ABOUT THIS EPISODE
It was a few years ago at this point when I came up with the idea of a themed issue of the audio magazine called CODES. I was watching The Mandalorian and these bounty hunters never remove their helmets. They often punctuate an encounter with each other saying, “This is the way.” Staying in the Star Wars world, you could extend the code to Jedis, whose objective is a monk-like devotion to order and justice and a devotion to the Force.
Batman has a code that he never kills. That in the Dark Knight, the Joker teases him about it. Batman, out of necessity, breaks the code in killing Harvey Dent to save Jim Gordon’s son.
I admire people with singular devotion because I am someone who is so lacking in singular devotion. I say I want something and yet my habits rarely align with that thing I purport to want. That’s why the people I tend to write about are obsessive and they give things up because the real sacrifice is not seeing their goals through, NOT giving up a night on the town, NOT giving drinking the weekend away, NOT eating multiple pizzas. I could go on.
So it was with that in mind that I wanted to get a sense of the codes people live by.
We have six essays in this issue. It features Sam Sharp, Lindsay Street, Jennifer Lang, Marilyn Wimp Paolino, Judith Evans, and Eren Simpson.
Follow along with the show @creativenonfictionpodcast and consider becoming a patron over at patreon.com/cnfpod. Those contributions helped pay these writers for their work.
