In this program, Claudia Cragg speaks with prize-winning author David Vann about his work in general and about his novel 'Caribou Island'. The book was recently featured as the night-time serial on BBC Radio 4's 'Book at Bedtime'.

'Caribou Island' "is set in David Vann's native Alaska, amid the icy, glacier-fed lakes and the remote islands covered in alder and Sitka spruce. And it is on such island, far from any habitation, that Gary, a medievalist who fled to Alaska 30 years before with his young wife, Irene, in search of an unattainable idyll, is now determined to begin once again. He will build a simple cabin there and at last find peace. Irene joins him in his endeavour, understanding, unlike her husband, that there are costs." 

Caribou Island is the second major literary work from David Vann, whose ground-breaking first book, 'Legend of a Suicide' has become a best-seller around the world and has won numerous literary awards including the prestigious Prix Medicis Etranger for 2010.

KGNU Denver/Boulder is in the middle of the Spring Fund Drive to raise much-needed funds that keep the eclectic music and vital news (local, national and international) programming on air. If you feel that independent public radio deserves support (in this age of corporate, monolithic media), please consider a donation (however small) especially in the light of the potential slash and burn cuts in government subsidies. Please visit: KGNU and give if you enjoy this podcast. Even a tiny donation to the station that makes this podcast possible is very gratefully received. Thank you.

FOLLOW on Twitter @KGNUITEClaudia

The Homelessness Marathon is an annual 14-hour radio broadcast featuring the voices and stories of homeless people from around the United States. It features live call-ins all night long via a national toll-free number and the programming is made available for free to all non-commercial radio, and some TV stations around the USA, on the internet and even internationally. Jeremy Weir Alderson is both founder and prime mover of the Marathon.

On the Homelessness Marathon, the producers talk to many different kinds of people who hold any number of  different views about how to end homelessness. In so doing, a wide diversity of opinion is presented, as well as the stand of the organizers themselves.

Behind the effort is at core the idea that the elimination of poverty is a moral duty for society. They believe that fulfilling this duty makes for a better society and that there are many ways to fulfill this duty, but that all of them should be guided by these principles.

The archives of this year's event - and of all preceding years' events back to 1998 - can be found HERE. If you are unable to listen in real time, there is a wealth of downloadable audio available right there for when you are. 

The interview attached here in this podcast is only one very tiny part of this year's event, an interview with two guests at Denver's daytime residence for the homeless, The St. Francis' Center, and with that entity's Executive Director, Tom Luehrs.