girl.
 
Come for the hockey romance but stay for an in-depth discussion covering Feldman’s writing process, how she discovered the true heart of her novel midway through writing, why she read the entire manuscript out loud to a friend, how she determined she was ready to query literary agents, and more. Finally, be sure to stick around to the end for some rapid rivalry questions that make us contemplate ginger ale and vodka cocktails, raves vs. book events, favorite Heated Rivalry episodes, and our love of figure skating. See you on the ice for the happily ever after.
 
Content warning: This episode generally references sex depicted on screen in Heated Rivalry and in romance novels at large.
 
Sonia Feldman is a recipient of the PEN America PEN/Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers, and her poetry and fiction have been published in literary journals like The Missouri Review, The Southern Review, and Waxwing. She runs Sonia’s Poem of the Week, a popular email newsletter. Girl’s Girl, her first novel, is forthcoming from Dial Press on June 2, 2026. Sonia lives and writes in Cleveland. Visit her website, follow her on Instagram at @writsonia, and preorder Girl’s Girl from Loganberry Books or wherever books are sold. Author photo credit: Lizzy Montana Myers.
 
Page Count is produced by Ohio Center for the Book at Cleveland Public Library. For full show notes and an edited transcript of this episode, visit the episode page. To get in touch, email ohiocenterforthebook@cpl.org (put “podcast” in the subject line) or follow us on Instagram or Facebook.

Horror & Hoodoo with Tracy Cross

Welcome to the dark world of horror author Tracy Cross! In this episode, Cross discusses her Conjure series trilogy, which follows a young girl developing into a powerful Hoodoo practitioner in Louisiana in the late 1800s. In the process, Cross sheds light on the practice of Hoodoo, why she was drawn to writing about this time period and setting, her research process, how Black writers are reclaiming the narrative surrounding Hoodoo and Voodoo, her experiences in an MFA program focusing on popular fiction, why writers must persist, and more.
 
Content warning: This episode includes a discussion of some dark topics horror writers might research as part of their work, including tanning practices for human skin. Please proceed with caution as needed.
 
Tracy Cross is a horror author based in Washington, DC. She is author of the Conjure Series (Dark Matter INK), which includes the novels Rootwork (2022), A Gathering of Weapons (2024), and The Legend of Pee Wee Conway (forthcoming 2026). A short story collection, The Journal of Small Hours, is also forthcoming. Her writing has been featured in numerous anthologies, and she has received awards from the Ladies of Horror Fiction and the Horror Writers Association. Follow her in Instagram @tracycrosswrites or visit her website, tracycrossonline.com.
 
Page Count is produced by Ohio Center for the Book at Cleveland Public Library. For full show notes and an edited transcript of this episode, visit the episode page. To get in touch, email ohiocenterforthebook@cpl.org (put “podcast” in the subject line) or follow us on Instagram or Facebook.
 

Ohio Celebrates Toni Morrison

It’s the year of Toni Morrison! Our friends at Literary Cleveland, in partnership with Ohio Humanities, are leading a yearlong, statewide celebration of the life, literature, and legacy of Toni Morrison, a Lorain, Ohio, native and the first African American woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. With the event kickoff just around the corner on February 18, Page Count is celebrating by rerunning our 2024 exploration of the Toni Morrison Reading Room. Listen to learn more about Morrison’s legacy, and then head over to ohiocelebratestonimorrison.org/events to get the scoop on the many incredible events, screenings, discussions, book clubs, and other programs held statewide this year.
 
To view images from the Toni Morrison Reading Room, visit “Inside the Toni Morrison Reading Room.”
 
Page Count is produced by Ohio Center for the Book at Cleveland Public Library. For full show notes and an edited transcript of this episode, visit the episode page. To get in touch, email ohiocenterforthebook@cpl.org (put “podcast” in the subject line) or follow us on Instagram or Facebook.

Cross-Cultural Character Exploration with Daniel Tam-Claiborne

Daniel Tam-Claiborne recently appeared at Mac’s Backs Books in Cleveland to discuss his debut novel, Transplants, which surrounds a Chinese college student and a Chinese American teacher who find themselves uprooted in new lives and cultures. Tam-Claiborne sheds light on his inspiration and process, his philosophy on writing outside one’s own experience, the craft of a multi-POV novel, incorporating the real-life trajectory of COVID into his fictional world, exploring identity and belonging in his work, and, naturally, why self-delusion is an important part of the writing life.
 
This conversation was recorded during an in-person author event hosted by Mac’s Backs on November 18, 2025. Order Transplants from Mac’s Backs here.
 
Page Count is produced by Ohio Center for the Book at Cleveland Public Library. For full show notes and an edited transcript of this episode, visit the episode page. To get in touch, email ohiocenterforthebook@cpl.org (put “podcast” in the subject line) or follow us on Instagram or Facebook.

The Art of Sports Journalism with Christine Brennan

Sportswriter Christine Brennan discusses her latest book, On Her Game: Caitlin Clark and the Revolution in Women’s Sports, including how she came to conceive, research, write, and publish the book as an instant New York Times bestseller in only a year. In addition to dissecting Caitlin Clark’s career and impact on the WNBA, Brennan also discusses her Toledo upbringing, the art of sports journalism, succeeding in a male-dominated field, the impact of Title IX, what it means when a biography is “unauthorized,” a preview of the upcoming Winter Olympics in Milan, and more.
 
Christine Brennan is an award-winning national sports columnist for USA Today, a commentator for CNN, ABC News, PBS NewsHour and NPR, a bestselling author, and a nationally known speaker. Named one of the country’s top 10 sports columnists three times by the Associated Press Sports Editors, she has covered the Olympic Games, both summer and winter, since 1984. She is the author of eight books, including Best Seat in the House, the only father-daughter memoir written by a sports journalist. Her latest book, On Her Game, is the bestselling 2025 portrait of basketball star Caitlin Clark. Visit christinebrennan.com and follow @cbrennansports on Instagram,  X, or Facebook for more.
 
Page Count is produced by Ohio Center for the Book at Cleveland Public Library. For full show notes and an edited transcript of this episode, visit the episode page. To get in touch, email ohiocenterforthebook@cpl.org (put “podcast” in the subject line) or follow us on Instagram or Facebook.

Bloopers!

We’re leaving 2025 on a note of failure, mishaps, and shame. That’s right: we have bloopers! Listen in to discover that Laura is incapable of saying the word “archivist,” she asks hopelessly clunky questions, she is completely unfamiliar with the 1991 action film Backdraft, she can’t recall the podcast introduction she’s said literally over 100 times, and she even gets popcorn stuck in her throat right before recording. Also, sometimes the lights go out, the wrong microphone is employed, recorders run low on battery power, and words like “iconography” and “ambiguity” rear their ugly heads. All this and more in our first (and perhaps only ever) bloopers episode.
 
Page Count is produced by Ohio Center for the Book at Cleveland Public Library. For full show notes and an edited transcript of this episode, visit the episode page. To get in touch, email ohiocenterforthebook@cpl.org (put “podcast” in the subject line) or follow us on Instagram or Facebook.
 

NO NO NO NO NO NO: The Rejection Show

It’s December, it gets dark in the afternoon, and it’s freezing here in Ohio…what better time to dive into the cheery topic of rejection? Better yet, how about a clip show of rejection goodies? LOL, you’re welcome! This mini episode features clips from seven guests who appeared on Page Count in 2025 and offered some rejection-related insights on everything from submission strategies to the importance of separating the business from the art, writing out of spite, persistence, and beyond. Plus, Laura shares her own rejection stats from 2025. So what are you waiting for? Dust off your cover letter, log into your Submittable account, and take a listen.
 
The following episodes were excerpted for this rejection extravaganza:
 
The Art of Editing with The Cincinnati Review
Clicking Our Heels Three Times with Dr. Taylor Byas
Experimental Fiction with Mary Grimm
Page Count Live: Writing Toward Peace with Loung Ung
Touring the Paul Laurence Dunbar House
Librarians are Superheroes with Karen Henry Clark
Speculative Fiction at the Columbus Book Festival
 
Page Count is produced by Ohio Center for the Book at Cleveland Public Library. For full show notes and an edited transcript of this episode, visit the episode page. To get in touch, email ohiocenterforthebook@cpl.org (put “podcast” in the subject line) or follow us on Instagram or Facebook.

Holiday Gift Recommendations from Little Professor

You’ve just been handed a rectangular-shaped gift with the telltale heft and size of a book. Who knows what worlds might be contained in that one little object? This holiday season, you can give that same gift of possibility by shopping at an independent bookstore—and Nick and Celeste Polsinelli, the owners of Little Professor Book Center in Athens, Ohio, have plenty of ideas to get you started. In this episode, Nick offers a range of recommendations, from picture books to epistolary novels to talking cats and beyond, to cover every book lover on your list no matter how eclectic their tastes.
 
Recommended books:
How to Be a Good Creature by Sy Montgomery, illustrated by Rebecca Green
The Christmas Sweater by Jan Brett
Du Iz Tak? by Carson Ellis
D.J. Rosenblum Becomes the G.O.A.T. by Abby White
The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman
The Cat Who Saved Books by Sosuke Natsukawa, translated by Louise Heal Kawai
Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn
The Girl and the Goddess by Nikita Gill
A Time of Dread by John Gwynne (Of Blood and Bone series)
The Millfield Mine Disaster by Ron W. Luce
Enchanted Ground: The Spirit Room of Jonathan Koons by Sharon Hatfield
A Place So Deep Inside America It Can't Be Seen by Kari Gunter-Seymour
The Bear by Andrew Krivak
Moon of the Crusted Snow by Waubgeshig Rice
 
Page Count is produced by Ohio Center for the Book at Cleveland Public Library. For full show notes and an edited transcript of this episode, visit the episode page. To get in touch, email ohiocenterforthebook@cpl.org (put “podcast” in the subject line) or follow us on Instagram or Facebook.