The Story Explorer

Solid Gold Podcasts #BeHeard
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What is the outlook of a story? Hello listener, welcome to my podcast series: The Story explorer. I am a reader who has the need to talk with others about what I’ve read. I have started and joined many book clubs. I now run one in a little café in Johannesburg. You are all welcome to join. But because time is sparse for many of us and Johannesburg is not within travelling distance for many readers I am taking up the challenge to talk about books in a podcast. I believe a story always is embedded in something else. This will be the starting point of this podcast journey. I want to look at what is around the story; what is the location? Who are the characters? What is it that happens in the story? What does it do within me, the reader? What do I think the author wants to say? What does this story make me think about? These are questions I want to explore with books that I think are important. Books I believe we all should read and talk about.

  1. Jul 31

    Frankie Murrey on the Open Book Festival, Fragmentary Writing, and Why We Need to Talk About Home

    Frankie Murrey, coordinator of Cape Town's Open Book Festival This episode is for readers, book club members, and curious minds who want to understand what to expect at the Cape Town Open Book Festival, and which authors are worth seeking out. Frankie Murrey, festival coordinator and writer, makes the case for ‘showing up, being in the room, adding your voice, and understanding something differently’. Host Christi Sa opens by discussing Frankie’s own unusual book: A Collection of Gaps, a box of short stories, fragments, artefacts, and stickers that explores what home means in a world of growing displacement and inequality. Frankie explains why she chose a fragmentary form over a linear narrative, why the box itself is a metaphor for the instability of home, and how she wants readers to place something of themselves into the gaps. The conversation moves to the Open Book Festival's transformation from a literary festival into what Frankie now calls 'Open Book - Conversations That Matter.' She talks openly about early audiences that were older and whiter than the city it served, and how the team repositioned the festival around urgent subjects, such as GBV, Afrophobia, Pan-African identity, mental health, and parenting. These topics are explored through the lens of books rather than about books. Frankie highlights five authors appearing at the 2026 festival: Selali Fiamanya, Before We Hit the Ground, (Scotland); I.O. Echeruo, The Comfort of Distant Stars, (Ghana and Nigeria); Faraaz Mahomed, Motherland, (South Africa and America); Sue Nyathi, The Polygamist, (Zimbabwe and South Africa) and Thando Fuze, Fluent in the Language of Burial, (Durban, South Africa). Each writer is framed as essential reading for specific reasons. The episode closes with two bold statements from the host, asking Frankie to bring back the nuance or tell her she’s got it all wrong: literature is a deviation from the basic story, and read in solitude but respond with a multitude. Her answers are honest, warm, and worth sitting with. openbookfestival.co.za · Open Book Festival Cape Town · Remi Ngamije & Frankie Murray and the Doek Literary Festival · silentbook.club · ChristiSa.com · Connect with Christi on LinkedIn · Follow Christi Sa on Instagram · Follow Saint Germain on Instagram

    Frankie Murrey on the Open Book Festival, Fragmentary Writing, and Why We Need to Talk About Home

  2. Jun 22

    "It is everywhere" - a conversation about debut novel Stern Gods with the author Kamanee Govender

    Debut novelist Kamanee Govender joins host Christi Sa to talk about Stern Gods, her clear-eyed literary coming-of-age story set in an Indian South African neighbourhood during the 1986 State of Emergency. This episode is essential listening for all South African citizens and especially school principals, youth organisation leaders, book clubs, and NGOs working with young people in South Africa who want to address how abuse, oppression, and silence shape children's lives. The main character of Stern Gods is Kaathi, who is twelve years old. She lives in Bombayville during apartheid, surrounded by alcoholism, domestic violence, verbal abuse, and the ongoing sexual abuse happening inside her own home. When her best friend is raped and silenced, Kaathi must find a way to carry that knowledge alone. Govender explains why she chose a child narrator - she wants to share what the impact of all kinds of abuse are on children. Children see and experience the world differently. They need protection. The conversation moves through the book's major themes: intergenerational trauma in Black and Indian South African families; how apartheid's systemic oppression pressed down through communities to land hardest on children; why women sometimes uphold the patriarchal structures that harm them and their children; and why sexual abuse within families remains a taboo subject in South Africa decades after democracy. Govender draws on her own healing journey, her work as a colour therapist and life coach, and the academic work of Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson to explain her realisation that sexual abuse by men is everywhere. Kamanee specifically mentions The Epstein files as an example that sexual abuse is happening everywhere. Christi and Kamanee talk about how survivors deal with abuse by internalising shame and self-blame, and they explore what it takes to begin speaking. Christi reads aloud from the novel and reflects on the passage where twelve-year-old Kaathi describes herself as evil and dirty, a moment the episode frames as an emotional core of why this story matters. The two also explore how humour operates inside devastating subject matter and how apartheid still to this day influences personal responses to trauma. The episode closes with a reading of the title passage; a reminder that where you are born in our world matters and a direct call to readers to take books into conversation with others. Connect with Kamanee on LinkedIn · Stern Gods by Kamanee Govender at Jacana Media · Coconut by Kopano Matlwa (inspiration cited by Govender) · The Assault on Truth by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson · ChristiSa.com · Connect with Christi on LinkedIn · Follow Christi Sa on Instagram · Follow Saint Germain on Instagram

    "It is everywhere" - a conversation about debut novel Stern Gods with the author Kamanee Govender

  3. May 14

    The Correspondent by Virginia Evans: One of a kind

    On reading lenses, epistolary fiction, and finding your elderly heroine. This episode is for book lovers, book club readers, and anyone who has ever felt frustrated saying 'I loved it' or 'I hated it' and wished they had better words. It gives you new tools, new vocabulary, and a new way of paying attention the next time you pick up a book. It is for readers who sense that the real pleasure and meaning of a book lives somewhere between the page and their own body, and who want language to explore that territory with others. Host Christi Sa opens with a scene from a book-filled dike house in the Netherlands, where a disagreement about Maggie O'Farrell's Hamnet becomes a masterclass in reading lenses. Instead of settling for 'agree to disagree,' she and her book friend excavate exactly what each of them brought to the same story: magical realism versus logical plot expectations, a woman left behind versus Shakespeare as a cultural hero. The result is not agreement but understanding, and a model for every book conversation you will ever have. The heart of the episode is a rich, personal reading response to The Correspondent by Virginia Evans, an epistolary novel about Sybil van Antwerp, an ageing woman going blind who writes letters to her brother Felix, to Joan Didion, and to Kazuo Ishiguro. Christi places this novel alongside Stoner by John Williams and Watching Over Her by Jean Baptiste Andrea in a rare category she calls 'one of a kind': books that capture you like a fish on a hook and leave you changed when they end. She tracks, in real time, what moves her: a seasonal metaphor for human life that makes her swallow; the puzzle of multiple correspondents including the mysterious 'DM'; the audacity and humour of Sybil as an elderly female heroine she had been searching for since Jane Eyre. The episode also explores what elderly writers do when they turn their ageing bodies into fiction, referencing Julian Barnes, Anna Enquist, Heidegger on art, Roland Barthes on the death of the author, and phenomenology as a tool for noticing your own reading experience. It closes with Christi writing a creative letter directly to Virginia Evans, modelling the very audacity she admires in Sybil, and asking listeners: who is your hero, and why? What moment in a book makes you swallow? Would you write a letter to tell a writer what their book meant to you? The Correspondent by Virginia Evans · Stoner by John Williams · Watching Over Her by Jean-Baptiste Andrea · ChristiSa.com · Connect with Christi on LinkedIn · Follow Christi Sa on Instagram · Follow Saint Germain on Instagram

    The Correspondent by Virginia Evans: One of a kind

  4. Mar 13

    I wrote a letter to a friend about The Old Drift

    In this episode of The Story Explorer, I’m reading you a letter I wrote to a friend. My friend often works remotely in different parts of Africa, and last year she recommended that I read The Old Drift by the Zambian-born writer Namwali Serpell. This novel won the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 2020. This is a true epic: more than five hundred pages long. And after finishing it, I wanted nothing more than to sit down with my friend and talk about it. But she was deep in remote field research, far away and difficult to reach. So instead, I wrote her a letter. In that letter, I poured out my thoughts, my questions, and my analysis of this remarkable novel. And today, I’m sharing that letter with you. That way, you can hear my reflections on the book, and my friend can listen too, wherever she happens to be working. In the letter, I unpack a label that is often attached to this novel: magical realism. Personally, I’m not convinced that label quite fits. In the episode, you'll hear why and what this book might be instead. As I often do, I also linger on the epigraph. Serpell opens the novel with a line from The Aeneid, Book 6, by Virgil, in the translation by Seamus Heaney. What echoes from that ancient Western epic inside this modern African one?I'll tell you. And what might it mean that Serpell chooses a line from a classical Latin poem to begin her story? My thoughts about this meaning making moment are in my letter. And now, without further ado, tune in and let me read it to you. Namwali Serpell's website · Publisher's note about Namwail Serpell winning the A.C. Clarke award in 2020 · ChristiSa.com · Connect with Christi on LinkedIn · Follow Christi Sa on Instagram · Follow Saint Germain on Instagram

    I wrote a letter to a friend about The Old Drift

  5. Feb 24

    Notes from Underground: a click for hope

    In this episode, I take you with me into my reading experience of Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky. I share the insights that slowly unfolded as I read, and especially what shifted for me when I returned to a poem by the Russian poet N. A. Nekrasov. While discussing the book at book club, I still felt like I wasn’t really getting it. I couldn’t quite grasp what was going on beneath the surface. So I started speaking my thoughts out loud: my doubts, my resistance, the questions that wouldn’t settle. And somewhere in that trail of thought, something shifted. It clicked. I suddenly arrived at an understanding of the novel that felt very different from most interpretations I’d heard. I came to see something essential: it is often the systems that become distorted and repulsive, not the human beings within them. And if systems are human-made, they are not beyond transformation. We can reshape what we have built. And that possibility, that responsibility, is our hope. Alma Classics has published Notes from Underground by F. Dostoevsky · ChristiSa.com · Connect with Christi on LinkedIn · Follow Christi Sa on Instagram · Follow Saint Germain on Instagram

    Notes from Underground: a click for hope

  6. Feb 3

    Boom! A realisation: ADHD is not what I thought it is...

    Words matter. In this episode, I share two insights I gained while reading Jessica McCabe's book 'How to ADHD'. This is a self-help book, and it's the first time I'm talking about a book from this category on the podcast. I include it in my story-exploring journey because self-help books are reflections of people's journeys; they are stories from individuals, and we can learn from them. Reading this book completely shifted my understanding of how an ADHD brain works, totally different from what I imagined. I give examples of how I picture an ADHD brain, and even use my own experience as a deaf person to explore what brains are capable of, highlighting similarities and differences with ADHD brains. I also touch on my study of Narrative Therapy with Dr. Chené Swart from Pretoria, and how this study opens up new realisations for me. I explain what this study involves in brief and discuss how naming a brain that doesn't follow the neurotypical path (a term I learned from Jessica McCabe) can shape perceptions, sometimes in misleading ways. Words matter. Each word we use creates a world, and when we change how we describe people with brains that are not neurotypical , we can change both the meaning and the impact of that label. Tune in to hear my reflections, stories and the surprising ways a single book can shift your thinking about this kind of brain. Jessica McCabe's website - How to ADHD · Dr. Chené Swart's website for more info about narrative work in our world · ChristiSa.com · Connect with Christi on LinkedIn · Follow Christi Sa on Instagram · Follow Saint Germain on Instagram

    Boom! A realisation: ADHD is not what I thought it is...

  7. 12/08/2025

    An Experiment Shared & A Challenge Received | In Conversation with Prof Siphiwo Mahala

    In this episode, I have a conversation with Professor Siphiwo Mahala about literature. With my podcast I aim to explore literary spaces in a broad sense. That means not only speaking to writers or readers, but also to the people who shape how literature is recognised and valued. Professor Siphiwo Mahala is the Chair of the Sunday Times Literary Awards and an associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Johannesburg. He is also an acclaimed writer in his own right. We talk about how the judging and selection process works. I explore a question that has been on my mind: what should a South African literary prize winner reveal or achieve in its texts? I think you, listeners, will find this fascinating. I begin this conversation with a little experiment. I read three of Siphiwo’s published works. Two short story collections; African Delights and his latest The Missing Pages, as well as his recent biography of Drum journalist Can Themba, Can Themba: The Making and Braking of the Intellectual Tsotsi. Based on these texts, I attempted to loosely sketch the “writer” that emerged in my mind. I read this experimental sketch to Siphiwo during our conversation, and you’ll hear how he responds. I then ask a few in-depth questions about Can Themba’s work, specifically his famous short story The Suit, and intertextuality. You’ll also discover which of Siphiwo’s stories is my favorite and why. At one point during our conversation, I get a very interesting challenge and my final question is which book we should read during the long summer holiday and festive season ahead of us. Professor Siphiwo Mahala is a writer, playwright, and critic · The announcement of the winner of the Sunday Times Literary Awards 2025 · ChristiSa.com · Connect with Christi on LinkedIn · Follow Christi Sa on Instagram · Follow Saint Germain on Instagram

    An Experiment Shared & A Challenge Received | In Conversation with Prof Siphiwo Mahala

  8. 11/12/2025

    Around the table with my book club

    This episode takes you, the listener, into a question based book discussion about the book So Long See You Tomorrow, by American author William Maxwell. The book is now available in a Vintage Classic, published by Penguin Random House UK. Originally published in 1980, it won the American Book Award and in 1995, William Maxwell received the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the short story. I was joined in the studio on a Saturday morning by three loyal members of the public book club I host at 44 Stanley, at Saint-Germain: Denise Alexander, Daniel Greeff, and Odette Graskie. Instead of dinner with wine, we had coffee and cake. A setting that reminded me of the familiar coffee-table gatherings in the Netherlands. Through a series of prepared questions, we explore the world Maxwell created in this short but moving novel. Denise shares that she noticed how in this novel “people keep quiet, they just carry on with life and they don’t voice anything.” We talk about the meaning of the title and the presence and meaning of the artwork 'The Palace at 4 a.m.' by Alberto Giacometti. Odette, who had researched the artist, describes the sculpture in detail for us, “It is made of just these sticks and could fall apart any moment”. We discover what it means to describe this novel as quiet, frail, or tragic. For example, Daniel Greeff shares that he realised, thinking about this book, that “the bravest thing one can do is admit to one’s frailty”. I share my own fascination with what is biographical and what is imagined. This question is based on a part of the introduction of the Vintage Classic that is written by Ann Patchett. This conversation is an example of what we can discover together when we ask each other questions about literary tools and share our personal reflections. The book is a Vintage Classic published by Penguin Random House UK · ChristiSa.com · Connect with Christi on LinkedIn · Follow Christi Sa on Instagram · Follow Saint Germain on Instagram

    Around the table with my book club
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About

What is the outlook of a story? Hello listener, welcome to my podcast series: The Story explorer. I am a reader who has the need to talk with others about what I’ve read. I have started and joined many book clubs. I now run one in a little café in Johannesburg. You are all welcome to join. But because time is sparse for many of us and Johannesburg is not within travelling distance for many readers I am taking up the challenge to talk about books in a podcast. I believe a story always is embedded in something else. This will be the starting point of this podcast journey. I want to look at what is around the story; what is the location? Who are the characters? What is it that happens in the story? What does it do within me, the reader? What do I think the author wants to say? What does this story make me think about? These are questions I want to explore with books that I think are important. Books I believe we all should read and talk about.

Information

  • Creator
    Solid Gold Podcasts #BeHeard
  • Years Active
    2024 - 2026
  • Episodes
    21
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Solid Gold Podcasts #BeHeard
  • Show Website
    The Story Explorer