Podcaster Dan Taberski's Investigation Into An Outbreak Of A Mysterious Illness
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This is Fresh Air. I'm Tanya Mosley, and my guest today is writer, producer, and podcaster Dan Taberski. He's the creator of several award-winning audio documentaries of the past decade, like Missing Richard Simmons, which explored the sudden disappearance of the late fitness icon, and Running from Cops, which was a look into the long-running reality show and its impact on law enforcement and public perception.

Taberski's latest project, Hysterical, was recently honored as Podcast of the Year at the Ambees. It's a seven-part series that unpacks a strange and fascinating medical mystery, a sudden outbreak in 2011 of tics and spasms among high school girls in Leroy, New York. In December of 2011, a young woman posted a video on YouTube. Hi, everyone. My name's...

And this is my first video. She's got shiny red hair with side bangs, and she's wearing a white graphic hoodie. A poster for the metal band Avenged Sevenfold is tacked to her bedroom wall behind her. So I'll start off by telling you a little bit about myself. I'm 16. I'm in 11th grade, and I play softball, like, all the time.

When she made this video, there was no TikTok. There was barely an Instagram. She's not looking to monetize, not trying to influence. What this 16-year-old is looking for is a little help. She's been having strange symptoms that so far no one can seem to explain. Recently, last August, I had passed out at a concert. I was headbanging and I thought, you know, I was just dehydrated and all that.

By now you've noticed that her speech is a bit halting, and her nervous teenage energy is more than just fidgeting. And about a month after, I pass out again at the homecoming dance. That's awesome, right? It has pattern and repetition. Eyes twitching, hands in the air, fingers flying. And a few days ago, my twitching has progressed into noises like through my nose or in my throat. And...

It's something that won't go away. The series draws a line from the cases in Leroy to historical episodes like the Salem witch trials, when girls displaying odd speech and convulsive fits were accused of being witches. And contemporary phenomena like Havana syndrome, when overseas diplomats and CIA agents suffered neurological symptoms that were suspected to be the result of foreign attacks.

These were all moments when real physical symptoms spread through communities with no clear biological cause. Many of these are known as mass psychogenic illnesses. Dan Terberski says he's drawn to puzzles that point to larger questions about who we are and how we live.

Before becoming a podcaster, he was a field producer for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart from 1999 to 2006. And before that, he worked on economic policy in the Clinton White House. Dan Taberski, welcome to Fresh Air. Thanks for having me. Nice to be here.

What a career you've carved out for yourself. I can't wait to get into that. But first, let's talk a little bit about Hysterical. Can you describe what you saw in Leroy, how prevalent it was and what was going on at its height?

Yeah. I mean, it started with one girl who woke up from a nap with a stutter and she couldn't speak. She just couldn't get her words out, which was not normal for her. Those symptoms evolved into twitches and spasms and vocal outbursts. A couple of weeks later, a friend on the cheerleading squad came down with similar symptoms. Ticks.

Verbal outbursts, spasms, like really scary looking things when you don't know what's causing it. Two became three, three became five, and they were off to the races. Almost all of the cases were centered in Leroy Junior Senior High School in a town called Leroy, New York.

Something that you delve into so well in this podcast is really our understanding of what even a psychogenic illness or conversion disorder is. Can you really break that down for us? Yeah. I mean, conversion disorder is basically psychological stress or trauma that exhibits itself as physical symptoms.

Sometimes it's very simple. It could be like GI issues or you're nauseous. Very often it's neurological and very often they can become bizarre and they can become long lasting. They can be lymphs, tics, spasms, outbursts, symptoms very similar to Tourette's syndrome. Syncope is one that happens a lot, which is passing out or near syncope, which is the feeling of passing out.

Seizures. So it can really run the gamut. But the only thing is, is that these symptoms don't seem to have an organic cause. So you might have a limp, but the x-rays are normal or you're having seizures three times a day, but your MRIs don't show anything.

You were initially drawn to this story, I read, of the students in Leroy after reading reports about Havana syndrome, which is to remind people that mysterious illness that affected diplomats and CIA officers really around the world, not just in Cuba, in 2016. And some of the experts that you talked to made an argument that what was happening to these men possibly isn't so different from what the girls were experiencing. So...

So much, especially with the girls in Leroy, is tied up in whether or not they're believed. They're told it's all in their heads, that they're being dramatic or hysterical. But I'm curious, how does that equation shift when the same unexplained symptoms or similar symptoms start happening to powerful men who are valued for their toughness and their composure and their physicality and mental strength?

Did that conversation around legitimacy and seriousness kind of evolve and change for you as you were delving into what was happening in Leroy? I mean, that was part of what was interesting about it in the first place was comparing Havana syndrome to what was happening in Leroy and how people were reacting to what happens when –

You're right. It's like CIA agents. It's like people who, you know, like they do secret ops. They, like I say in the podcast, they know how to neutralize things. Like these are serious, potentially scary people who are trained to deal with the stress of, if not combat, close to it. And so many people weren't willing to count on the possibility that mass psychogenic illness could happen to people like that or it could happen to men, period. Yeah.

And to watch how quickly the conversation became about, quote unquote, it's all in your head for the girls compared to the diplomats and the CIA agents, I just thought was really interesting and really telling about women and girls and belief in terms of their medical conditions and their medical experiences. Right or wrong? And, you know, I'm

I'm not saying it wasn't. They both could be mass psychogenic illness. They both might not be. But it was just interesting how hesitant people were to question the men and how quick they were to write off the girls. And Leroy, a lot of folks thought it might be environmental. What were some of the most compelling arguments in favor of that theory? And really, what did you ultimately conclude?

Yeah. I mean, as this was sort of all unfolding and people were trying to figure out what this was, somebody slipped an anonymous note in somebody's mailbox for the parents of one of the victims who was suffering from this.

And it reminded them of something that had happened in 1973 that might have something to do with what was going on now. And in 1973, it turns out there was a train derailment about three miles away from the school. And during the derailment, the train unloaded approximately 35,000 gallons of trichloroethylene, which is an industrial solvent. And it ended up in the ground in the water table and stayed there.

And many people believed that this could potentially explain why people were having these symptoms, thinking that the plume that was underground had gone to the high school and was starting to cause these symptoms. And they investigated the area. There were six fracking wells on the school property, which is just really shocking. They were not able to show that it was causing the symptoms that were happening. But it does go to show that

It really can be anything at a time like this and that you can't just say, oh, it's mass psychogenic illness. It's all in your head and walk away because there really are things part part of knowing that it's mass psychogenic illness is really knowing as sure as you can be that it's not something else, which requires an investigation, which requires all that footwork.

And then after a few years, mysteriously, the symptoms for many of these girls went away. I mean, basically for all of them. Yeah. By the end of the school year, the symptoms were all but gone. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, one of the other things that you delve into is just how much stress the environment and also our interactions with each other kind of play a role in how we react to the environment and each other. So...

In the case of the girls, it was an interesting point that you talked about how the media might actually perpetuate or even worsen this symptom. So how deeply influenced we are by each other, because the more the story was reported, the more cases seemed to emerge.

So was it that increasing media attention, simply shining a light on it, was already happening? Or did the power of suggestion actually play a role? Well, it's hard to know. Like, you can't know for sure, right? You have to report on it. You have to report on this thing. It's a medical mystery. You need to find out the answer. But the thing about mass psychogenic illness, especially one that was breaking out in Leroy, where the symptoms were so bizarre...

is that it's a line of sight illness. It's not passed randomly. It's usually passed in social groups like kids at a high school or like a nunnery or workers on a factory floor, even people in a town. But by putting the girls with the tics on the news, they were basically showing the tics to everybody else in the town and then that would become a vector for spread. That the constant looking at the symptoms and seeing them and talking about them actually contributes to it continuing.

Right. There was a student with Tourette's who went to the school. She talked to you about how when she would go to camp with other young people who had Tourette's that their tics and their behaviors would actually grow. It was from being around each other. And, you know, I was thinking about this, Dan, and listening to this podcast and many of your others. And one of the things that I just noticed is

was something that happens in a very subtle way to all of us is that even your voice changes based on who you're talking to. It's subtle. But when you were talking to an officer, for instance, from the CIA, your voice kind of mimicked him in a way. I do the same thing. And it just it made me just wonder if you had been thinking about this as well, like how much we are influenced simply by being in front of or in interaction with each other.

I mean, for me, it keeps coming back to the positive version of this is laughter. It's contagious laughter.

Yes. That feeling of being around somebody and they're laughing and you feel your mouth start to open. You feel your smile coming. And then you feel your body start convulsing, right? It's contagious. Yeah, it's truly contagious. And you can't stop it. It's wonderful, right? It's usually amazing to have that and sort of ecstatic to have that sort of contagion. But it's a really similar principle, how much we impact each other for sure. Yeah.

Dan, let's talk a little bit about the late Richard Simmons, who just passed away last year at 76. You produced a hugely popular podcast in 2017 called

Which was both like a public appeal and a deeply emotional investigation. You wanted to understand why this person who was larger than life suddenly chose to disappear from public life. And I'd like to play a clip from episode four of the series where you highlight his tremendous impact. And in this clip, we're going to hear Richard Simmons speak. He's at a congressional hearing talking about kids' health. Let's listen. You speak first.

Richard Simmons believes because he's lived it. He was fat and he lacked self-worth, but he was born again. He found the answer and he's going to help you find it, too. Am I going too far with this religion thing? Because honestly, I don't think you can. And I'm hoping that the committee today will know there is no other way to do this or our children will get more sick. This is Richard in 2008.

Testifying before Congress about obesity. And there's a statistic that says our children today will not live as long as their parents. What have we done? What have we done to the kids of the United States of America? This is wrong. I do not want any child in America to have my childhood because it was taken away from me because I just wasn't good enough. Well, I'm good enough now. I'm 60 years old now.

And I devoted my life to this and I will devote my life to this to the day I die. That was a clip from the podcast Missing Richard Simmons produced and hosted by my guest today, Dan Taberski. Dan, as we heard in that clip,

Simmons is passionately talking about fighting for overweight children until the day he dies. And that was his promise to fans. I mean, he'd write to every person. He'd call to check on them. If you wrote to him, he was going to write you back if he received your letter. He really forged this relationship with the public that felt like we were owed his empathy.

And so like the moral question that you ask in this podcast and that continues to come up when the podcast is talked about is like, how much do celebrities owe the public, if anything? And do they have the right to step away from public life? You're some years away from making this podcast. I'm just wondering, where do you stand on that?

Well, it's fun to listen to Richard. Isn't it? The thing I love about that clip is not just that he made a promise and that we need to hold him to it. It's that he made a promise that he so clearly meant. And that was the concern about it. It's not that he said something and that we need to make him, we need to hold him to account. It's that his passion cannot be understated. This was not a flash in the pan for him. This wasn't a joke. It wasn't a lie. It was his entire life. And which is what made it

I felt so important to like find out why he would stop doing that. I don't think that celebrities owe anybody anything. I do think that if you're a celebrity, you should think twice about developing the kind of relationship that Richard Simmons had with his fans because he gave so much of himself to

And the more you give, the harder it is to claw that back. I mean, like he'd wake up four o'clock in the morning, call like, you know, 20 people a day for free just to like help them lose weight. Like he helped people lose hundreds and hundreds of pounds over the phone. He saved lives constantly.

He developed friendships or things that felt like friendships. And it's hard to take that back. It's hard to take that away from people when it was a relationship that was real. And that when he does disappear, it did make them feel like they were crazy. It made them feel like everybody was saying, oh, relax, he's a celebrity. You're not really friends with a celebrity. But they were. Hundreds of people were. And so I don't think celebrities owe anybody anything. But I still can't believe what a complex relationship

Richard Simmons had ended up in at that stage in his life and that there was only one way to get out of doing it, I think, and that was probably to cut it. Was to drop from public life. Just drop it. Yeah. You knew him personally in that you took his Slimmons workout classes, which were in-person classes. You and Richard Simmons talked about doing a documentary together. But then when he dropped from public life, you were in a

That idea went away, but you then wanted to delve into why he just dropped from public life. And...

The podcast, when you listen to it in its entirety, it is complex. You do delve into some of the challenges of you pushing forward even when he is not participating. But one reviewer called the show an invasion of privacy masquerading as a love letter. And you defended your choice by trying to explain the reasons why. Looking back now, do you feel the same about making the show more

Has your perspective changed or do you really stand behind it? Oh, I stand behind it. I'm so proud of it. I'm so proud of it, in part because it was such a fine line that we were walking. And if I had just parachuted in there, if I didn't know him or know the people around him, I think it would have felt different. But because I was so familiar with what was going on,

And so familiar with the severity of what he had done in terms of cutting people out of his life, friends that he had had for 10, 20, 30 years. There was one woman in her 90s. They were so close that Richard used to pick her up, drive her to his class. They would have the class and then he'd drive her home.

Like these were real relationships. And there was a real concern for what was happening behind the door at the house where he still was that it didn't seem like people were taking it seriously. And so I'm so glad to have been able to get people in such an unusual way, like to get people to care so much about Richard Simmons again, that they got mad about the fact that the project existed in the first place.

I'm thinking about some of the other feedback you got about like being able to drop out of public life, like when people really depend on you. And the thing about Richard Simmons is for all of the relationships that he had that were deep and profound with people, he also was a figure where people were looking to and receiving that empathy from him through the television screen or his appearances in ways that made them feel comfortable.

Still feel, I think, that they kind of were owed that because they really looked to him for that. And so this evangelical pastor in Texas, he reached out to you to say, I like see myself in him. What did he share with you? He was really an interesting guy. He's a preacher, pretty conservative, like not where we were sort of pretty different politically than.

And we normally wouldn't have that much to talk about, but he just reached out and wanted to talk about it. And we sort of developed a relationship. And for him, he understood as a pastor, as somebody who gives that sort of empathy to the people in his congregation. And sometimes, you know, he doesn't have the empathy to give and they're asking for it anyway, and he still has to give it. And he talked about the sort of exhaustion that he felt, the sort of

real physical, emotional, mental fatigue of having empathy to the point where you can't limit how much you're giving out. He really got that exhaustion. And I just loved that this guy who's so different from Richard Simmons saw, right? He's like, I know exactly what feeling you're talking about. Let's take a short break. If you're just joining us, my guest is documentary podcaster Dan Taberski. We'll continue our conversation after a short break. I'm Tanya Moseley, and this is Fresh Air.

Okay.

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Through your investigation of his life, I mean, while you were trying to figure out why he went missing, why he disappeared from public life, you're also learning about the man himself and how that translated into the way that he lived. What were some of your takeaways in that? Like,

Did he ever triumph over that challenge of growing up as an overweight kid? I mean, he did. The irony is that he lost the weight in all the wrong ways. When he was young, he basically went on a crash diet and ate like water and lettuce and lost like an insane amount of weight in a very short period of time to the point where he ended up in the hospital. And he tells the story about how a nurse asked him, do you want to live or you want to die? Because that's what this is going to be about.

That's where you are. And that was the moment where he decided, he says, that he wanted to live. And he built a whole life around helping other people get to that feeling. But the feeling was always still there. I mean, I've seen Richard Simmons cry more times than I can – that I feel like I've taken a breath, sincerely. And those emotions and his sort of –

His sort of contact with those feelings from so long ago was still so visceral. I think that's what people loved about him because he had such access to those feelings, which really were what other people were feeling all the time. But he couldn't – he wasn't able to shake it. And I think that was – I think that was part of the struggle. Yeah.

You went through all of these theories on why he disappeared. The podcast came back up into the public consciousness when he died last year. What did you walk away with? Because you didn't walk away with the answers. In the same way with Hysterical, we're left thinking about a lot of things and really reflecting on them, but we still don't really know. What does your heart tell you?

I think he experienced a personal crisis. I don't necessarily know what that is, the details of that. He had like a club where people could log on and there was like a chat room where people who were trying to lose weight could all – and he would come on and talk to people and it was really him. And we have transcripts of some of the later conversations he had where he was clearly struggling financially.

With emotional trauma, mental trauma, like he was in trouble and he was expressing that to the people in the class and they were trying to help him and he couldn't do that. And he couldn't not... In what ways? Like, can you give an example? I think that he was...

In a place where the only way that he could deal with it was to stop it all at once. And I think a lot of the emotional trouble he was having was because of the constant emotional work that he was making himself do in terms of helping other people and taking on other people's trauma. I mean, it's a huge burden. And he wasn't trained. I mean, he wasn't trained as a psychiatrist or psychologist or some sort of counselor. This is all just like –

Not winging it, but it all comes from his heart. And while there's something beautiful about that, there was definitely signs that he was not protecting himself in a way that somebody who cares for people with serious emotional problems needs to care for themselves so that they can keep doing it. Dan, I want to talk with you about the podcast that came out of yours in 2021 to mark the 20th anniversary of the terrorist attacks on September 11th. It's a seven-part series called 9-12.

And you're not only telling stories from people who are talking about where they were on 9-11, but you also really delve into how it changed us. The clip I want to play is from the first episode where...

You actually found people who were part of a reality show called The Ship, which was a recreation of Explorer Captain Cook's 18th century voyage to Australia and New Zealand. And on 9-11, the crew was trapped on a ship in the middle of the ocean without access to TV or radio. And this clip begins with Alan Block, who was part of that voyage. Let's listen. 9 or 10 o'clock is the morning change of watch, okay? Yeah.

And that's the one where the captain, who is about five foot two with a tiny bald head and this gigantic loud voice. And usually the meeting is, thank you for gathering. We've got some weather coming in today, but likely continued good sailing conditions. For lunch is salted beef. For dinner is salted pork. That was the morning meeting. No big deal, right?

Well, this day started differently. We thought we were going to... We thought it was more of a public flogging. Mario and a shipmate had broken a bunch of safety rules on camera the day before while trying to catch a 30-pound barracuda. So when everyone was assembled on the quarterdeck, Mario thought that the captain was about to chew them out. And we were, you know, sort of our heads were right down waiting for the whip to come down on us in front of everybody. And then he just...

Then he just proceeded to tell us this strange story. Sorry to wake you up so alarmingly. What I'm going to tell you now is going to shock all of you. This morning, American time, 8:30, the 737 was flown into one of the Twin Towers at the World Trade Center in New York. It was full of passengers. It was hijacked. 20 minutes later, another airplane flew into the other Twin Tower. That one was hijacked as well.

That was a clip from the 2021 podcast 912 produced and hosted by my guest today, Dan Taberski. Like anytime I hear anything like that, where not just people telling their stories about where they were in 9-11, but real sound, real video or audio of people hearing it in real time, it just...

like stops me in my tracks. It takes me right back there. I'm sure it's the same for you. Oh, yeah. It gives me chills. I mean, 20 years after 9-11 is a long time. And so we were just trying to figure out how we could bring people back to that shock. The shock has been gone for so long.

And we were trying to figure out how to get people back to that without just sort of like dousing them in audio from the actual, you know, planes hitting buildings and people screaming and all that terrible stuff, which is super exploitative. And it doesn't even do the trick anymore. Yeah.

That's such a unique story and was able to really take us into it in the ways that you just talked about. But you also went to several other really interesting places like the staff of the publication of The Onion and lots of other places to find out where they were when they heard it. Mm-hmm.

We wanted to be able to tell a story about how we digested it all. And so going to those stories that are sort of on the side of 9-11 or people who had weird reactions or like The Onion is a perfect example of people who had to tell jokes about 9-11 like three days afterwards.

And how do you deal with that? And how humor ended up actually being this sort of incredible bomb. And we just wanted to do justice to what had happened to everybody afterwards. And to be able to sort of mine all those stories and see how it changed us, which it so clearly did. It just seemed like the thing that I really wanted to talk about it. I mean, I was here in New York. I lost a very good friend and

It was part of my life. And, you know, I still live in New York. And so it was something that I was wrestling with as well about seeing 9-11 memorials and

sort of rolling your eyes sometimes because you feel like they're sort of playing on certain feelings that aren't really there anymore and they're just sort of doing it to make money. Just all these sorts of other icky side stories and other sort of weird things that happen after something. The conspiracy theories and trying to tell movies about it and address a play to Osama bin Laden and how weird that is. It means so more than just the day. And podcasting is just a great place to...

Fish around like that and take your time getting to a larger point as opposed to just sort of starting, you know, with like the here's what happened on that day and making people only feel that visceral thing. There's so much more to do in conversation. In conversation, the intimacy of the audio. Yeah. And just like memory, it can be really beautiful memory.

To talk to people who had an experience, but they ever moved enough with it, they have wisdom about it, too. You're not just asking them to sort of relive the visceral experience of tell me about that horrible thing that happened to you that day, which sometimes it can feel like you're doing. People have processed it. People have thought about it. And if you ask them questions in that context, people really have wise, smart things to say about how to get past that.

Something like that and how it affected you and how to maybe how to do things differently next time. I'm sorry you lost a friend. Oh, thanks.

What's your personal memory of 9-11? Where were you? Were you in the city? Yeah, I was in the city. I was at my boyfriend's apartment on 10th Street. And it just all happened really quickly. I watched it all on TV. I didn't see it happen. I watched it all as it was happening on TV. And then...

We realized that a friend of mine worked in the South Tower of the Trade Center. And he lived in an apartment in Tribeca where his wife was at that time and could see the buildings as this was all happening. She saw the buildings collapse from her building and knowing her husband was on the 101st floor. And so – and then we spent the next few days looking for him, sort of knowing that we weren't going to find him but doing it anyway because to do anything else just felt wrong.

Did you get those answers that you were looking for by making this podcast? That like by hearing other people's stories kind of making sense and moving forward.

I tend to not look for answers because I tend to not believe. I think there's, you know what I mean? What do you mean by not believe? Well, no, you believe it, but the answer is always more complicated. Everybody wants an answer. And if there were an answer, then the podcast will be one word and it would be the answer and then you'd be done. But I think what it is and what podcasting is so good at is that

is that because it's conversation mixed in with essay, mixed in with sort of audio, natural audio, like I'm not really looking for answers. I'm more looking for wisdom. I'm more looking for people who are involved in it to help me put it somewhere in my head where it makes sense. Let's take a short break. If you're just joining us, my guest is documentary podcaster Dan Taberski. We'll continue our conversation after a short break. This is Fresh Air.

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I'm just curious, your time in government at the White House, did it inform at all your approach to storytelling? Did you learn anything there? You learned what you didn't want to be and do. Yeah, I learned what I didn't want to be and do. My lesson from the White House is that the people there were sincere.

My – despite the politics of it, my boss used to say like, Dan, if you stay late tonight, like 22,000 more people in Ohio are going to get the earned income tax credit if we get this passed. And this is how it's going to change their lives. And like that – it was real. It wasn't – it wasn't –

It wasn't, I'm going to do this so I can make money. It was a real passion for policy and understanding how it changes people's lives and doing sort of incremental work to move the ball forward. And I was really inspired by that. I mean, you transitioned into storytelling at a really interesting political time and moment. I mean, you...

You worked as a field producer then for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart from 99 to 2006. And that's a really important window for the life of that show in particular because I actually think that was one of the show's most influential eras. It's like really when it was forming its identity. I started when Jon Stewart started. And so I was definitely part of as it evolved with him. I mean, when I started...

The idea of doing this sort of journalism about politics that was also kind of a joke and involving actual politicians in that like was was pretty out there. And it was really exciting at the very beginning. Like they didn't even have Comedy Central in Washington.

So you would call people up. Yeah. You would call people up and you'd be like, we're from The Daily Show. And they would sort of think you were saying The Today Show. Right. Yeah. And so you wouldn't disabuse them of it because it was sort of – Yeah. And so it was wild to do that sort of reporting that on the one hand wasn't journalism but on the other hand had more truth in it than anything I'd ever done.

Because the subject matter, like truth through irony or truth through humor, it just opened up a whole other sort of world of how to sort of describe what you're seeing around you. Okay. So an interesting detail about you is that you're a quilt maker. And I am so fascinated by this because, I mean, quilt making is storytelling. There are personal histories interwoven into the fabric, the choices for the fabric, the colors, like all the things. Right.

How did you get into it? It feels a little on the nose, doesn't it? Very. But also, like, very fascinating. I want to know more. You know, I was always kind of interested in that. My mother used to do stuff like crochet and knit. And I was always, you know, I was a boy, so I was a little shy about expressing too much interest. But I've learned how to crochet. And I kind of, you know, I used to sort of watch her doing those things. And then, but as an adult, I took a quilting class about...

10, 12 years ago with a bunch of ladies. I just kind of liked the idea of the machine and connecting things and then just exploring it. And then I started, rather than using store-bought fabric, I began going to Goodwill and buying clothes by the pound. And I would cut. So now I cut up those clothes and I make quilts out of that.

But like very often I'll get like, you know, hospital scrubs are really great to make quilts out of. Really? Yeah, because they're just like a night. They come in like there's like a nice dusty rose color or like a nice blues. And they sew together really well because they're just thin. And so I get the sort of storytelling connection. I don't know that I'm trying to tell a story when I'm making something, but I definitely like being around it. I like being around the sort of –

that people have left behind. How much time do you devote to it? I have a whole studio. You know, I go back and forth. Very often it's something I'm doing, like when I'm in the middle of writing, I'll end up doing a lot of quilting. It's a very good...

It's a very good creative activity to focus on when you can't focus on the other thing you're doing anymore. And very often the good ideas in writing come when you're only paying half attention, right? When you're just sort of – when it's in the back and you're subconscious and you're just like watching a movie and that's when you have all your ideas. And so it's very good to take the pressure off the writing and then just go start to stitch together a few pieces of fabric and then all of a sudden you have a good idea for what you're writing and you go back to that.

So fascinating. Dan Taberski, thank you so much for this conversation and for your work. Oh, thanks so much. Could not be more honored to be here. Dan Taberski is the creator and host of the podcast series Hysterical. Coming up, our book critic Maureen Corrigan will share her roundup of some of the best mystery and suspense novels out this summer. This is Fresh Air. This message comes from Jackson. Let's face it, retirement planning can be confusing.

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This summer's poisonous mixed bouquet of mystery and suspense fiction contains stems of the gothic, the hard-boiled, and a sprig of the cozy in honor of Agatha Christie. Our book critic Maureen Corrigan has a roundup. The mystery and suspense novels coming out this month are some of the best this crew of mostly well-established writers has written. So let's get to them.

El Dorado Drive is Megan Abbott's most doom-laden novel yet. It's set in the year 2008 in Detroit, which happens to be Abbott's hometown.

The three middle-aged Bishop sisters, our main characters here, can recall their father driving them around town in a sapphire blue caddy when he was general counsel to GM. But those days are mere rusty memories. The trio is beset by money troubles until middle sister Pam invites her sibs into an all-female financial club she's joined called The Wheel.

Here's a brief description of the club's Macbeth-like initiation rites. There was a ritual to it. The women forming a circle around the coffee table, faces shiny, flyaway hair and lipstick smudged, heels off, pedicured toes, dancing in the carpet plush. A woman named Sue intoned the oath.

We pledge to commit to the secrecy of the wheel and trust in its promise. All together now, women trust, women give, women protect.

What these women think of as female empowerment, the feds might consider a Ponzi scheme. The spell of this smart, socially pointed suspense novel lingers long after the wheel's stash of cash and one of its members are no more. The presence of the uncanny is even more potent in Dwyer Murphy's new novel, The House on Buzzard's Bay.

Gothic chill wafts like ocean mist throughout this tale of college friends reuniting at an old house one of them has inherited. The house was built by a band of 19th century spiritualists, and as the vacation gets underway, the friends are plagued by an uneasy sense that those spiritualists may not have vacated the premises.

Dwyer's restrained style heightens the ominous atmosphere. In this scene, a stranger, a woman named Camille, has turned up at the house. She says she was invited by one of the group who's since disappeared. It's nighttime and the friends invite her to stay. Here's how Jim, the man who's inherited the place, describes Camille's reaction.

She said how kind we all were, just as she'd known we would be. She must have repeated that three or four times so that it sounded almost like she was making a joke. Restraint is not a hallmark of S.A. Cosby's crime fiction. His writing is rough, raw, and violent.

King of Ashes, Cosby's latest novel, is set in the Virginia town of Jefferson Run, which, like Abbott's Detroit, has seen better days. Once a manufacturing hub where mason jars were made, the town is now ruled by a gang called the Black Baron Boys.

Roman Carruthers, our anti-hero, left years ago for college and then moved to Atlanta to pursue a big career in money management. Roman knows his rise is thanks in part to his father, known as the King of Ashes, because his crematory made him one of the few prominent black businessmen in town.

When the novel opens, Roman is summoned back home by his sister, with the news their father lies near death after a suspicious hit and run. Turns out that Roman's younger brother Dante has ripped off the Black Baron boys in a drug deal, and they don't believe in repayment on the installment plan.

Cosby invests the classic noir plot of the ordinary man pulled into a nightmare with emotional depth. Roman scrambles to save his family by using his financial know-how to make the gang a fortune, all the while plotting their annihilation. I warn you, that crematory gets put to use a lot.

But King of Ashes is so ingenious, neither grit nor gore could make me stop reading it. Laura Lipman's latest novel resurrects a character from her beloved Baltimore-based Tess Monaghan series. Murder Takes a Vacation stars Tess's former assistant, Muriel Blossom.

The widowed Mrs. Blossom, as she's known, has won the lottery, and she's treating herself to a river cruise, starting in Paris. But when the handsome man who flirted with her on the plane is found dead, Mrs. Blossom's vacation literally becomes a getaway, as she tries to dodge both the police, who see her as a suspect, and the evildoers.

It would be easy to underestimate Death Takes a Vacation to assume it's just a Miss Marple-type romp. That would be a mistake. Where Christie, through Marple, investigated the invisibility of older women, Lipman perceptively explores how older women often collaborate in their own invisibility, muting their appearance and their desires.

Whatever your desires for summer mystery reading, at least one of these novels should fulfill them. Maureen Corrigan is a professor of literature at Georgetown University.

Tomorrow on Fresh Air, we revisit painter, sculptor, and filmmaker Titus Gaffar's directorial debut, a film loosely based on his life titled Exhibiting Forgiveness. It's about a celebrated painter whose world unravels when his estranged father, a recovering addict, suddenly reappears in his life. I hope you'll join us. To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram at NPR Fresh Air.

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