Cassie McCullagh

But he goes right into American history.

Mm-hmm.

And the first story in the collection is a sort of dialogue and exchanges between Frederick Douglass, the black former slave and abolitionist, and the white anti-slavery crusader John Brown.

But then he, the writer himself, is in it as well, trying to work out what he makes of the story.

So it's really quite complex stuff.

The other thing that we haven't talked about, Michael, in terms of the explicit politics of this collection, is that it begins with a prefatory note that says, Dear Mr President.

I send this note along with some stories I've written.

And it's basically a plea saying, you have to abolish slavery.

You have to deal with the way that slavery is still felt in this country.

And then as he goes on, he says, you could be anybody, President, by the time you're reading this.

You could be a woman, you could be a black woman, but whoever you are, you have to deal with this aspect of our history.

So it's setting the whole collection up in an explicitly political way, but it's sort of playing around with who that imagined audience might be and, of course, whether the current one would ever read.

What did you make of his style?

Brett Evans, Rowena Goncalves, Intrigued.

Yes, I do think some of the pieces in Weidman's book have been published elsewhere.

And there was one I realised I had read in The New Yorker, one that's very interesting because it's about whether a white student should or could write a black character.

And he teaches writing as well.

But Rowena Gonsalves, it does very much read like a curated collection.

You've written a collection of short stories.

Yes.