Writers on Writing: Recent Episodes
Barbara DeMarco-Barrett and Marrie Stone
A weekly podcast hosted by Barbara DeMarco-Barrett and Marrie Stone on the art and business of writing.
Wally Lamb is the author of six New York Times bestselling novels: I’ll Take You There, We Are Water, Wishin’ and Hopin’, The Hour I First Believed, I Know This Much Is True, and She’s Come Undone. He also edited Couldn’t Keep It to Myself and I’ll Fly Away, two volumes of essays from students in his writing workshop at York Correctional Institution, a women’s prison in Connecticut, where he was a volunteer facilitator for twenty years. He’s been on the show three times in the past. Those interviews can be found in our archives.
The River is Waiting is his first novel in nine years. He joins Marrie Stone to talk about it. It’s the first time Wally has put York Correctional Institution into his fiction. And he puts other parts of himself into this novel, as well.
He talks about rendering real life experiences into fiction, how to weave politics and current events into your prose, making unsympathetic characters sympathetic to your reader, what writing in the present tense does to your prose, what Wally may have learned about writing and life from the inmates he’s worked with, a little about the writing group he’s been part of for 20 years, and much more.
For more information on Writers on Writing and to become a supporter, visit our Patreon page. For a one-time donation, visit Ko-fi. You can find hundreds of past interviews on our website. You can help out the show and indie bookstores by buying books at our bookstore on bookshop.org. It’s stocked with titles by our guest authors, as well as our personal favorites. And on Spotify, you’ll find an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. It’s perfect for writing. Look for the artist, Just My Type. Email the show at writersonwritingpodcast@gmail.com. We love to hear from our listeners!
(Recorded on April 28, 2025)
Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Host: Marrie Stone
Music: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)
Gillian McAllister graduated with an English degree before working as a lawyer. She lives in Birmingham, England, where she now writes full-time. She is the author of the New York Times bestseller Wrong Place Wrong Time and the Sunday Times bestsellers Everything But the Truth, Anything You Do Say (titled The Choice in the US), No Further Questions (titled The Good Sister in the US), The Evidence Against You, How to Disappear, and That Night. Her newest novel, Famous Last Words, is the focus of this interview.
Gillian joins Barbara DeMarco-Barrett from England to talk about writing a compelling first chapter, plotting and structure, subplots, twists, research and revision.
For more information on Writers on Writing and to become a supporter, visit our Patreon page. For a one-time donation, visit Ko-fi. You can find hundreds of past interviews on our website. You can help out the show and indie bookstores by buying books at our bookstore on bookshop.org. It’s stocked with titles by our guest authors, as well as our personal favorites. And on Spotify, you’ll find an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. It’s perfect for writing. Look for the artist, Just My Type. Email the show at writersonwritingpodcast@gmail.com. We love to hear from our listeners!
(Recorded on April 18, 2025)
Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Host: Marrie Stone
Music: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)
We don’t have many guests return to the show six times. Jess Walter is now one of them. Barbara DeMarco-Barrett has interviewed him three times — for his novels Beautiful Ruins and The Financial Lives of the Poets, as well as his story collection We Live in Water. He’s been on with Marrie Stone for The Cold Millions and the story collection The Angel of Rome. There are a few reasons we’re always eager to talk to him. First, he’s always trying something different — short stories, novels, historical fiction, mystery, humor. And no matter what he’s up to, his works are universally terrific. But he’s also a fantastic teacher. We bill the show as a free MFA program from the masters, and Jess is a thoughtful and articulate master. Like explaining why his hilarious short story, Cheston!, never makes the cut for his collections.
Jess is the author of eight novels and two story collections. His latest, So Far Gone, is out June 10th and published by Harper. It is very much born of this time and this country. It takes place in Trump’s America, back to the familiar territory of Spokane, Washington. It’s laugh out loud funny and poignant and tragic and all the things Jess is known for. He joins Marrie to talk about it.
For more information on Writers on Writing and to become a supporter, visit our Patreon page. For a one-time donation, visit Ko-fi. You can find hundreds of past interviews on our website. You can help out the show and indie bookstores by buying books at our bookstore on bookshop.org. It’s stocked with titles by our guest authors, as well as our personal favorites. And on Spotify, you’ll find an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. It’s perfect for writing. Look for the artist, Just My Type. Email the show at writersonwritingpodcast@gmail.com. We love to hear from our listeners!
(Recorded on May 23, 2025)
Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Host: Marrie Stone
Music: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)
Darrow Farr is a Salvadoran-American writer who was a Stegner Fellow in Fiction at Stanford University from 2017-2019 and received an MFA in Creative Writing from The Michener Center at the University of Texas. She was born and raised outside of Philadelphia, where she now lives with her husband and son. The Bombshell is her debut novel.
Darrow joins Barbara DeMarco-Barrett to talk about why she chose a 17-year-old female protagonist and single POV—until the ending of the book, placing the story in Corsica, 1990, writing sympathetic villains, cribbing from her life, keeping track of everything that goes into your novel, the title, and more.
For more information on Writers on Writing and to become a supporter, visit our Patreon page. For a one-time donation, visit Ko-fi. You can find hundreds of past interviews on our website. You can help out the show and indie bookstores by buying books at our bookstore on bookshop.org. It’s stocked with titles by our guest authors, as well as our personal favorites. And on Spotify, you’ll find an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. It’s perfect for writing. Look for the artist, Just My Type. Email the show at writersonwritingpodcast@gmail.com. We love to hear from our listeners!
(Recorded on May 1, 2025)
Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Host: Marrie Stone
Music: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)
Richard Russo is the author of ten novels, most recently Somebody’s Fool, Chances Are, Everybody’s Fool and That Old Cape Magic; two collections of stories; one previous essay collection about writing — The Destiny Thief: Essays on Writing, Writers and Life; and the memoir Elsewhere. In 2002 he received the Pulitzer Prize for Empire Falls, which, like Nobody’s Fool, won multiple awards for its screen adaptation, and in 2023 his novel Straight Man was adapted into the television series Lucky Hank.
His latest, Life and Art, contains 13 essays touching on many of the topics we grapple with on the show. How to imagine your way into another person’s skin. When it is inappropriate to try. What should writers be making of this current moment in history and their role in it. Where and how do we find meaning in our work. It feels very much born out of the pandemic, and out of this cultural moment, so it’s got a lot of insights about our country and Richard’s unique socioeconomic experiences living in it for 75 years. He joins Marrie Stone to talk about it.
For more information on Writers on Writing and to become a supporter, visit our Patreon page. For a one-time donation, visit Ko-fi. You can find hundreds of past interviews on our website. You can help out the show and indie bookstores by buying books at our bookstore on bookshop.org. It’s stocked with titles by our guest authors, as well as our personal favorites. And on Spotify, you’ll find an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. It’s perfect for writing. Look for the artist, Just My Type. Email the show at writersonwritingpodcast@gmail.com. We love to hear from our listeners!
(Recorded on May 12, 2025)
Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Host: Marrie Stone
Music: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)
Charlotte Wood is the author of seven novels and three books of non-fiction. Her novel Stone Yard Devotional was shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize. It was described by the UK Guardian as ‘a quiet novel of immense power’ and has been praised by authors Anne Enright, Tim Winton, Karen Joy Fowler, Hannah Kent and Paula Hawkins among others. Her previous books include The Luminous Solution, a book of essays on the creative process; the international bestseller, The Weekend; and The Natural Way of Things which won a number of prizes including The Stella Prize and the Prime Minister’s Literary Award. Her features and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, Literary Hub, The Sydney Morning Herald andThe Saturday Paper among other publications. In 2023 Belvoir Theatre Company staged an adaptation of her novel The Weekend, and her novel The Natural Way of Thingsfeatured in ABC Television’s 2021 series The Books That Made Us.
Charlotte joins Barbara DeMarco-Barrett to talk about pacing a quiet novel, her main character who is never named, why she set the novel at the start of the pandemic, plagues, slowing down your writing and paying attention to small details, her relationship with plot, revision, and voice, and much more.
For more information on Writers on Writing and to become a supporter, visit our Patreon page. For a one-time donation, visit Ko-fi. You can find hundreds of past interviews on our website. You can help out the show and indie bookstores by buying books at our bookstore on bookshop.org. It’s stocked with titles by our guest authors, as well as our personal favorites. And on Spotify, you’ll find an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. It’s perfect for writing. Look for the artist, Just My Type. Email the show at writersonwritingpodcast@gmail.com. We love to hear from our listeners!
(Recorded on April 23, 2025)
Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Host: Marrie Stone
Music: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)
Vauhini Vara grew up alongside internet startup companies. She was in middle school when AOL sent those first floppy disks to our homes, inviting us to dial up to the World Wide Web. A graduate of Stanford and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she became a tech writer for The Wall Street Journal and a business reporter for The Atlantic, The New Yorker and other publications. In 2017, Vara profiled Sam Altman, a co-founder of OpenAI, and gained early access to ChatGPT. She used the program to write about a topic that had long eluded her — the grief she experienced over the death of her sister. “Ghosts” came out in The Believer in the summer of 2021 and quickly went viral (as evidenced by its adaptation on This American Life). That piece, and several others, are part of Vara’s latest book, Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age.
Vara’s 2022 novel, The Immortal King Rao — also steeped in the tech industry — was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and her story collection, This is Salvaged, came out the following year. She joins Marrie Stone to talk about how technology, including ChatGPT and other A.I. models, impact writers and where she sees things going. Her insights are both hopeful and terrifying. She also talks about writing in different genres as a journalist, a novelist, a writer of creative nonfiction and short stories. She shares her insights about playing with different structures and how to release yourself from conventional forms of storytelling.
For more information on Writers on Writing and to become a supporter, visit our Patreon page. For a one-time donation, visit Ko-fi. You can find hundreds of past interviews on our website. You can help out the show and indie bookstores by buying books at our bookstore on bookshop.org. It’s stocked with titles by our guest authors, as well as our personal favorites. And on Spotify, you’ll find an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. It’s perfect for writing. Look for the artist, Just My Type. Email the show at writersonwritingpodcast@gmail.com. We love to hear from our listeners!
(Recorded on April 29, 2025)
Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Host: Marrie Stone
Music: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)
Jennifer Haigh’s first novel, Mrs. Kimble, won the PEN Hemingway Award for debut fiction. Mercy Street, was named a Best Book of 2022 by The New Yorker and won the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award. Her short stories have been published widely, in the Atlantic, Granta, The Best American Short Stories, and many other places. Published in eighteen languages, her work has been recognized by the Guggenheim Foundation, the Michener Foundation and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Boston. Her new novel, Rabbit Moon, is the focus of our talk today.
Jennifer joins Barbara DeMarco-Barrett. They talk about her time in Shanghai and how being there inspired the novel, why she wrote a novel about sisters, writing multiple points of view, writing minor characters, what she reads when she’s writing fiction, how much she knows going in, why she doesn’t plot, and more.
For more information on Writers on Writing and to become a supporter, visit our Patreon page. For a one-time donation, visit Ko-fi. You can find hundreds of past interviews on our website. You can help out the show and indie bookstores by buying books at our bookstore on bookshop.org. It’s stocked with titles by our guest authors, as well as our personal favorites. And on Spotify, you’ll find an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. It’s perfect for writing. Look for the artist, Just My Type. Email the show at writersonwritingpodcast@gmail.com. We love to hear from our listeners!
(Recorded on April 4, 2025)
Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Host: Marrie Stone
Music: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)
Andrew Porter is the author of two story collections, The Disappeared and The Theory of Light and Matter. He’s also the author of the novel In Between Days. His latest, out this month, is The Imagined Life and it treads on some familiar territory as the others. Andrew joins Marrie Stone to talk about it.
His work has been compared to Richard Yates and John Cheever. He talks about those influences and his hyper-focus on the domestic realm. He also talks about the impacts his former professor, Marilynne Robinson, has on his work. They talk about writerly choices — point of view, structure, revision, and character development. And they discuss larger themes of men, boys, marriage, and sexuality in today’s culture and how literature reflects those struggles.
For more information on Writers on Writing and to become a supporter, visit our Patreon page. For a one-time donation, visit Ko-fi. You can find hundreds of past interviews on our website. You’ll help out the show and indie bookstores by buying books at our bookstore on bookshop.org. It’s stocked with titles by our guest authors, as well as our personal favorites. And on Spotify, you’ll find an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. Look for the artist, Just My Type. Email the show at writersonwritingpodcast@gmail.com. We love to hear from our listeners!
(Recorded on April 16, 2025)
Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Host: Marrie Stone
Music: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)
Tova Mirvis is the author of the memoir The Book of Separation as well as three novels, Visible City, The Outside World and The Ladies Auxiliary, a national bestseller. Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe Magazine and Real Simple, and her fiction has been broadcast on NPR. She lives in Newton, MA with her family. Her most recent novel is We Would Never.
Tova joins Barbara DeMarco-Barrett to talk about how the idea for her new book came from a case she followed in the media, the challenges of writing her first thriller, turning real people into fictional characters, writing multiple point of views, pacing, at what point she thinks about the reader, and more.
For more information on Writers on Writing and to become a supporter, visit our Patreon page. For a one-time donation, visit Ko-fi. You can find hundreds of past interviews on our website. You’ll help out the show and indie bookstores by buying books at our bookstore on bookshop.org. It’s stocked with titles by our guest authors, as well as our personal favorites. And on Spotify, you’ll find an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. Look for the artist, Just My Type. Email the show at writersonwritingpodcast@gmail.com. We love to hear from our listeners!
(Recorded on February 28, 2025)
Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Host: Marrie Stone
Music: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)
In 2007, with his Caldecott-winning masterpiece The Invention of Hugo Cabret, Brian Selznick invented a new way of storytelling. The book became the basis for the 2011 Oscar-winning movie Hugo, directed by Martin Scorsese.
Brian is the author and illustrator of many other books for children, including Wonderstruck(also a movie),The Marvels, Kaleidoscope, andBig Tree, which was named one of the Best Children's books of 2023 by the New York Times and the audio book, narrated by Meryl Streep, was nominated for a Grammy. His latest book, Run Away With Me, is his first YA novel.
Brian joins Marrie Stone to talk about his inventive approach to storytelling, playing with its form and structure, tapping into your own passions and curiosities to ignite passion and curiosity in your reader, building attention in our youth in the digital age, Brian’s insane love of research, the utterly unique origin story behind Run Away With Me, and so much more.
For more information on Writers on Writing and to become a supporter, visit our Patreon page. For a one-time donation, visit Ko-fi. You can find hundreds of past interviews on our website. You’ll help out the show and indie bookstores by buying books at our bookstore on bookshop.org. It’s stocked with titles by our guest authors, as well as our personal favorites. And on Spotify, you’ll find an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. Look for the artist, Just My Type. Email the show at writersonwritingpodcast@gmail.com. We love to hear from our listeners!
(Recorded on April 4, 2025)
Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Host: Marrie Stone
Music: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)
Colum McCann first came on the podcast in 2010 to talk about his National Book Award winning novel, Let the Great World Spin. He most recently returned in 2020 with his New York Times bestseller Apeirogon. He’s back this month with a stunning new novel, Twist. He joins Marrie Stone to talk about the book and his inspiration.
They also discuss the need for stories in this current historical moment, why Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is a book for our times, the things currently giving him hope, and how he manages to make profound statements about the world without sounding pedological. Colum also shares some of his writerly moves distinct to his style, including his weave of arcane and interesting information into his novels, his effective use of lists, his emphasis on the sound of language and sentence structure, and more.
For more information on Writers on Writing and to become a supporter, visit our Patreon page. For a one-time donation, visit Ko-fi. You can find hundreds of past interviews on our website. You’ll help out the show and indie bookstores by buying books at our bookstore on bookshop.org. It’s stocked with titles by our guest authors, as well as our personal favorites. And on Spotify, you’ll find an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. Look for the artist, Just My Type. Email the show at writersonwritingpodcast@gmail.com. We love to hear from our listeners!
(Recorded on March 28, 2025)
Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Host: Marrie Stone
Music: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)
Scott Turow is a writer and former practicing lawyer and the author of 13 bestselling works of fiction, including Presumed Innocent. Scott has also published two nonfiction books, including One L, about his experience as a law student. His books have been translated into more than 40 languages, sold more than 30 million copies worldwide, and have been adapted into movies and television projects. He frequently contributes essays and op-ed pieces to publications such as the New York Times, Washington Post, Vanity Fair, New Yorker, and the Atlantic. His most recent novel is Presumed Guilty.
Scott joins Barbara DeMarco-Barrett to talk about his path to writing fiction, loving literary fiction and also loving plot, writing in the first person present tense, writing outside your culture and race, the importance of setting, and his revision process.
For more information on Writers on Writing and to become a supporter, visit our Patreon page. For a one-time donation, visit Ko-fi. You can find hundreds of past interviews on our website. You’ll help out the show and indie bookstores by buying books at our bookstore on bookshop.org. It’s stocked with titles by our guest authors, as well as our personal favorites. And on Spotify, you’ll find an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. Look for the artist, Just My Type. Email the show at writersonwritingpodcast@gmail.com. We love to hear from our listeners!
(Recorded on March 18, 2025)
Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Host: Marrie Stone
Music: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)
Charlotte McConaghy is an Australian author living in Sydney with her partner and two children. She has a Masters Degree in Screenwriting from the Australian Film Television and Radio School, and a number of published SFF works in Australia. Her novel Migrations was her first foray into adult literary fiction, published in North America by Flatiron Books, and by Penguin Random House in Australia and the UK. It is being translated into over 25 languages and adapted to film. Once There Were Wolves, the New York Times Bestseller, is a romantic mystery about a biologist charged with reintroducing wolves to the Scottish Highlands in order to rewild the landscape and bring a forest back to life. Wild Dark Shore, the focus of today’s show, continues her love of romantic thrillers set in beautiful, remote places, and explores not only what it takes to raise children in a collapsing world, but the impossible choices we make to protect those we love.
Charlotte joins Barbara DeMarco-Barrett to talk about whether she comes up with the story first or the setting, what her research entails, why she chose multiple point of view narrators for Wild Dark Shore, how she knows when a novel is finished, revision, and more.
For more information on Writers on Writing and to become a supporter, visit our Patreon page. For a one-time donation, visit Ko-fi. You can find hundreds of past interviews on our website. You’ll help out the show and indie bookstores by buying books at our bookstore on bookshop.org. It’s stocked with titles by our guest authors, as well as our personal favorites. And on Spotify, you’ll find an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. Look for the artist, Just My Type. Email the show at writersonwritingpodcast@gmail.com. We love to hear from our listeners!
(Recorded on February 14, 2025)
Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Host: Marrie Stone
Music: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)
Eowyn Ivey was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2013 for her debut novel, The Snow Child. Her latest, Black Woods, Blue Sky, offers a dark fairytale, a love story of a different kind, and depicts a mother-daughter relationship like none we’ve read before.
Ivey joins Marrie Stone to talk about the backstories behind the novel. They also chat about writing different points of view, including writing from a 6-year-old perspective, setting up the rules of magical realism, and making landscape a character in your novel. They explore how time and linearity aren’t the same thing as structure in a novel, and writing a novel that exists outside of time.
For more information on Writers on Writing and to become a supporter, visit our Patreon page. For a one-time donation, visit Ko-fi. You can find hundreds of past interviews on our website. Help out the show and indie bookstores by buying books at our bookstore on bookshop.org. It’s stocked with titles by our guest authors, as well as our personal favorites. And on Spotify, you’ll find an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. Look for the artist, Just My Type. Email the show at writersonwritingpodcast@gmail.com. We love to hear from our listeners!
(Recorded on March 4, 2025)
Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Host: Marrie Stone
Music: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)
Adam Ross is the author of Mr. Peanut, selected as one of the best books of the year by The New York Times, The New Yorker, and The Economist. He’s been a fellow in fiction at the American Academy in Berlin and a Hodder Fellow for Fiction at Princeton University. He is editor of The Sewanee Review. Born and raised in New York City, he now lives in Nashville, Tennessee, with his two daughters. His new novel is PLAYWORLD.
On the show, Adam joins Barbara DeMarco-Barrett to talk about how the idea for PLAYWORLD became a book, why it took ten years to write, how being an actor influenced his writing, why he named his protagoinist Griffin Hurt, writing voiceover scenes, bringing his experiences as a kid into the story, his revision process, journaling, and so much more.
For more information on Writers on Writing and to become a supporter, visit our Patreon page. For a one-time donation, visit Ko-fi. You can find hundreds of past interviews on our website. Help out the show and indie bookstores by buying books at our bookstore on bookshop.org. It’s stocked with titles by our guest authors, as well as our personal favorites. And on Spotify, you’ll find to an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. Look for the artist, Just My Type. Email the show at writersonwritingpodcast@gmail.com. We love to hear from our listeners!
(Recorded on February 21, 2025)
Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Host: Marrie Stone
Music: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)
Laila Lalami’s fifth novel, The Dream Hotel, is a dystopian story for our time. Set in Los Angeles in the near-distant future, the novel follows Sara –– a museum archivist and mother — who just landed at LAX from London and is retained by the Risk Assessment Administration for a crime they believe she might commit based on data and algorithms the government uses to track its citizens through their dreams.
Lalami, a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist, has been hailed a “maestra of literary fiction” by NPR. She joins Marrie Stone to talk about writing dystopian fiction during a time when reality might be moving faster than fantasy. She discusses her research process, her tendency to begin her novels in the middle and write to the outsides, how she trained to become a novelist by dissecting fiction, and much more. Along the way, Lalami references Jane Smiley’s article on revision, which can be found here.
For more information on Writers on Writing and to become a supporter, visit our Patreon page. For a one-time donation, visit Ko-fi. You can find hundreds upon hundreds of past interviews on our website. If you'd like to support the show and indie bookstores, consider buying books at our bookstore on bookshop.org. We’ve stocked it with titles from our guests, as well as some of our personal favorites. And on Spotify, you’ll find to an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. Look for the artist, Just My Type. Email the show at writersonwritingpodcast@gmail.com. We love to hear from our listeners!
(Recorded on February 20, 2025)
Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Host: Marrie Stone
Music: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)
Tana French is the New York Times bestselling author of eight previous books, including The Searcher, The Likeness, and The Witch Elm. Her novels have sold over three million copies and won numerous awards, including the Edgar, Anthony, Macavity, and Barry awards, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Best Mystery/Thriller, and the Irish Book Award for Crime Fiction. She’s been called a mystery writer for people who don’t read mysteries. She lives in Dublin with her family.
Tana French joins Barbara DeMarco-Barrett to talk about her latest novel, The Hunter. They discuss her attraction to crime fiction, how her acting background helps her get into character, how characters come to her, how she’s not a plotter, and much more.
For more information on Writers on Writing and to become a supporter, visit our Patreon page. For a one-time donation, visit Ko-fi. You can find hundreds upon hundreds of past interviews on our website. If you'd like to support the show and indie bookstores, consider buying books at our bookstore on bookshop.org. We’ve stocked it with titles from our guests, as well as some of our personal favorites. And on Spotify, you’ll find to an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. Look for the artist, Just My Type. Email the show at writersonwritingpodcast@gmail.com. We love to hear from our listeners!
(Recorded on January 10, 2025)
Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Host: Marrie Stone
Music: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)
Eric Puchner is the author of two story collections — Music Through the Floor and Last Day on Earth. His first novel, Model Home, was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award in Fiction. His latest novel, Dream State, publishes February 18. He joins Marrie Stone to talk about it.
They discuss controlling time in a novel, since the book takes place over generations and moves not linearly but fluidly through time. They also talk about anticipating the future, because the novel projects ahead in time. They discuss point of view, bringing real world issues like climate change and environmentalism into your work in non-moralizing ways, and what he advises his students about writer’s block. They also discuss the current world of agents and editors and what he's learned in his decades of publishing, and so much more.
As a bonus, Eric and his wife, novelist Katherine Noel, collaborated on an essay entitled I Married a Novelist, a fun, funny, and delightful read.
For more information on Writers on Writing and to become a supporter, visit our Patreon page. For a one-time donation, visit Ko-fi. You can find hundreds upon hundreds of past interviews on our website. If you'd like to support the show and indie bookstores, consider buying books at our bookstore on bookshop.org. We’ve stocked it with titles from our guests, as well as some of our personal favorites. And on Spotify, you’ll find to an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. Look for the artist, Just My Type. Email the show at writersonwritingpodcast@gmail.com. We love to hear from our listeners!
(Recorded on February 5, 2025)
Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Host: Marrie Stone
Music: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)
Renee Fountain is president of Gandolfo Helin & Fountain Lit Mgmt. She’s been in the publishing industry for more than 30 years. She’s worked at Harcourt and Simon & Schuster with some of the best writers and illustrators in publishing, has managed iconic classics like Raggedy Ann and Nancy Drew, and brokered film and television options. Renee also spent five years with the CW Television Network as a book scout and story analyst for scripted television. Renèe represents fiction and non-fiction, from YA to adult but doesn’t represent picture books, middle grade, or previously published work. She attends writers’ conferences where she provides manuscript critiques, fields author pitches, and teaches masterclasses. She offers free resources for writers at Reneefountain.com/podcastjumpstart and on her Substack page. In addition to agenting, Renèe helps writers hone their craft and books with developmental editing and coaching through her company Gryphon Quill and as a faculty member of The Manuscript Academy.
Renee joins Barbara DeMarco-Barrett to talk about what she wishes a writer would send her, how she finds her clients, how the words on the page are more important than MFAs and a writer’s age, query letters, what to do about your bio if you have no writing credits, comps, the state of the publishing biz, social media, and so much more.
For more information on Writers on Writing and to become a supporter, visit our Patreon page. For a one-time donation, visit Ko-fi. You can find hundreds upon hundreds of past interviews on our website. If you'd like to support the show and indie bookstores, consider buying books at our bookstore on bookshop.org. We’ve stocked it with titles from our guests, as well as some of our personal favorites. And on Spotify, you’ll find to an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. Look for the artist, Just My Type. Email the show at writersonwritingpodcast@gmail.com. We love to hear from our listeners!
(Recorded on January 31, 2025)
Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Host: Marrie Stone
Music: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)
Danielle Prescod is a 15-year veteran of the beauty and fashion industry. She is also the author of the memoir Token Black Girl, which was one of the buzziest books of 2022, and cited as a must read by People, USA Today, Town and Country, Ebony, The LA Times, and landed her on NBC’s Today Show and elsewhere.
Her debut novel is The Rules of Fortune. It’s published by Mindy Kaling’s Book Studio, an imprint at Amazon, and hits shelves February 1, 2025. She joins Marrie Stone to talk about it, as well as Mindy’s Book Studio and working with an Amazon imprint, how she found her agent, how she taught herself to write fiction and what she’ll do different next time, the difference between writing her memoir and writing a novel, and so much more. You can follow her here on Instagram.
For more information on Writers on Writing and to become a supporter, visit our Patreon page. For a one-time donation, visit Ko-fi. You can find hundreds upon hundreds of past interviews on our website. If you'd like to support the show and indie bookstores, consider buying books at our bookstore on bookshop.org. We’ve stocked it with titles from our guests, as well as some of our personal favorites. And on Spotify, you’ll find to an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. Look for the artist, Just My Type. Email the show at writersonwritingpodcast@gmail.com. We love to hear from our listeners!
(Recorded on January 23, 2025)
Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Host: Marrie Stone
Music: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)
Kim (Freilich) Dower (City Poet Laureate of West Hollywood from October 2016 – October 2018)has published six highly acclaimed collections of poetry all from Red Hen Press. Her newest What She Wants is called, “witty, sultry and thoughtful,” by the Washington Post. The bestselling, I Wore This Dress Today for You, Mom, an Eric Hoffer Book Award Finalist, was called a “fantastic collection” by The Washington Post, “impressively insightful, thought-provoking, and truly memorable” by The Midwest Book Review and Shelf-Awareness said, “These gorgeous gems are energized by the sheer power of her wit and irreverent style.” Air Kissing on Mars, Kim’s first collection, was described by the Los Angeles Times as, “sensual and evocative . . . seamlessly combining humor and heartache.” Slice of Moon was called “unexpected and sublime,” by “O” magazine, Last Train to the Missing Planet, “poems that speak about the grey space between tragedy and tenderness, memory and loss, fragility and perseverance,” said Richard Blanco, and Sunbathing on Tyrone Power’s Grave, won the 2020 Independent Publishers Book Award Gold Medal for Poetry. Kim’s work has been featured in numerous literary journals including Plume, Ploughshares, Rattle, The James Dickey Review, and Garrison Keillor's "The Writer's Almanac," and her poems are included in several anthologies, notably, Wide Awake: Poets of Los Angeles and Beyond. She teaches poetry workshops for Antioch University, UCLA Extension Writer’s Program, and the West Hollywood Library. Born and raised on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and a graduate of Emerson College in Boston, Kim lives with her family in West Hollywood, CA. To learn more about Kim visit her website: www.kimdowerpoetry.com
Kim joins Barbara DeMarco-Barrett to talk about the attributes of a poet, whether studying the classic poets and traditional forms is necessary if you want to write poetry, what is poetry?, and limerence. Kim reads three poems from the collection and talks about the process of writing them.
For more information on Writers on Writing and to become a supporter, visit our Patreon page. For a one-time donation, visit Ko-fi. You can find hundreds upon hundreds of past interviews on our website. If you'd like to support the show and indie bookstores, consider buying books at our bookstore on bookshop.org. We’ve stocked it with titles from our guests, as well as some of our personal favorites. And on Spotify, you’ll find to an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. Look for the artist, Just My Type. Email the show at writersonwritingpodcast@gmail.com. We love to hear from our listeners!
(Recorded on January 17, 2025)
Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Host: Marrie Stone
Music: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)
Bradford Morrow is the author of 10 novels, as well as short stories, children’s books, essays, anthologies, and illustrated books. He is also the founder and editor of the literary journal Conjunctions, which has been in publication since 1981. Professor Morrow has taught literature at Bard College for 35 years.
His latest is The Forger’s Requiem. It’s the third in a trilogy, following The Forgers and The Forger’s Daughter. He joins Marrie Stone to talk about these novels, as well as his techniques for reading like a writer, his work at Conjunctions, his use of journals for novel-writing, his writing routine, his love of the Oxford English Dictionary, and so much more.
For more information on Writers on Writing and to become a supporter, visit our Patreon page. For a one-time donation, visit Ko-fi. You can find hundreds upon hundreds of past interviews on our website. If you'd like to support the show and indie bookstores, consider buying books at our bookstore on bookshop.org. We’ve stocked it with titles from our guests, as well as some of our personal favorites. And on Spotify, you’ll find to an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. Look for the artist, Just My Type. Email the show at writersonwritingpodcast@gmail.com. We love to hear from our listeners!
(Recorded on January 9, 2025)
Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Host: Marrie Stone
Music: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)
Rebecca Renner is a journalist and fiction writer from Daytona Beach, Florida. She’s a seventh-generation Floridian, and is committed to making life in her state better for everyone through writing about politics, social issues, and the environment. She has a Master’s of Fine Arts in creative writing from Stetson University, the oldest university in the state of Florida. Her writing has appeared in The Paris Review, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Glamour, VICE, New York Magazine and more. She’s author of the narrative nonfiction/true crime book, Gator Country: Deception, Danger, and Alligators in the Everglades.
On the show we talked about the misbelief about alligators, the everglades, doing research, finding sources and convincing them to be a part of your project, and more.
For more information on Writers on Writing and to become a supporter, visit our Patreon page. For a one-time donation, visit Ko-fi. You can find hundreds upon hundreds of past interviews on our website. If you'd like to support the show and indie bookstores, consider buying books at our bookstore on bookshop.org. We’ve stocked it with titles from our guests, as well as some of our personal favorites. And on Spotify, you’ll find to an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. Look for the artist, Just My Type. Email the show at writersonwritingpodcast@gmail.com. We love to hear from our listeners!
(Recorded on April 12, 2024)
Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Host: Marrie Stone
Music: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)
One of the questions I often get this time of year is who were my favorite interviews and what were my favorite books? This year, the question prompted me to begin digging through my 25+ hours of recordings to find the gems from 2024. I decided to edit some of them together and share them here. Of course, this is just a small sampling and doesn’t include Barbara’s many treasures.
One of my New Year’s resolutions is to try doing more reading and less watching. If you’re in that boat too and looking for some good places to start, maybe this episode will help you out. All the complete interviews can be found in our archives at www.writersonwriting.com.
Here’s a quick list of the authors and books mentioned in this episode: Steve Almond’s Truth is the Arrow, Mercy is the Bow, Kevin Barry’s The Heart in Winter, Bonnie Jo Campbell’s The Waters, Kristin Hannah’s The Women, Jonathan Lethem’s Brooklyn Crime Novel, Hisham Matar’s My Friends, Joyce Maynard’s How the Light Gets In, Alice McDermott’s Absolution, Ben Shattuck’s The History of Sound, Curtis Sittenfeld’s Romantic Comedy, and Elizabeth Strout’s Tell Me Everything.
For more information on Writers on Writing and to become a supporter, visit our Patreon page. For a one-time donation, visit Ko-fi. Listen to past interviews on our website. If you'd like to support the show and indie bookstores, consider buying books at our bookstore on bookshop.org. We’ve stocked it with titles from our guests, as well as some of our personal favorites. And on Spotify, you’ll find to an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. Look for the artist, Just My Type. Email the show at writersonwritingpodcast@gmail.com. We love to hear from our listeners!
Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Host: Marrie Stone
Music: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)
I have a Christmas and Hanukah gift for you: my show with Stephen Dunn. This is one of my favorite shows and he was one of my favorite poets. He published something like 21 collections of poetry. The show you’re about to hear from 2001, the first time he was a guest on the show. Writers on Writing was on the radio then. Podcasting wouldn’t be along for four more years and it would be a number of years—I’ve lost track—before my cohost Marrie Stone joined us.
I first learned of Dunn back in the early 1980s. I was on a bus in San Francisco, looking up at the placards that lined the roof of the bus and there was a poem of his. It may have been his poem, “Contact,” which he reads during the following interview. Back then the City posted poetry on MUNI busses (I think it’s doing that again). Dunn and I never met in person but he graced me and the show with his presence a half dozen times.
Stephen Dunn was born on June 24, 1939, in Forest Hills, Queens. He graduated from Forest Hills High School in 1957. He earned a BA in history and English from Hofstra University, attended the New School Writing Workshops, and finished his MA in creative writing at Syracuse University. Dunn’s books of poetry include the posthumous collection The Not Yet Fallen World (W. W. Norton, 2022); Pagan Virtues (W. W. Norton, 2019); Lines of Defense (W. W. Norton, 2014); Here and Now: Poems (W. W. Norton, 2011); What Goes On: Selected and New Poems 1995-2009 (W. W. Norton, 2009); Everything Else in the World (W. W. Norton, 2006); Local Visitations (W. W. Norton, 2003); Different Hours (W. W. Norton, 2000), winner of the 2001 Pulitzer Prize winner for poetry; Loosestrife (W. W. Norton, 1996), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; New and Selected Poems: 1974–1994(W. W. Norton, 1994); Landscape at the End of the Century (W. W. Norton, 1991); Between Angels (W. W. Norton, 1989); Local Time (William Morrow & Co., 1986), winner of the National Poetry Series; Not Dancing (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1984); Work & Love (HarperCollins, 1981); A Circus of Needs (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1978); Full of Lust and Good Usage (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1976); and Looking For Holes In the Ceiling (University of Massachusetts Press, 1974). He is also the author of Walking Light: Memoirs and Essays on Poetry (BOA Editions, 2001), and Riffs & Reciprocities: Prose Pairs (W. W. Norton, 1998).
About Dunn’s work, the poet Billy Collins has written:
The art lies in hiding the art, Horace tells us, and Stephen Dunn has proven himself a master of concealment. His honesty would not be so forceful were it not for his discrete formality; his poems would not be so strikingly naked were they not so carefully dressed.
Dunn’s other honors include the Academy Award for Literature, the James Wright Prize, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. He has taught poetry and creative writing and held residencies at Wartburg College, Wichita State University, Columbia University, University of Washington, Syracuse University, Southwest Minnesota State College, Princeton University, and University of Michigan.
Dunn has worked as a professional basketball player, an advertising copywriter, and an editor, as well as a professor of creative writing. Dunn was the distinguished professor of creative writing at Richard Stockton College and lived in Frostburg, Maryland with his wife, the writer Barbara Hurd. He passed away on June 25, 2021.
He won a Pulitzer Prize for Different Hours, the focus for our talk on this day in 2001. We also talk about the poets’ state of mind, writing poems during and after the moment, existing in the world of ambiguity, being a retrospective poet, how his focus has changed over the years, how he taught poetry, good training for a poet, hearing from readers, National Poetry Month, and more.
For more information on Writers on Writing and to become a supporter, visit our Patreon page. For a one-time donation, visit Ko-fi. You can find hundreds upon hundreds of past interviews on our website. If you'd like to support the show and indie bookstores, consider buying books at our bookstore on bookshop.org. We’ve stocked it with titles from our guests, as well as some of our personal favorites. And on Spotify, you’ll find to an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. Look for the artist, Just My Type. Email the show at writersonwritingpodcast@gmail.com. We love to hear from our listeners!
(Recorded in 2001 in the KUCI-FM studio at University of California Irvine campus.)
Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Host: Marrie Stone
Music: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)
Karl Marlantes served as a Marine in Vietnam, where he was awarded the Navy Cross, the Bronze Star, two Navy Commendation Medals for valor, two Purple Hearts, and ten air medals. He is the bestselling author of Deep River, Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War, and What It is Like to Go to War. His latest, Cold Victory, is out in paperback by Grove Press.
Karl joins Marrie Stone to discuss it. He talks about writing books based on direct experience versus writing books based on research, how he turned his experience in Vietnam into fiction, what he learned from Danielle Steel and Louis L’Amour, how to use Excel spreadsheets to plot your novel, and much more.
For more information on Writers on Writing and to become a supporter, visit our Patreon page. For a one-time donation, visit Ko-fi. Listen to past interviews on our website. If you'd like to support the show and indie bookstores, consider buying books at our bookstore on bookshop.org. We’ve stocked it with titles from our guests, as well as some of our personal favorites. And on Spotify, you’ll find to an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. Look for the artist, Just My Type. Email the show at writersonwritingpodcast@gmail.com. We love to hear from our listeners!
(Recorded on December 10, 2024)
Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Host: Marrie Stone
Music: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)
Caroline Leavitt, the New York Times bestselling author of thirteen novels, most recently Days of Wonder, A finalist for the Midatlantic Fiction Prize and longlisted for the Joyce Carol Oates Literary Prize. Caroline is also the co-founder of A Mighty Blaze and a book critic for People Magazine. Find out more at www.carolineleavitt.com Caroline joins Barbara DeMarco-Barrett to talk about writing the end of the book before the beginning, how understanding story structure changed everything for her, using real settings as well as making them up, writing in dual points of view, character arcs, covers, and more.
For more information on Writers on Writing and to become a supporter, visit our Patreon page. For a one-time donation, visit Ko-fi. Listen to past interviews on our website. If you'd like to support the show and indie bookstores, consider buying books at our bookstore on bookshop.org. We’ve stocked it with titles from our guests, as well as some of our personal favorites. And on Spotify, you’ll find to an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. Look for the artist, Just My Type. Email the show at writersonwritingpodcast@gmail.com. We love to hear from our listeners!
(Recorded on November 15, 2024)
Host: Barbara DeMarco-BarrettHost: Marrie StoneMusic and sound editing: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)
Suzanne Redfearn didn’t discover her talent for fiction until her 30s. A trained commercial and residential architect, she’d also worked as a copywriter, marketing manager, graphic designer, and other odd jobs. Today, Suzanne is the #1 Amazon and USA Today bestselling author of seven novels: Two Good Men, Where Butterflies Wander, Moment In Time, Hadley & Grace, In an Instant, No Ordinary Life, and Hush Little Baby. Her books have been translated into twenty-seven languages and have been recognized by RT Reviews, Target Recommends, Goodreads, Publisher’s Marketplace, and Kirkus Reviews. She has been awarded Best New Fiction from Best Book Awards and has been a Goodreads Choice Awards Finalist.
Suzanne joins Marrie Stone to talk about her path to success in commercial fiction. (Spoiler alert: it was neither linear nor easy.) She is an autodidact and shares the resources she found invaluable to teach herself the craft (including Writing the Breakout Novel by Donald Maass and Save the Cat by Jessica Brody).
Suzanne has had five agents, three publishers, and still has several unpublished manuscripts in her drawer. She talks about what to look for in an agent, the advantages and disadvantages of publishing under an Amazon imprint, writing the right novel at the wrong time, how to revive an old manuscript, where to look for story ideas, what to do when plot is a problem, and so much more.
For more information on Writers on Writing and extra writing perks, visit our Patreon page. For a one-time donation, visit Ko-fi. To listen to past interviews, visit our website. Support the show by buying books at our bookstore on bookshop.org. We’ve stocked it with titles from our guests, as well as some of our personal favorites. You support independent bookstores and our show when you purchase books through the store. And on Spotify, you’ll find to an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. Look for the artist, Just My Type. Email the show at writersonwritingpodcast@gmail.com. We love to hear from our listeners.
(Recorded on November 25, 2024)
Host: Barbara DeMarco-BarrettHost: Marrie StoneMusic and sound editing: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)
Susan Minot is an award-winning novelist, short-story writer, poet, playwright, and screenwriter. She also paints watercolors and makes collages. She was born in Boston and grew up in Manchester-by-the-sea, Massachusetts, with six siblings who are all artists. Her first novel was Monkeys, published in 1986. She wrote the screenplay for Bernardo Bertolucci’s “Stealing Beauty” (1995.) Her novel Evening, nominated for the Los Angeles Times Book Award, was a worldwide bestseller and became a major motion picture in 2007. Her stories have received O. Henry Awards and have been anthologized widely, including The Best American Short Stories. Her eighth book, a collection of stories, Why I Don’t Write, was published in 2020. Her daughter, Ava, was born in 2001. She teaches in the graduate writing program at Stony Brook University and privately at her kitchen table. She lives in both New York City and on North Haven, an island off the coast of Maine. Her new book is Don’t Be a Stranger, and is the focus of today’s show.
Susan joins Barbara DeMarco-Barrett to discuss naming characters, the hubbub that surrounds September to May trysts, Lolita, epigraphs, the conflict between motherhood and desire, structure, book covers, and more.
For more information on Writers on Writing and extra writing perks, visit our Patreon page. For a one-time donation, visit Ko-fi. To listen to past interviews, visit our website. Support the show by buying books at our bookstore on bookshop.org. We’ve stocked it with titles from our guests, as well as some of our personal favorites. You support independent bookstores and our show when you purchase books through the store. And on Spotify, you’ll find to an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. Look for the artist, Just My Type. Email the show at writersonwritingpodcast@gmail.com. We love to hear from our listeners.
(Recorded on November 12, 2024)
Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Host: Marrie Stone
Music and sound editing: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)
Coco Mellors is the author of Cleopatra and Frankenstein, which was a Sunday Times bestseller and is currently being adapted for television. Her second novel, Blue Sisters, came out in September 20240 and was a Read with Jenna pick. She joins Marrie Stone to talk about it.
Coco discusseswriting from different POVs, writing compellingly about addiction and substance abuse, how to write sex scenes in all their various forms (and how to trick yourself to write difficult scenes by switching POV), the elegant weave of backstory, and her favorite advice by former professor Rick Moody. They also discuss the difficult heartbreak of the publishing process and the business of being a writer — rejections, MFAs, and the pressure of the next novel.
For more information on Writers on Writing and extra writing perks, visit our Patreon page. To listen to past interviews, visit our website. Support the show by buying books at our bookstore on bookshop.org. We’ve stocked it with titles from our guests, as well as some of our personal favorites. You support independent bookstores and our show when you purchase books through the store. And on Spotify, you’ll find to an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. Look for the artist, Just My Type. Email the show at writersonwritingpodcast@gmail.com. We love to hear from our listeners.
(Recorded on November 4, 2024)
Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Host: Marrie Stone
Music and sound editing: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)
Nicola Yoon is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Instructions for Dancing, Everything, Everything, The Sun Is Also a Star, and a co-author of Blackout and Whiteout. She is a National Book Award finalist, a Michael L. Printz Honor Book recipient, a Coretta Scott King New Talent Award winner and the first Black woman to hit #1 on the New York Times Young Adult bestseller list. Two of her novels have been made into films. She’s also the co-publisher of Joy Revolution, a Random House young adult imprint dedicated to love stories starring people of color. She grew up in Jamaica and Brooklyn, and lives in Los Angeles with her husband, the novelist David Yoon, and their daughter.
Nicola joins Barbara DeMarc-Barrett to talk about her path to writing YA and the transition to writing adult fiction, trigger warnings, categorization of genres, writing horror, revising, theme, POV, titles, The Stepford Wives, and much more.
For more information on Writers on Writing and extra writing perks, visit our Patreon page. To listen to past interviews, visit our website. Support the show by buying books at our bookstore on bookshop.org. We’ve stocked it with titles from our guests, as well as some of our personal favorites. You support independent bookstores and our show when you purchase books through the store. And on Spotify, you’ll find to an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. Look for the artist, Just My Type. Email the show at writersonwritingpodcast@gmail.com. We love to hear from our listeners.
(Recorded on September 20, 2024)
Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Host: Marrie Stone
Music and sound editing: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)
Alice McDermott is the author of nine novels, all published by FSG, including Charming Billy(winner of the National Book Award), That Night, As Weddings and Wakes, and After This (which were finalists for the Pulitzer). She is also the author of the essay collection What About the Baby? Some Thoughts on the Art of Fiction. Her most recent novel, now out in paperback, is Absolution. She joins Marrie Stone to talk about it, her door into the Vietnam War, and many of the lessons she applies to her own work which appear in What About the Baby?
For more information on Writers on Writing and extra writing perks, visit our Patreon page. To listen to past interviews, visit our website. Support the show by buying books at our bookstore on bookshop.org. We’ve stocked it with titles from our guests, as well as some of our personal favorites. You support independent bookstores and our show when you purchase books through the store. And on Spotify, you’ll find to an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. Look for the artist, Just My Type. Email the show at writersonwritingpodcast@gmail.com. We love to hear from our listeners.
(Recorded on October 23, 2024)
Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Host: Marrie Stone
Music and sound editing: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)
Jo Hamya was born in London in 1997 where she now lives. After living in Miami for a few years, she completed an English degree at King’s College London and a MSt in contemporary literature and culture at Oxford University. There, she divided her research between updating twentieth-century cultural theory into twenty-first-century digital contexts, and the impact of social media on form and questions of identity in contemporary women’s writing. Since leaving Oxford, she has worked as a copyeditor for Tatler and edited manuscripts subsequently published by Edinburgh University Press and Doubleday UK. She has also written for the Financial Times. The Hypocrite is her new novel and the focus of today’s show.
Jo joins Barbara DeMarco-Barrett to discuss writing dual point of views, writing interiority, the lack of quotation marks in dialogue, poetry’s influence on her writing, changing publishers, and much more. And if you prefer watching interviews instead of listen, check out my youtube channel @inkmama. This interview, along with a few others, is up there.
For more information on Writers on Writing and extra writing perks, visit our Patreon page. To listen to past interviews, visit our website. Support the show by buying books at our bookstore on bookshop.org. We’ve stocked it with titles from our guests, as well as some of our personal favorites. You support independent bookstores and our show when you purchase books through the store. And on Spotify, you’ll find to an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. Look for the artist, Just My Type. Email the show at writersonwritingpodcast@gmail.com. We love to hear from our listeners.
(Recorded on October 10, 2024)
Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Host: Marrie Stone
Music and sound editing: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)
Zoe Whittall is a Canadian poet, novelist, and TV writer. She has published five novels including The Fake, The Spectacular, The Best Kind of People which is being adapted for film by Sarah Polley, the Lambda-winning Holding Still for as Long as Possible, and her debut, Bottle Rocket Hearts. She has film and TV credits on the Baroness von Sketch Show, Schitt’s Creek, and others. She’s also a poet, authoring three poetry collections to date.
Her latest, Wild Failure, is a collection of 10 stories that capture the queer experience, exploring power dynamics, gender roles, shame, desire, insecurity, aging, and other universal themes that make us all human. It came out a few months ago by Ballantine and she joins Marrie Stone to talk it. They discuss writing across various genres and how they feed each other, getting into and out of a story, writing sex (both consensual and nonconsensual), and so much more. They also chat about the business side of writing -- getting your work published, MFAs, agents, and editors.
For more information on Writers on Writing and extra writing perks, visit our Patreon page. To listen to past interviews, visit our website. Support the show by buying books at our bookstore on bookshop.org. We’ve stocked it with titles from our guests, as well as some of our personal favorites. You support independent bookstores and our show when you purchase books through the store. And on Spotify, you’ll find to an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. Look for the artist, Just My Type. Email the show at writersonwritingpodcast@gmail.com. We love to hear from our listeners.
(Recorded on October 18, 2024)
Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Host: Marrie Stone
Music and sound editing: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)
Jean Hanff Korelitz is the author of nine novels including The Latecomer and The Plot (both in development for limited series), You Should Have Known (adapted as HBO’s 2020 limited series, The Undoing, by David E. Kelley and starring Nicole Kidman and Hugh Grant) and Admission (basis for the 2013 film starring Tina Fey). The Plot was featured on The Tonight Show as the Fallon Summer Reads 2021 pick. Korelitz lives in New York City. Her most recent novel, which is a follow-up to The Plot, is The Sequel.
Jean joins Barbara DeMarco-Barrett to talk about sequels and if a sequel should stand on its own, unreliable narrators, writing a book within a book, how you know when a book is finished, rejection, appropriation, and much more.
For more information on Writers on Writing and extra writing perks, visit our Patreon page. To listen to past interviews, visit our website. Support the show by buying books at our bookstore on bookshop.org. We’ve stocked it with titles from our guests, as well as some of our personal favorites. You support independent bookstores and our show when you purchase books through the store. And on Spotify, you’ll find to an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. Look for the artist, Just My Type. Email the show at writersonwritingpodcast@gmail.com. We love to hear from our listeners.
(Recorded in August, 2024)
Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Host: Marrie Stone
Music and sound editing: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)
Jonathan Lethem is one of the smartest, riskiest, and most experimental writers working in crime fiction today. He writes about crime not only like a fiction writer with all that propulsive page turning thrill, but also like a sociologist, a psychologist, a historian and a philosopher. That might never have been truer of his work than his latest, Brooklyn Crime Novel, which came out last year and is recently out in paperback. It's as much a book about gentrification, integration, race, class, economics, and all the things that come with coming-of-age stories like sex and drugs and skateboards and basketballs, as it is about what’s really a character in the book …. crime.
Jonathan writes about Brooklyn the way Tim O’Brien writes about Vietnam, with a kind of intimacy and respect and resentment and ambivalence for the way the place shaped who he became. He joins Marrie Stone to talk about the novel. He talks about writing a novel in fragments, how to access and harness memory in fiction, living inside and outside a space to write about it, and tackling experimental points of view.
Jonathan is the author of 13 novels, including his 1999 blockbuster Motherless Brooklyn, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was made into a film by the same name in 2019 by Ed Norton. Fortress of Solitude, published in 2003, also delved into the streets of Brooklyn and race and gentrification. In addition, Jonathan has authored 4 story collections, 10 other essay collections and other books.
For more information on Writers on Writing and extra writing perks, visit our Patreon page. To listen to past interviews, visit our website. Support the show by buying books at our bookstore on bookshop.org. We’ve stocked it with titles from our guests (including many of Jonathan’s titles), as well as some of our personal favorites. You’ll support independent bookstores and our show by purchasing through the store. Finally, on Spotify listen to an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. Look for the artist, Just My Type. Email the show at writersonwritingpodcast@gmail.com. We love to hear from our listeners.
(Recorded on September 30, 2024)
Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Host: Marrie Stone
Music and sound editing: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)
Jenna Satterthwaite was born in the Midwest, grew up in Spain, lived briefly in France, and now lives in Chicago with her husband and three kids. Jenna studied classical guitar at the Conservatorio Profesional de Música de Zaragoza and earned her BAs in English Lit and French at Indiana University. Once upon a time, Jenna moonlighted as a singer-songwriter in folk band Thornfield. As well as being a literary agent with Storm Literary Agency, she is a debut novelist. Made For You came out earlier this year. She has two more books coming in 2025: Beach Bodies (Summer 2025, Transworld/PRH UK), and The New Year's Party (October 2025, Mira/HarperCollins).
Jenna is different from most agents because not only is she an agent, she’s a debut novelist. Jenna joins Barbara DeMarco-Barrett to discuss the inspiration for Made For You, why she wrote the thriller in dual points of view, how she kept going when previous novels were rejected, how also being a writer affects agenting, query letters, the differences among genres, advantages of working with a junior agent, and more. This podcast is released in time for you to query her as she’s accepting queries during the month of October 2024 and then will take a break to catch up.
For more information on Writers on Writing and extra writing perks, visit our Patreon page. To listen to past interviews, visit our website. Support the show by buying books at our bookstore on bookshop.org. We’ve stocked it with titles from our guests, as well as some of our personal favorites. You’ll support independent bookstores and our show by purchasing through the store. Finally, on Spotify listen to an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. Look for the artist, Just My Type. Email the show at writersonwritingpodcast@gmail.com. We love to hear from our listeners.
(Recorded on August 30, 2024)
Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Host: Marrie Stone
Music and sound editing: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)
Alice Hoffman is the author of more than 40 books, including novels, YA fiction, middle grade and children’s books, short stories and nonfiction. Perhaps best known for her 1995 novel Practical Magic, which was adapted for a 1998 film of the same name, many of her works fall into the genre of magic realism and contain elements of magic, irony, and non-standard romances and relationships. Toni Morrison called The Dovekeepers “... a major contribution to twenty-first century literature.”
Her latest, When We Flew Away, tells Anne Frank’s story before she went into hiding. Alice joins Marrie Stone to talk about the book’s unusual origin story and how the pandemic may have influenced its writing. She discusses her research process, how she organizes her material, how to navigate fictionalizing a historical icon, and what she hopes this book will leave young readers. They also talk about Alice’s essay in Modern Love, and how she approaches different writing projects.
For more information on Writers on Writing and extra writing perks, visit our Patreon page. To listen to past interviews, visit our website. Support the show by buying books at our bookstore on bookshop.org. We’ve stocked it with titles from our guests (including all of Liz Strout’s titles), as well as some of our personal favorites. You’ll support independent bookstores and our show by purchasing through the store. Finally, on Spotify listen to an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. Look for the artist, Just My Type. Email the show at writersonwritingpodcast@gmail.com. We love to hear from our listeners.
(Recorded on September 13, 2024)
Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Host: Marrie Stone
Music and sound editing: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)
This week we’re talking with four hybrid/self-published authors.
Christine Amoroso spent the first decade of her professional career as an accountant. In 1997 she chased a childhood dream and began a career in elementary education, first as a teacher and then a principal. In 2014 she started a blog, Bare Naked in Public, writing personal narratives about life’s lessons. In 2017, Christine sold her possessions and moved to Italy to write her memoir. A year later she returned home with the first draft of her memoir Bare Naked in Public, published in July of this year. When Christine’s not writing, she power-walks along the coast, plays soccer, and indulges her grandchildren. She travels abroad every chance she gets.
Andrew Bridgeman has nearly as many twists in his own story as there are in his novel. A former rugby player, jazz singer, salesman, and entrepreneur, he finds inspiration in the characters he’s crashed into along the way. Mr. Bridgeman studied creative writing at Dickinson College and earned his MBA from Washington University in Saint Louis. After decades in the St. Louis Area, he now lives in New Hampshire with his wife, Kathy. He enjoys hiking in the mountains near his home, playing guitar, and exploring the US in an Airstream RV. Fortunate Son is his debut novel.
Nancy Klann-Moren is an author, artist and third generation Southern California native. She began her writing journey after a career in advertising and marketing. Short stories were her primary genre until an instructor encouraged her to turn one into a novel. Her two novels, The Clock of Life and Love and Protest, explore how ordinary people getting involved in social activism can make a difference for the greater good. Her collection of short stories, Like the Flies On The Patio, is a insightful glimpse into the lives of working class people.
Anne Moose has mostly made her living as a technical writer. She has a background as an editor and small book publisher in Berkeley California, so self-publishing came naturally to her. In recent years she has written and published three novels: Arkansas Summer, House of Fragile Dreams, and her latest, When You Read This I’ll Be Gone. They span different genres while each is a suspenseful story highlighting social issues she cares about deeply.
The authors join Barbara DeMarco-Barrett to talk about their path to writing and hybrid or indie publishing, the pros and cons, tips, and more.
If you’d like to watch the episode on YouTube, here’s the link. You can find other shows on my YouTube channel.
For more information on Writers on Writing and extra writing perks, visit our Patreon page. To listen to past interviews, visit our website. Support the show by buying books at our bookstore on bookshop.org. We’ve stocked it with titles from our guests, as well as some of our personal favorites. You’ll support independent bookstores and our show by purchasing through the store. Finally, on Spotify listen to an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. Look for the artist, Just My Type. Email the show at writersonwritingpodcast@gmail.com. We love to hear from our listeners.
(Recorded August 23, 2024)
Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Host: Marrie Stone
Music and sound editing: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)
Elizabeth Strout’s latest novel, Tell Me Everything, brings together her whole cast of characters to Crosby, Maine. Olive Kitteridge and Lucy Barton finally meet. Lucy continues her intense friendship with Bob Burgess. And, along the way, there’s a murder investigation, separations, and struggles with addiction. The book asks the big questions — what gives our lives meaning, what is love, what’s the difference between being evil and being broken, and what does forgiveness really look like?
Liz joins Marrie Stone for her 7th appearance on the podcast. She shares some thoughts about Alice Munro and the revelations about her life in the aftermath of her death. She talks about what playing the piano has brought to her writing. She discloses the one writing exercise she always does with her characters, what’s currently on her reading stack, and so much more.
For more information on Writers on Writing and extra writing perks, visit our Patreon page. To listen to past interviews, visit our website. Support the show by buying books at our bookstore on bookshop.org. We’ve stocked it with titles from our guests (including all of Liz Strout’s titles), as well as some of our personal favorites. You’ll support independent bookstores and our show by purchasing through the store. Finally, on Spotify listen to an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. Look for the artist, Just My Type. Email the show at writersonwritingpodcast@gmail.com. We love to hear from our listeners.
(Recorded on September 5, 2024)
Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Host: Marrie Stone
Music and sound editing: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)
Patricia Engel is the author of five books including the newest collection of short stories, The Faraway World; Infinite Country, a New York Times Bestseller and Reese's Book Club pick; The Veins of the Ocean, winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize; It’s Not Love, It’s Just Paris, winner of the International Latino Book Award; and Vida, a finalist for the Pen/Hemingway and Young Lions Fiction Awards, and a New York Times Notable Book. She is a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her stories appear in The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Mystery Stories, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and elsewhere. Born to Colombian parents, Patricia teaches creative writing at the University of Miami.
Patricia Engel joins Barbara DeMarco-Barrett to discuss how ideas become short stories or novels, how Veins of the Ocean started as a short story and became a novel, how the ending a short story differs from the ending of a novel, why she likes first person, knowing what to leave out in a short story, and more.
For more information on Writers on Writing and extra writing perks, visit our Patreon page. To listen to past interviews, visit our website. Support the show by buying books at our bookstore on bookshop.org. We’ve stocked it with titles from our guests, as well as some of our personal favorites. You’ll support independent bookstores and our show by purchasing through the store. Finally, on Spotify listen to an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. Look for the artist, Just My Type. Email the show at writersonwritingpodcast@gmail.com. We love to hear from our listeners.
(Recorded on April 25, 2024)
Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Host: Marrie Stone
Music and sound editing: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)
Ben Shattuck is the author of Six Walks: In the Footsteps of Henry David Thoreau, which was a New Yorker Best Book of 2022, a Wall Street Journal Best Book of Spring, and the New York Times Best Book of Summer. His latest is The History of Sound, a collection of 12 stories told as duets or couplets, with two stories talking to each other.
He joins Marrie Stone to talk about the collection, including finding the voice of each story across the three centuries of time the collection covers, point of view choices, managing time in fiction, the short story he loves to teach, and more. They also talk about the business of writing, including his feelings on getting an MFA and what made the biggest impact on his life as a writer (including one essay that changed the trajectory of his career), finding an agent for a story collection, how his audio books changed his reading experience, and more.
For more information on Writers on Writing and extra writing perks, visit our Patreon page. To listen to past interviews, visit our website. Support the show by buying books at our bookstore on bookshop.org. We’ve stocked it with titles from our guests, as well as some of our personal favorites. You’ll support independent bookstores and our show by purchasing through the store. Finally, on Spotify listen to an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. Look for the artist, Just My Type. Email the show at writersonwritingpodcast@gmail.com. We love to hear from our listeners.
(Recorded on August 22, 2024)
Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Host: Marrie Stone
Music and sound editing: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)
Sarah Pearse lives by the sea in South Devon with her husband and two daughters. After moving to Switzerland in her twenties, she spent every spare moment exploring the mountains in the Swiss Alpine town of Crans Montana, the dramatic setting that inspired her debut novel, The Sanatorium, a Reese Witherspoon Bookclub Pick. The Retreat, her second novel, was also a New York Times Bestseller and a Top Ten Sunday Times Bestseller. Over 1 million copies of her books have been sold in over 30 countries. Her latest book, and the focus of today’s conversation, is The Wilds.
Sarah joins Barbara DeMarco-Barrett to discuss Sarah’s path to writing, prologues, dual point of view, setting, structuring a novel, van life, plotting, and they also talk about her first novel, The Sanatorium, and how she based it on an actual place in the Alps where they did horrid experiments.
For more information on Writers on Writing and extra writing perks, visit our Patreon page. To listen to past interviews, visit our website. Support the show by buying books at our bookstore on bookshop.org. We’ve stocked it with titles from our guests, as well as some of our personal favorites. You’ll support independent bookstores and our show by purchasing through the store. Finally, on Spotify listen to an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. Look for the artist, Just My Type. Email the show at writersonwritingpodcast@gmail.com. We love to hear from our listeners.
(Recorded on June 27, 2024)
Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Host: Marrie Stone
Music and sound editing: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)
Julia Phillips is the author of the National Book Award finalist and NYT Book Review’s 10 Best Books of the Year debut Disappearing Earth. Her latest is Bear, out and available by Hogarth. She joins Marrie to talk about it, as well as the power of fairytales and using that structure in your work. She talks about working in a close third point of view, how to make setting a character in your story, and how the pandemic impacted this current wave of fiction. They also talk about finding an agent, being a good literary citizen, and so much more.
For more information on Writers on Writing and extra writing perks, visit our Patreon page. To listen to past interviews, visit our website. Support the show by buying books at our bookstore on bookshop.org. We’ve stocked it with titles from our guests, as well as some of our personal favorites. You’ll support independent bookstores and our show by purchasing through the store. Finally, on Spotify listen to an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. Look for the artist, Just My Type. Email the show at writersonwritingpodcast@gmail.com. We love to hear from our listeners.
(Recorded on August 1, 2024)
Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Host: Marrie Stone
Music and sound editing: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)
Flynn Berry is author of Trust Her. Berry is the New York Times bestselling author of Under the Harrow, winner of the 2017 Edgar Award for Best First Novel; A Double Life, a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice; and Northern Spy, a Reese’s Book Club pick that was named one of the ten best thrillers of 2021 by The New York Times and The Washington Post. Northern Spy is being adapted for film by Netflix.
Flynn joins Barbara DeMarco-Barrett to talk about her new thriller, Trust Her, and to discuss why she was attracted to crime fiction, why she writes about Ireland, first chapters, how beholden to the facts is she when writing about a real place with serious history, how much she knows about structure and characters before she begins, her relationship to reviews, surprises in writing the novel, and more.
For more information on Writers on Writing and extra writing perks, visit our Patreon page. To listen to past interviews, visit our website. Support the show by buying books at our bookstore on bookshop.org. We’ve stocked it with titles from our guests, as well as some of our personal favorites. You’ll support independent bookstores and our show by purchasing through the store. Finally, on Spotify listen to an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. Look for the artist, Just My Type. Email the show at writersonwritingpodcast@gmail.com. We love to hear from our listeners.
(Recorded on July 12, 2024)
Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Host: Marrie Stone
Music and sound editing: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)
New York Times bestseller Kimberly McCreight is the author of eight novels, including A Good Marriage, Friends Like These and Reconstructing Amelia. She’s also the author of the New York Times bestselling young adult trilogy The Outliers. Several of her novels have been optioned for the screen.
Her latest is Like Mother, Like Daughter. She joins Marrie Stone to talk about it. Along the way, Kimberly shares how her prior career in the law serves her fiction and how she generates her ideas. She also talks about her revision process, when she shows work to readers, and when she knows a story isn’t working. They also talk about finding an agent and some of the business logistics behind making your living as a writer.
For more information on Writers on Writing and extra writing perks, visit our Patreon page. To listen to past interviews, visit our website. Support the show by buying books at our bookstore on bookshop.org. We’ve stocked it with titles from our guests, as well as some of our personal favorites. You’ll support independent bookstores and our show by purchasing through the store. Finally, on Spotify listen to an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. Look for the artist, Just My Type. Email the show at writersonwritingpodcast@gmail.com. We love to hear from our listeners.
(Recorded on July 25, 2024)
Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Host: Marrie Stone
Music and sound editing: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)
Jill Ciment isthe author of the collection of short stories and novellas, Small Claims; the novels The Law of Falling Bodies, Teeth of the Dog, The Tattoo Artist, Heroic Measures, Act of God, The Body in Question; and the memoirs, Half a Life and Consent. She has been the recipient of numerous grants and awards, among them a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, two New York Foundation for the Arts fellowships, the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize, and a Guggenheim fellowship. Jill is a professor emeritus at the University of Florida. She lives in Gainesville, Florida, and New York City.
Jill joins Barbara DeMarco-Barrett to discuss Jill’s path to writing, how she learned to structure books, how to be completely honest when the person you’re writing about is still alive, pacing a memoir while adding interiority and reflection, writing dialogue when you didn’t take notes, the hardest part of writing memoir, and more.
For more information on Writers on Writing and extra writing perks, visit our Patreon page. To listen to past interviews, visit our website. Support the show by buying books at our bookstore on bookshop.org. We’ve stocked it with titles from our guests, as well as some of our personal favorites. You’ll support independent bookstores and our show by purchasing through the store. Finally, on Spotify listen to an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. Look for the artist, Just My Type. Email the show at writersonwritingpodcast@gmail.com. We love to hear from our listeners.
(Recorded on June 14, 2024)
Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Host: Marrie Stone
Music and sound editing: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)
Teddy Wayne is the author of the novels The Winner, The Great Man Theory, Apartment, Loner, The Love Song of Jonny Valentine, and Kapitoil. He is the winner of a Whiting Writers’ Award and an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship as well as a finalist for the Young Lions Fiction Award, PEN/Bingham Prize, and Dayton Literary Peace Prize. A former columnist for the New York Times and McSweeney’sand a frequent contributor to The New Yorker, he has taught at Columbia University and Washington University in St. Louis. He has developed films and series from his novels with Columbia Pictures, HBO, MGM Television, and others. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife, the writer Kate Greathead, and their children.
Teddy joins Barbara DeMarco-Barrett to talk about his path to writing, how to make unlikeable characters empathetic, writing characters who are outsiders, his unusual way of plotting, and much more.
For more information on Writers on Writing and extra writing perks, visit our Patreon page. To listen to past interviews, visit our website. Support the show by buying books at our bookstore on bookshop.org. We’ve stocked it with titles from our guests, as well as some of our personal favorites. You’ll support independent bookstores and our show by purchasing through the store. Finally, on Spotify listen to an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. Look for the artist, Just My Type. Email the show at writersonwritingpodcast@gmail.com. We love to hear from our listeners.
(Recorded on July 12, 2024)
Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Host: Marrie Stone
Music and sound editing: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)
Kevin Barry is the author of four novels — Night Boat to Tangier, Beatlebone, City of Bohane (which was longlisted for the 2019 Booker Prize) and, most recently, The Heart in Winter. He’s also the author of three short story collections, including That Old Country Music.
The Heart in Winter was 25 years in the making. Unlike his other works, the story is set not in Ireland, but in Montana and Idaho in the late 1800s. Kevin joins Marrie Stone to chat about it. They talk about why he always finishes every piece of fiction, even when it’s not working. He also shares his one guiding principle for unlocking his characters, finding the “tuning fork” for your novel, why dreaming and fiction come from the same place, his recommended book on writing, and so much more.
For more information on Writers on Writing and extra writing perks, visit our Patreon page. To listen to past interviews, visit our website. Support the show by buying books at our bookstore on bookshop.org. We’ve stocked it with titles from our guests, as well as some of our personal favorites. You’ll support independent bookstores and our show by purchasing through the store. Finally, on Spotify listen to an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. Look for the artist, Just My Type. Email the show at writersonwritingpodcast@gmail.com. We love to hear from our listeners.
(Recorded on July 5, 2024)
Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Host: Marrie Stone
Music and sound editing: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)
(This podcast was recorded live on June 22, 2024 at Arvida Book Co in Tustin, California.)
Dawn Tripp is the author of the novel Georgia, a national bestseller. She is the author of three previous novels: Game of Secrets, Moon Tide, and The Season of Open Water, which won the Massachusetts Book Award for Fiction. Her poems and essays have appeared in the Virginia Quarterly Review, Harvard Review, AGNI, Conjunctions, and NPR, among others. She serves on the board of the Boston Book Festival and on the board of Gnome Surf: A non-profit Surf Therapy Organization focused on creating a culture shift towards kindness, love, and acceptance for athletes of all abilities. She graduated from Harvard and lives in Massachusetts with her sons. Her new novel is JACKIE.
Dawn joins Barbara DeMarco-Barrett to discuss historical fiction and the research involved, surprises in the writing of the novel, why she chose the present tense, getting down the voice, and more.
For more information on Writers on Writing and extra writing perks, visit our Patreon page. To listen to past interviews, visit our website. Support the show by buying books at our bookstore on bookshop.org. We’ve stocked it with titles from our guests, as well as some of our personal favorites. You’ll support independent bookstores and our show by purchasing through the store. Finally, on Spotify listen to an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. Look for the artist, Just My Type. Email the show at writersonwritingpodcast@gmail.com. We love to hear from our listeners.
(Recorded on June 22, 2024)
Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Host: Marrie Stone
Music and sound editing: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.
Joyce Maynard has been publishing since she was 13 years old. She first came to national attention with the publication of her New York Times cover story, “An Eighteen Year Old Looks Back on Life,” in 1972, when she was a freshman at Yale. Since then, she has published 20 books, including the New York Times bestselling novel, Labor Dayand To Die For (both adapted for film), Under the Influence and the memoirs, At Home in the World and The Best of Us.
Count the Ways—the story of a marriage and a divorce, and the children who survived it— was published in 2021. Its sequel, How the Light Gets In, came out last week. Joyce joins Marrie Stone to talk about it, including sustaining characters over two novels and how she knew she wasn’t finished with this family yet. She also talks about her ongoing obsessions and the importance of writing those obsessions down, her advice on not writing prematurely, her heavy use of white boards and what they look like, how to incorporate politics and the external world into fiction, her mother’s writing advice that she shares with her students, and more.
For more information on Writers on Writing and extra writing perks, visit our Patreon page. To listen to past interviews, visit our website. Support the show by buying books at our bookstore on bookshop.org. We’ve stocked it with titles from our guests, as well as some of our personal favorites. You’ll support independent bookstores and our show by purchasing through the store. Finally, on Spotify listen to an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. Look for the artist, Just My Type. Email the show at writersonwritingpodcast@gmail.com. We love to hear from our listeners.
(Recorded on June 28, 2024)
Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Host: Marrie Stone
Music and sound editing: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)
Dani Segelbaum began her publishing career as an editorial assistant at HarperCollins Publishers, focusing primarily on highly designed non-fiction titles. She ‘s worked as a literary assistant at New Leaf Literary & Media, working with established and debut authors. Dani joined Arc Literary in 2024 after three years at the Carol Mann Agency. Born and raised in Minneapolis, Dani is a graduate of Boston University’s College of Communication where she studied journalism and political science. Dani represents both fiction and non-fiction and works with authors from diverse backgrounds to tell stories important to them. Dani is also an evaluation agent at Gotham Writers Workshop in New York City.
Dani joins Barbara DeMarco-Barrett to discuss comps, ageism in publishing and does it exist or not, prologues, mistakes writers make, query letters and just how voicey they can be, word counts of books, the difference between categories, and much more.
For more information on Writers on Writing and extra writing perks, visit our Patreon page. To listen to past interviews, visit our website. Support the show by buying books at our bookstore on bookshop.org. We’ve stocked it with titles from our guests, as well as some of our personal favorites. You’ll support independent bookstores and our show by purchasing through the store. Finally, on Spotify listen to an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. Look for the artist, Just My Type. Email the show at writersonwritingpodcast@gmail.com. We love to hear from our listeners.
(Recorded on May 31, 2024)
Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Host: Marrie Stone
Music and sound editing: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)
Curtis Sittenfeld is the bestselling author of seven novels and one collection of short stories. Her books have been on many “Best Books of the Year” lists, optioned for television and film, and translated into 30 languages.
Romantic Comedy is her latest. It was picked for Reese Witherspoon’s Book Club in 2023 and it’s now out in paperback. She joins Marrie Stone to talk about researching late-night comedy shows and how she accomplished her research during the pandemic, writing authentically about sex and relationships, when to decide to abandon a project, whether MFAs are worth it, and so much more.
For more information on Writers on Writing and extra writing perks, visit our Patreon page. To listen to past interviews, visit our website. Support the show by buying books at our bookstore on bookshop.org. We’ve stocked it with titles from our guests, as well as some of our personal favorites. You’ll support independent bookstores and our show by purchasing through the store. Finally, on Spotify listen to an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. Look for the artist, Just My Type. Email the show at writersonwritingpodcast@gmail.com. We love to hear from our listeners.
(Recorded on June 13, 2024)
Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Host: Marrie Stone
Music and sound editing: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)
Tracy Sierra was born and raised in the Colorado mountains. She is an attorney who currently lives in New England in an antique colonial-era home complete with its own secret room. When not writing, she spends time with her husband and two children. Nightwatching is her debut novel and was the Spring pick of the Jimmy Fallon Book Club.
Tracy joins Barbara DeMarco-Barrett to discuss unnamed narrators, unreliable characters, beginning the crisis on the first page, writing scenes that take place in tight settings, unfolding backstory to increase tension, interiority, and much more.
For more information on Writers on Writing and extra writing perks, visit our Patreon page. To listen to past interviews, visit our website. Support the show by buying books at our bookstore on bookshop.org. We’ve stocked it with titles from our guests, as well as some of our personal favorites. You’ll support independent bookstores and our show by purchasing through the store. Finally, on Spotify listen to an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. Look for the artist, Just My Type. Email the show at writersonwritingpodcast@gmail.com. We love to hear from our listeners.
(Recorded on April 12, 2024)
Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Host: Marrie Stone
Music and sound editing: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)
Ann Leary has led an extraordinary life. Married for over 30 years to actor and comedian Denis Leary, Ann has walked red carpets, partied with stars, and traveled the world, all while sustaining her own rich career in writing. But she’s also relatable to the everywoman. She’s struggled with alcoholism. Struggled in her marriage. Struggled with her neighbors and her tennis game. Women of a certain age will likely relate to Ann’s life.
Her latest, a collection of 20 essays called I’ve Tried Being Nice, is a kind of coming-of-middle-age book. Ann joins Marrie Stone to talk about what makes an effective essay, finding the story within the situation, writing essays for particular markets and the gift of the prompt, how to write about family members without angering them, and more. Along the way, they discuss their favorite essays (Ann’s can be found here and Marrie’s here).
For more information on Writers on Writing and extra writing perks, visit our Patreon page. To listen to past interviews, visit our website. Support the show by buying books at our bookstore on bookshop.org. We’ve stocked it with titles from our guests, as well as some of our personal favorites. You’ll support independent bookstores and our show by purchasing through the store. Finally, on Spotify listen to an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. Look for the artist, Just My Type. Email the show at writersonwritingpodcast@gmail.com. We love to hear from our listeners.
(Recorded on May 23, 2024)
Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Host: Marrie Stone
Music and sound editing: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)
Roxana Robinson is the author of eleven books—seven novels, three collections of short stories, and the biography of Georgia O’Keeffe. Four of these were chosen as New York Times Notable Books, two as New York Times Editors’ Choices. Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, Best American Short Stories, The Southampton Review, Ep!phany and elsewhere. Her work has been widely anthologized and broadcast on NPR. Her books have been published in England, France, Germany, Holland and Spain. Roxana Robinson has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation and the MacDowell Colony, and she was named a Literary Lion by the New York Public Library. Robinson has served on the Boards of PEN and the Authors Guild, and was the president of the Authors Guild. She has received the Barnes and Noble “Writers for Writers Award,” given by Poets and Writers, and the Award for Distinguished Service to the Literary Community from the Authors Guild. She teaches in the MFA Program at Hunter College. Her latest novel is Leaving.
Roxana Robinson joins Barbara DeMarco-Barrett to discuss beginnings and endings, backstory, animal companions as characters, love scenes, theme, opera, and much more.
For more information on Writers on Writing and extra writing perks, visit our Patreon page. To listen to past interviews, visit our website. Support the show by buying books at our bookstore on bookshop.org. We’ve stocked it with titles from our guests, as well as some of our personal favorites. You’ll support independent bookstores and our show by purchasing through the store. Finally, on Spotify listen to an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. Look for the artist, Just My Type. Email the show at writersonwritingpodcast@gmail.com. We love to hear from our listeners.
(Recorded on May 8, 2024)
Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Host: Marrie Stone
Music and sound editing: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)
Megan Miranda is the New York Times bestselling author of All the Missing Girls; The Perfect Stranger; The Last House Guest, a Reese Witherspoon Book Club pick; The Girl from Widow Hills; Such a Quiet Place; The Last to Vanish; and The Only Survivors. She has also written several books for young adults. She grew up in New Jersey, graduated from MIT, and lives in North Carolina with her husband and two children. Follow @MeganLMiranda on Instagram, @AuthorMeganMiranda on Facebook, or visit MeganMiranda.com. Her latest book is Daughter of Mine, published by Simon & Schuster/Marysue Rucci Books.
Megan joins Barbara to discuss her path to writing crime fiction, voice, transitioning from YA to adult fiction, ensemble casts, setting, plotting, pacing, and much more.
For more information on Writers on Writing and extra writing perks, visit our Patreon page. To listen to past interviews, visit our website. Support the show by buying books at our bookstore on bookshop.org. We’ve stocked it with titles from our guests, as well as some of our personal favorites. You’ll support independent bookstores and our show by purchasing through the store. Finally, on Spotify listen to an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. Look for the artist, Just My Type. Email the show at writersonwritingpodcast@gmail.com. We love to hear from our listeners.
(Recorded on March 8, 2024)
Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Host: Marrie Stone
Music and sound editing: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)
A.J. Jacobs is the author of nine books including the NYT bestsellers The Year of Living Biblically, The Know It All, Drop Dead Healthy, and The Puzzler. His latest, in the spirit of The Year of Living Biblically, is The Year of Living Constitutionally: One Man’s Humble Quest to Follow the Constitution’s Original Meaning.
A.J. joins Marrie Stone to talk about making yourself a guinea pig for your work and how to set up the rule system to do that, researching a bottomless topic and when you know you’ve done enough, walking the political tightrope in divided times, as well as how this book changed A.J.’s thinking on a variety of subjects and the impact of the project.
For more information on Writers on Writing and extra writing perks, visit our Patreon page. To listen to past interviews, visit our website. Support the show by buying books at our bookstore on bookshop.org. We’ve stocked it with titles from our guests, as well as some of our personal favorites. You’ll support independent bookstores and our show by purchasing through the store. Finally, on Spotify listen to an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. Look for the artist, Just My Type. Email the show at writersonwritingpodcast@gmail.com. We love to hear from our listeners.
(Recorded on May 16, 2024)
Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Host: Marrie Stone
Music and sound editing: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)
Hank Phillippi Ryan is the USA Today bestselling author of 15 novels of suspense. She has won multiple prestigious awards for her crime fiction, including five Agathas, five Anthonys, and the coveted Mary Higgins Clark Award. She’s the on-air investigative reporter for Boston’s WHDH-TV, and has won 37 EMMYs, 14 Edward R. Murrow awards, and dozens of other honors for her groundbreaking journalism. Hank’s novels have been named Best Thriller of the Year by Library Journal, New York Post, BOOK BUB, PopSugar, Real Simple Magazine and others. Hank lives in Boston with her husband, a criminal defense and civil rights attorney. Her new book is One Wrong Word, a twisty non-stop story of gaslighting, manipulation, and murder.
Hank joins Barbara DeMarco-Barrett to talk about her journey to writing, the crossover from broadcast journalism, voice, multiple points of view, avoiding the muddled middle, twists, pacing, and much more.
For more information on Writers on Writing and extra writing perks, visit our Patreon page. To listen to past interviews, visit our website. Support the show by buying books at our bookstore on bookshop.org. We’ve stocked it with titles from our guests, as well as some of our personal favorites. You’ll support independent bookstores and our show by purchasing through the store. Finally, on Spotify listen to an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. Look for the artist, Just My Type. Email the show at writersonwritingpodcast@gmail.com. We love to hear from our listeners.
(Recorded on April 4, 2024)
Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Host: Marrie Stone
Music and sound editing: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)
Debut novelist Ela Lee is author of the breakout novel Jaded, published in the US by Simon and Schuster and in the UK by Vintage. Prior to becoming a novelist, Ela was a litigator who grew up in London.
Ela joins Marrie Stone to talk about a lot of writerly topics, including writing about sexual violence and misogyny in the post #metoo movement, writing about racism and microaggressions in the current climate where diversity, equity and inclusion are hot button topics, and creating a cast of characters to represent various viewpoints without being didactic. They also discuss how to write a query letter that will grab an agent, finding an agent and publisher without an MFA, how to get your manuscript out of an agent’s slush pile, marketing your book on social media, and more.
For more information on Writers on Writing and extra writing perks, visit our Patreon page. To listen to past interviews, visit our website. Support the show by buying books at our bookstore on bookshop.org. We’ve stocked it with titles from our guests, as well as some of our personal favorites. You’ll support independent bookstores and our show by purchasing through the store. Finally, on Spotify listen to an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. Look for the artist, Just My Type. Email the show at writersonwritingpodcast@gmail.com. We love to hear from our listeners.
(Recorded on April 16, 2024)
Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Host: Marrie Stone
Music and sound editing: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)
Alexander Sammartino was born in Rhode Island, grew up in Arizona, and now lives in Brooklyn. He received his MFA from Syracuse University. His debut novel, Last Acts, was published by Scribner in January and was selected as a New York Times’ Editors Choice. Last Acts has been described as “hilarious and wrenching,” by the Minneapolis Star Tribune, “irreverent” by the Chicago Review of Books, and “a wholly American novel about salvation” by the Pittsburgh Post Gazette. Alex has been called “a magnificent sentence writer” by the New York Times Book Review. And George Saunders, author of Lincoln in the Bardo and A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, said, “What a taut, energetic, tender, and wholly original debut novel Alexander Sammartino has written. He knows something deep about the dark heart of America that somehow doesn’t stop him from writing about it with genuine, goofy love. Somewhere, Denis Johnson and Saul Bellow are smiling because their lineage—that of honest, highwire, virtuosic writing that summons up the world with all its charms and hazards, has found a worthy heir."
Alex joins Barbara DeMarco-Barrett to discuss father/son novels, writing short chapters, multiple perspectives, beginnings and endings, interiority, backstory, influences, and much more.
For more information on Writers on Writing and to receive extra writing perks, visit our Patreon page. Listen to past interviews on our website. Another way to support the show is by buying books at our bookstore on bookshop.org. We’ve stocked it with titles from our guests, as well as some of our personal favorites. You’ll support independent bookstores and our show by purchasing through the store. Finally, on Spotify listen to an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. Look for the artist, Just My Type. Email the show at writersonwritingpodcast@gmail.com. We love to hear from our listeners.
(Recorded on March 29, 2024)
Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Host: Marrie Stone
Music and sound editing: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)
Jill McCorkle is the author of seven novels, two which came out on the same day in 1984 and, her most recent, Hieroglyphics, to great acclaim. Five of her books have been named New York Times notable books and four of her stories have appeared in Best American Short Stories. Her essay, “Cuss Time,” originally published in The American Scholar, was selected for Best American Essays. Jill has published five collections of short stories. Her latest, that she discusses today with Marrie Stone, is Old Crimes.
This conversation parses through several of these stories, using them as examples to discuss point of view choices, how to manage time in fiction, how to balance backstory, how to incorporate humor into difficult material, how you can get your stories to talk to each other in a collection, and so much more.
For more information on Writers on Writing and extra writing perks, visit our Patreon page. To listen to past interviews, visit our website. Support the show by buying books at our bookstore on bookshop.org. We’ve stocked it with titles from our guests, as well as some of our personal favorites. You’ll support independent bookstores and our show by purchasing through the store. Finally, on Spotify listen to an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. Look for the artist, Just My Type. Email the show at writersonwritingpodcast@gmail.com. We love to hear from our listeners.
(Recorded on April 11, 2024)
Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Host: Marrie Stone
Music and sound editing: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)
Ivy Pochoda is the author of the critically acclaimed novels Wonder Valley, Visitation Street, and These Women, a The New York Times best thriller of 2020. These Women was a finalist for The Los Angeles Times Book Prize, The Edgar Award, California Book Award, The Macavity Award, and the International Thriller Writers Award. Wonder Valley won the 2018 Strand Critics Award for Best Novel and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and France’s Le Grand Prix de Litterature Americaine. Visitation Street won the Prix Page America in France. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times and The Los Angeles Review of Books. She teaches creative writing at the Studio 526 Skid Row.
Ivy’s latest novel, Sing Her Down, was nominated for a Los Angeles Times Book Prize. (This show was recorded prior to the awards on Friday April 19. Fingers crossed that Sing Her Down is a winner.) Prior conversations with Ivy can be found by searching this website.
Ivy joins Barbara DeMarco-Barrett to talk about Sing Her Down, which was written during the pandemic, multiple POV characters, setting, twists, keeping track, prologues, and so much more.
For more information on Writers on Writing and extra writing perks, visit our Patreon page. To listen to past interviews, visit our website. Support the show by buying books at our bookstore on bookshop.org. We’ve stocked it with titles from our guests, as well as some of our personal favorites. You’ll support independent bookstores and our show by purchasing through the store. Finally, on Spotify listen to an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. Look for the artist, Just My Type. Email the show at writersonwritingpodcast@gmail.com. We love to hear from our listeners.
(Recorded on April 3, 2024)
Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Host: Marrie Stone
Music and sound editing: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)
Steve Almond is the author of twelve books of fiction and nonfiction, including the New York Times bestsellers Candyfreak and Against Football. You can check those out here.
His recent books include the novel All the Secrets of the World, which has been optioned for television by 20th Century Fox, and William Stoner and the Battle for the Inner Life.
For four years, Steve hosted the New York Times Dear Sugars podcast with his pal Cheryl Strayed. He is the recipient of a 2022 NEA grant in fiction, and his short stories have been anthologized in the Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize, Best American Erotica, and Best American Mysteries series. He also publishes crazy, DIY books.
His latest is Truth is the Arrow, Mercy is the Bow: A DIY Manual for the Construction of Stories. He joins Marrie Stone to talk about it, including what this book adds to the conversation of craft. Steve also shares several of the books he’s found useful in his own creative endeavors including A Burning by Megha Majumdar, The Wife by Meg Wolitzer, Wild by Cheryl Strayed and Memorial Drive by Natasha Trethewey.
They talk about why childhood experiences consistently provide writers their material, and how to recognize when you’re being authentically true to your story versus performing for your audience. They also discuss elements of plot, character, managing time in fiction, writers block, and more.
For more information on Writers on Writing and extra writing perks, visit our Patreon page. To listen to past interviews, visit our website. Support the show by buying books at our bookstore on bookshop.org. We’ve stocked it with titles from our guests, as well as some of our personal favorites. You’ll support independent bookstores and our show by purchasing through the store. Finally, on Spotify listen to an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. Look for the artist, Just My Type. Email the show at writersonwritingpodcast@gmail.com. We love to hear from our listeners.
(Recorded on April 1, 2024)
Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Host: Marrie Stone
Music and sound editing: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)
Hannah Sward, daughter of the late poet Robert Sward, is the award-winning author of Strip, her debut memoir. Hannah has appeared on NBC CA Live, C-SPAN BookTV, dozens of podcasts, and panels, and has published essays in the Los Angeles Times, HuffPost (forthcoming), Arts & Letters, and more. Hannah lives in Los Angeles where she is working on her next book.
Hannah joins Barbara DeMarco-Barrett to talk about voice, what to do about family members concerned with what you’re writing, or have written, writing short chapters, tools, getting personal, and much more.
For more information on Writers on Writing and extra writing perks, visit our Patreon page. To listen to past interviews, visit our website. Support the show by buying books at our bookstore on bookshop.org. We’ve stocked it with titles from our guests, as well as some of our personal favorites. You’ll support independent bookstores and our show by purchasing through the store. Finally, on Spotify listen to an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. Look for the artist, Just My Type. Email the show at writersonwritingpodcast@gmail.com. We love to hear from our listeners.
(Recorded on March 15, 2024)
Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Host: Marrie Stone
Music and sound editing: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)
Katherine Heiny has traveled one of the more interesting roads into publishing we’ve heard in a while. She was published by The New Yorker at the incredible age of 25. Praised as a prodigy, her work appeared in an anthology alongside Alice Munro, Raymond Carver and Ann Beattie. And then she disappeared.
She popped back up two decades later when she published her first story collection, Single, Carefree, Mellow – followed by two novels, Early Morning Riser and Standard Deviation, and now she’s back with another story collection. In those intervening years, she married a former spy, wrote 25 young adult books under a pen name, and emerged the hilarious and gut-punching writer she is today.
Games & Rituals came out last year. Katherine joins Marrie Stone to talk about the collection, what writing YA brought to her fiction, the situation versus the story and finding the aboutness of your story, what the short story form allows her to do that the novel does not, how to weave backstory into your short stories, fictionalizing real life events, Katherine’s thoughts about publishing and so much more.
For more information on Writers on Writing and extra writing perks, visit our Patreon page. To listen to past interviews, visit our website. You can also support the show by buying books at our bookstore on bookshop.org. We’ve stocked it with titles from our guests, as well as some of our personal favorites. You’ll support independent bookstores and our show by purchasing through the store. Finally, on Spotify you can listen to an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. Look for the artist, Just My Type. Email the show at writersonwritingpodcast@gmail.com. We love to hear from our listeners.
(Recorded on March 20, 2024)
Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Host: Marrie Stone
Music and sound editing: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)
Madeline is an agent and assistant at Janklow & Nesbit looking for fiction that bridges the gap between commercial and literary, upmarket thrillers and grounded speculative stories that explore the ideas of family and home, and queer stories. She's also looking for select narrative nonfiction. Madeline began her agenting career in 2018 as an intern at Curtis Brown, and soon after began working as an assistant at the Jean V. Naggar Literary Agency. In 2021, she joined Writers House as an agent associate and in 2022 Madeline joined Janklow & Nesbit Associates where she works with senior agent PJ Mark and is actively building her own list. A graduate of Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon, Madeline now lives in Brooklyn. Prior to publishing, she worked in a children's library, at a few different advertising agencies, and as a barista in coffee shops around NYC.
Madeline joins Barbara DeMarco-Barrett to discuss the dreaded novel synopsis and how agents and editors use it, query letters, comps, how perfect a manuscript needs to be for her to take it on, mistakes writers make, and so much more.
For more information on Writers on Writing and extra writing perks, visit our Patreon page. To listen to past interviews, visit our website. You can also support the show by buying books at our bookstore on bookshop.org. We’ve stocked it with titles from our guests, as well as some of our personal favorites. You’ll support independent bookstores and our show by purchasing through the store. Finally, on Spotify you can listen to an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. Look for the artist, Just My Type. Email the show at writersonwritingpodcast@gmail.com. We love to hear from our listeners.
(Recorded on March 1, 2024)
Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Host: Marrie Stone
Music and sound editing: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)
Téa Obreht is the international bestselling author of The Tiger’s Wife, which won the 2011 Orange Prize for Fiction and was a finalist for the National Book Award when she was only 25. Her second novel, Inland, was an instant bestseller, won the Southwest Book Award, and was a finalist for the Dylan Thomas Prize.
Téa’s latest is The Morningside, out later this month by Random House. It has all her signature magical realism elements alongside exploring big contemporary issues like climate change and immigration, all spun around some compelling mysterious figures living in an evocative place. Téa joins Marrie Stone to talk about finding her characters, constructing her setting, and settling on her structure and point of view. They also talk about how to weave non-POV character’s backstory into a first-person narrative, her color-coded system of keeping track of her symbols, prologues, and her advice to writers just entering the field.
For more information on Writers on Writing and extra writing perks, visit our Patreon page. To listen to past interviews, visit our website. You can also support the show by buying books at our bookstore on bookshop.org. We’ve stocked it with titles from our guests, as well as some of our personal favorites. You’ll support independent bookstores and our show by purchasing through the store. Finally, on Spotify you can listen to an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. Look for the artist, Just My Type. Email the show at writersonwritingpodcast@gmail.com. We love to hear from our listeners.
(Recorded on March 7, 2024)
Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Host: Marrie Stone
Music and sound editing: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)
Grant Faulkner, the former Executive Director of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), the co-founder of 100 Word Story, and the co-host of the podcast, Write-minded. His essays on creativity have been published in The New York Times, Poets & Writers, Literary Hub, Writer’s Digest, and The Writer. His stories have appeared in The Southwest Review, and The Gettysburg Review, and he has been anthologized in collections such as Norton’s New Micro: Exceptionally Short Fiction, Flash Fiction America, Best Small Fictions, and Best Microfiction. His new book is The Art of Brevity, published by the University of New Mexico Press.
Grant joins Barbara Demarco-Barrett to talk about The Art of Brevity and why writing good flash fiction can be difficult to get right, the role of dialogue in flash, what you want to leave a reader with at the end of a story, how writing flash fiction influences his longer prose, the most common mistake he encounters in flash, and more.
For more information on Writers on Writing and extra writing perks, visit our Patreon page. To listen to past interviews, visit our website. You can also support the show by buying books at our bookstore on bookshop.org. We’ve stocked it with titles from our guests, as well as some of our personal favorites. You’ll support independent bookstores and our show by purchasing through the store. Finally, on Spotify you can listen to an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. Look for the artist, Just My Type. Email the show at writersonwritingpodcast@gmail.com. We love to hear from our listeners.
(Recorded on March 1, 2024)
Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Host: Marrie Stone
Music and sound editing: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)
Mona Simpson is the bestselling author of seven novels including Anywhere But Here, The Lost Father, A Regular Guy, Off Keck Road, My Hollywood, Casebook and, most recently, Commitment.
Mona studied poetry at Berkley. She got her MFA from Columbia. During grad school, she published her first short stories in Ploughshares, The Iowa Review and Mademoiselle. She worked as an editor at The Paris Review for five years. She also teaches at UCLA. She knows the industry from several angles and has worked in it for decades.
She joins Marrie Stone to talk about Commitment and writing multiple point-of-view novels. They talk about maintaining momentum in a novel’s middle, bringing bygone eras back to life, breathing life into your characters, playing the role of psychologist as writer, the role of research and much more.
In many ways, Commitment might be considered a “what-if” novel. Some aspects bear resemblance to Mona’s life and other aspects are very different. Mona and Marrie also discuss the generative idea of “what-if” novels, how writing one novel sometimes begets another, and other ways to generate ideas for your fiction.
For more information on Writers on Writing and extra writing perks, visit our Patreon page. To listen to past interviews, visit our website. You can also support the show by buying books at our bookstore on bookshop.org. We’ve stocked it with titles from our guests, as well as some of our personal favorites. You’ll support independent bookstores and our show by purchasing through the store. Finally, on Spotify you can listen to an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. Look for the artist, Just My Type. Email the show at writersonwritingpodcast@gmail.com. We love to hear from our listeners.
(Recorded on February 9, 2024)
Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Host: Marrie Stone
Music and sound editing: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)
CeCe Lyra, a literary agent at P.S. Literary Agency, represents adult fiction and nonfiction. She is especially looking for clients with whom she can build fruitful, lasting relationships. CeCe believes that stories are empathy-generating machines capable of healing, connecting, and enacting true change. As a mixed-race Latinx immigrant, CeCe understands the power of seeing oneself reflected in books, hence her passion for championing under or misrepresented voices and narratives. She is also the co-host of the popular podcast, The Shit No One Tells You About Writing, which has over two million downloads.
CeCe joins Barbara DeMarco-Barrett to talk about query letters, conversations writers should have with prospective agents, interpreting rejection letters, how much of a submission an agent will read before they stop, googling writers, mistakes writers make, and much more.
For more information on Writers on Writing and extra writing perks, visit our Patreon page. To listen to past interviews, visit our website. You can also support the show by buying books at our new bookstore on bookshop.org. We’ve stocked it with titles from our guests, as well as some of our personal favorites. You’ll support independent bookstores and our show by purchasing through the store. Finally, on Spotify you can listen to an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. Look for the artist, Just My Type. Email the show at writersonwritingpodcast@gmail.com. We love to hear from our listeners.
(Recorded on Feb. 1, 2024)
Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Host: Marrie Stone
Music and sound editing: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)
Louise Kennedy may not have been a name you’d heard five years ago. Since 2021, she’s had both a debut novel and a collection of short stories published. Trespasses was named a Best Book of the Year by the Washington Post and shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction. Her story collection The End of the World is a Cul De Sac came out to great acclaim.
Louise spent 30 years working as a chef and didn’t come to writing until her 50s. She grew up Catholic on the outskirts of Belfast in Northern Ireland at the height of the Troubles. A bomb detonated in front of her grandmother during a walk to the bank, resulting in several hundred stitches. The pub that her grandfather ran suffered two bombing attempts. After the second one, they moved to Ireland where she still lives today.
She joins Marrie Stone to talk about both books, her approaches to short stories versus novels, what coming to writing later in life gave to her fiction, why Irish is such a dynamic language, the importance of her writing shed, and much more.
For more information on Writers on Writing and extra writing perks, visit our Patreon page. To listen to past interviews, visit our website. You can also support the show by buying books at our new bookstore on bookshop.org. We’ve stocked it with titles from our guests, as well as some of our own personal favorites. By purchasing through the store, you’ll support both independent bookstores and our show. Finally, on Spotify you can listen to an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. Look for the artist, Just My Type. Email the show at writersonwritingpodcast@gmail.com. We love to hear from our listeners.
(Recorded on January 31, 2024)
Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Host: Marrie Stone
Music and sound editing: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)
Andrew Ewell, the author of the new novel, Set for Life. He’s received fellowships from Yaddo, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and VCCA France. His stories and essays have appeared in Salon, the Chattahoochee Review, Five Chapters, and TriQuarterly, among others. He holds an MFA in creative writing from Boston University and taught creative writing at numerous other universities before writing Set for Life.
Andrew joined Barbara DeMarco-Barrett to discuss autofiction, unnamed protagonists, unlikeable characters—a popular topic these days, keeping track of characters and plot, writing about academia, endings, and much more.
For more information on Writers on Writing and extra writing perks, visit our Patreon page. To listen to past interviews, visit our website. You can also support the show by buying books at our new bookstore on bookshop.org. We’ve stocked it with titles from our guests, as well as some of our personal favorites. By purchasing through the store, you’ll support both independent bookstores and our show. Finally, on Spotify you can listen to an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. Look for the artist, Just My Type. Email the show at writersonwritingpodcast@gmail.com. We love to hear from our listeners.
(Recorded on January 19, 2024)
Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Host: Marrie Stone
Music and sound editing: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)
Kristin Hannah is the award-winning and bestselling author of more than 20 novels including the international blockbuster, The Nightingale. She also authored the NYT bestsellers The Great Alone, The Four Winds and, most recently, The Women, which shares the largely untold tales of women in the Vietnam War who served in the nursing corp. Warner Brothers already acquired the film rightseven before the book’s release. (An interview with Kristin regarding The Great Alone can be found here.)
Kristin joins Marrie Stone to talk about The Women and why it took more than 20 years before she felt ready to tackle this topic. She talks about her approach to writing trauma and war without overwhelming the reader, and why writing about Vietnam was so different from writing about WWII. She also discusses what goes into researching a book like this and how she knows when she’s done enough. In addition to other writing advice, Kristin shares how Breaking Bad and Game of Thrones impacted her writing, why she writes in longhand, and much more.
For more information on Writers on Writing and extra writing perks, visit our Patreon page. To listen to past interviews, visit our website. You can also support the show by buying books at our new bookstore on bookshop.org. We’ve stocked it with titles from our guests, as well as some of our own personal favorites. By purchasing through the store, you’ll support both independent bookstores and our show. Finally, on Spotify you can listen to an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. Look for the artist, Just My Type. Email the show at writersonwritingpodcast@gmail.com. We love to hear from our listeners.
(Recorded on January 18, 2024)
Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Host: Marrie Stone
Music and sound editing: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)
Literary agent Emma Dries is a writer and editor, and an agent at Triangle House Literary, where she represents literary fiction, narrative nonfiction, and academic crossover, with a special interest in climate writing. She began her career in editorial, working with bestselling and award winning authors at Alfred A. Knopf, Doubleday, Ecco, and Flatiron Books. She has a BA in History from the University of Chicago and an MFA in Fiction from Johns Hopkins, where she also taught undergraduate fiction and poetry. Her writing has been published in Lit Hub, Bookforum, Outside and Dwell and she was the finalist for the Boston Review 2021 Aura Estrada Short Story Contest.
Emma joins Barbara DeMarco-Barrett to talk about about unlikeable characters in fiction, query letters, MFAs, when you know a manuscript is ready to send out, ageism, a conversation you should have with an agent before signing, and much more.
For more information on Writers on Writing and extra writing perks, visit our Patreon page. To listen to past interviews, visit our website. You can also support the show by buying books at our new bookstore on bookshop.org. We’ve stocked it with titles from our guests, as well as some of our own personal favorites. By purchasing through the store, you’ll support both independent bookstores and our show. Finally, on Spotify you can listen to an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. Look for the artist, Just My Type. Email the show at writersonwritingpodcast@gmail.com. We love to hear from our listeners.
(Recorded on January 20, 2024)
Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Host: Marrie Stone
Music and sound editing: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)
Pulitzer Prize winning author Hisham Matar’s debut novel, In the Country of Men, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and The Guardian First Book Award and won numerous international prizes. His prize-winning memoir, The Return, published in 2016, received the 2017 Pulitzer Prize. It was one of The New York Times' top 10 books of the year. He’s also the author of Anatomy of a Disappearance and A Month in Siena, which was named One of the Best Books of the Year in 2019 by The Washington Post and Evening Standard.
My Friendsis his latest. The New York Timesrecently said of it, “Readers encountering Matar for the first time will find in My Friends a masterly literary meditation on his lifelong themes. For those who already know his work, the effect is amplified tenfold. In the dark house Matar continues to explore, the rooms are full of echoes: The further in you go, the louder they get.”
Matar joins Marrie Stone to talk about these lifelong preoccupations, and the sources from which they stem. He discusses his literary influences, why he believes literature is critical in times of despair, and what he hopes to achieve in his fiction. They also discuss structure, points of view, how time can work in fiction, and other issues of craft.
For more information on Writers on Writing and extra writing perks, visit our Patreon page. To listen to past interviews, visit our website. We’re also excited to announce the opening of our new bookstore on bookshop.org. We’ve stocked it with titles from our guests, as well as some of our own personal favorites. By purchasing through the store, you’ll support both independent bookstores and our show. New titles will be added all the time (it’s a work in progress). Finally, on Spotify you can listen to an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. Look for the artist, Just My Type. Email the show at writersonwritingpodcast@gmail.com. We love to hear from our listeners.
(Recorded on January 8, 2024)
Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Host: Marrie Stone
Music and sound editing: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)
Melissa Broder is the author of the novels, Death Valley, Milk Fed, and The Pisces, the essay collection So Sad Today, and five poetry collections, including Superdoom. Her books are translated in ten languages. She has written for the New York Times, Elle.com, and New York Magazine’s The Cut. She lives in Los Angeles.
Melissa chats with Barbara DeMarco-Barrett about her new novel, Death Valley. She talks about how when the first line came to her, she put aside what she was working on because she knew this was the book she needed to focus on. They discuss making tragedy funny, the Best Western hotel chain, magic cacti, process, plotting, and externalizing the internal life of characters.
For more information on Writers on Writing and extra writing perks, visit our Patreon page. To listen to past interviews, visit our website. We also have an affiliate bookstore on bookshop.org. We’ve stocked it with titles from our guests, as well as some of our own personal favorites. By purchasing through the store, you’ll support both independent bookstores and our show. New titles will be added all the time (it’s a work in progress). Finally, on Spotify you can listen to an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. Look for the artist, Just My Type. Email the show at writersonwritingpodcast@gmail.com. We love to hear from our listeners.
(Recorded on December January 5, 2023)
Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Host: Marrie Stone
Music and sound editing: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)
Bonnie Jo Campbell, known as the “master of rural noir,” is the author of eight books. Her story collection, American Salvage, was a finalist for the 2009 National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction. Her 2011 novel, Once Upon a River, was made into a film in 2020.
In this episode, Bonnie chats with Marrie Stone about her highly anticipated novel The Waters, which comes out next week. It’s Bonnie’s first novel in over a decade and it’s already receiving rave reviews. The Waters follows three generations of women in the swamplands of Michigan. Herbalist Hermine “Herself” Zook is the matriarch and the area’s healer, homeopath, or witch, depending on the way the town looks at her. Meet Hermine (played by Bonnie’s mother) here.
Bonnie talks about the architecture of this novel, and how she struggled to find something beyond the traditional three-act structure. She shares her discovery of Sharon Blackie, and the realization that structure can take different forms. The conversation also references Jane Alison’s Meander, Spiral, Explode.
They talk about character development and what makes characters unique, referencing both Jungian psychotherapists Robert A. Johnson and James Hillman (author of The Soul’s Code).
Bonnie also discusses fairy tales in literary fiction, how to talk about contemporary and divisive issues like abortion and gun control in accessible ways, how to make the most of your settings, breathing life into mysterious characters, her revision process and much more. She also shares additional advice to writers (particularly short story writers) here.
For more information on Writers on Writing and extra writing perks, visit our Patreon page. To listen to past interviews, visit our website. We’re also excited to announce the opening of our new bookstore on bookshop.org. We’ve stocked it with titles from our guests, as well as some of our own personal favorites. By purchasing through the store, you’ll support both independent bookstores and our show. New titles will be added all the time (it’s a work in progress). Finally, on Spotify you can listen to an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. Look for the artist, Just My Type. Email the show at writersonwritingpodcast@gmail.com. We love to hear from our listeners.
(Recorded on December 27, 2023)
Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Host: Marrie Stone
Music and sound editing: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)
Kathleen Schmidt, founder and CEO of Kathleen Schmidt Public Relations, has experience in all aspects of the industry, including as a publicist, literary agent, acquisitions editor, and ghostwriter. Her career encompasses 30 years of creating and directing impactful and strategic global media, marketing, and branding campaigns for politicians, A-List celebrities, athletes, and high-profile personalities. To date, she has worked on 50 New York Times bestsellers, and her clients have continuously appeared in top-tier national print, broadcast, and radio outlets such as The Today Show, Good Morning America, Vogue, Elle, Financial Times, Vanity Fair, GQ, and Sirius XM. Kathleen writes the Publishing Confidential Substack.
Kathleen joined Barbara DeMarco-Barrett to discuss what sells books, blurbs, brands, Substack, book clubs, and more.
To listen to past interviews, visit our website. We’re also excited to announce the opening of our new bookstore on bookshop.org. We’ve stocked it with titles from our guests, as well as some of our own personal favorites. By purchasing through the store, you’ll support both independent bookstores and our show. New titles will be added all the time (it’s a work in progress). Finally, on Spotify you can listen to an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. Look for the artist, Just My Type. Email the show at writersonwritingpodcast@gmail.com. We love to hear from our listeners.For more information on Writers on Writing and additional writing tips, visit our Patreon page.
(Recorded in September 2023)
Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Host: Marrie Stone
Music and sound editing: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)
Lisa Gornick has been hailed by NPR as “one of the most perceptive, compassionate writers of fiction in America…immensely talented and brave.” She is the author of four previous novels—most recently The Peacock Feast and Louisa Meets Bear.
In this episode, Lisa chats with Marrie Stone about her latest novel, Ana Turns. Ana is turning 60, which is cause for reflection on her sexless marriage, her 7-year affair, her worries about her only child who’s doing some reflecting of their own, her arguably cruel and emotionally unavailable mother, and much more. In addition to unpacking how Lisa rendered these characters and their chorus of voices, they chat about how to manage time and backstory in a novel, dealing with contemporary issues in sensitive ways, thoughts on sensitivity readers (with a brief reference to Ian McEwan’s thoughts on the same), and weaving in subplots, among other topics.
Lisa also shares some psychotherapeutic wisdom from her days as a practicing therapist including unpacking writers’ fears about telling their own stories authentically because of who it might hurt, the right to tell ones’ stories, and how to protect others along the way. She also shares some additional insights about how her work in psychotherapy impacts her writing process on Patreon. To read more, or for more information on Writers on Writing and additional writing tips, visit our Patreon page.
To listen to past interviews, visit our website. We’re also excited to announce the opening of our new bookstore on bookshop.org. We’ve stocked it with titles from our guests, as well as some of our own personal favorites. By purchasing through the store, you’ll support both independent bookstores and our show. New titles will be added all the time (it’s a work in progress). Finally, on Spotify you can listen to an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. Look for the artist, Just My Type. Email the show at writersonwritingpodcast@gmail.com. We love to hear from our listeners.
(Recorded on December 6, 2023)
Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Host: Marrie Stone
Music and sound editing: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)
Matthew Carnicelli is the president of Carnicelli Literary Management, located in New York City and the Hudson Valley. He represents bestselling and award-winning authors publishing books in the areas of history, current events, sports, business, memoir, biography, health, literary fiction, and graphic novels. Since becoming an agent in 2004, he has focused on helping leading thinkers, journalists, academics, and others with exceptional stories or messages develop clear and original book ideas and partnering them with the best editors and publishers for their books. Matthew is a graduate of Washington University, with a B.A. in English literature and political science, and received an M.A. from the University of Toronto in English literature. He has taught college-level nonfiction writing and is a frequent guest on various writing and publishing-industry panels.
Matthew joined Barbara DeMarco-Barrett to talk about what he’s looking for, comps, query letters, the author bio, ageism, interpreting rejection, how he finds his authors, and much more.
For more information on Writers on Writing and additional writing tips, visit our Patreon page. To listen to past interviews, visit our website. We’re also excited to announce the opening of our new bookstore on bookshop.org. We’ve stocked it with titles from our guests, as well as some of our own personal favorites. By purchasing through the store, you’ll support both independent bookstores and our show. New titles will be added all the time (it’s a work in progress). Finally, on Spotify you can listen to an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. Look for the artist, Just My Type. Email the show at writersonwritingpodcast@gmail.com. We love to hear from our listeners.
(Recorded on December 1, 2023)
Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Host: Marrie Stone
Music and sound editing: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)
Jayne Anne Phillips’s first book of stories, Black Tickets (published in 1979 when she was only 26), won the prestigious Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Featured in Newsweek, Raymond Carver pronounced Black Tickets “stories unlike any in our literature…a crooked beauty” and established Jayne Anne as a writer “in love with the American language.” She was praised by Nadine Gordimer as “the best short story writer since Eudora Welty” and Black Tickets has since become a classic of the short story genre.
Since then, she’s written an additional collection of short stories and six novels. Her latest, Night Watch, was longlisted for the National Book Award. It’s considered part of a trilogy of war novels alongside Machine Dreams (about Vietnam) and Lark and Termite (about Korea). Others include Quiet Dell, Shelter, and Mother Kind. All of these works have garnered prizes, praise and critic attention.
Jayne Anne Phillips joins Marrie Stone to talk about Night Watch. They discuss writing a Civil War story that speaks to our times, the research required of historical fiction and how to organize it, accessing the voices of another time, writing difficult scenes, how to manage the element of surprise for both the reader and the writer, and much more.
For more information on Writers on Writing and additional writing tips, visit our Patreon page. To listen to past interviews, visit our website. We’re also excited to announce the opening of our new bookstore on bookshop.org. We’ve stocked it with titles from our guests, as well as some of our own personal favorites. By purchasing through the store, you’ll support both independent bookstores and our show. New titles will be added all the time (it’s a work in progress). Finally, on Spotify you can listen to an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. Look for the artist, Just My Type. Email the show at writersonwritingpodcast@gmail.com. We love to hear from our listeners.
(Recorded on November 30, 2023)
Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Host: Marrie Stone
Music and sound editing: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)
Mark Tavani started his publishing career in 2000 with Ballantine Books and spent more than 23 years with Penguin Random House, Bantam, Del Rey, and G.P. Putnam's Sons. He edited bestsellers and award-winners across numerous categories of fiction and nonfiction, including books by Jim Abbott, Steve Berry, C.J. Box, Justin Cronin, Clive and Dirk Cussler, Jeffery Deaver, Lisa Gardner, Jack McCallum, Lisa Scottoline, Bill Simmons, and R.L. Stine. He recently joined the David Black Literary Agency, where he represents both fiction and nonfiction. Mark has a degree in Creative Writing from the University of Pittsburgh. He is an adjunct professor with NYU's School of Professional Studies and lives with his wife, his daughters, and a headstrong dog in Rutherford, New Jersey.
Mark Tavani joined Barbara DeMarco-Barrett to talk about what he’s looking for, the dreaded comps, the category of bookclub fiction, submitting memoir, ageism in publishing (or not), why MFAs and the literary community involvement are important, how to know if an agent is the right fit for you, and so much more.
For more information on Writers on Writing and additional writing tips, visit our Patreon page. To listen to past interviews, visit our website. We’re also excited to announce the opening of our new bookstore on bookshop.org. We’ve stocked it with titles from our guests, as well as some of our own personal favorites. By purchasing through the store, you’ll support both independent bookstores and our show. New titles will be added all the time (it’s a work in progress). Finally, on Spotify you can listen to an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. Look for the artist, Just My Type. Email the show at writersonwritingpodcast@gmail.com. We love to hear from our listeners.
(Recorded on November 17, 2023)
Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Host: Marrie Stone
Music and sound editing: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)
Nathan Hill first came on the show in 2017 with his best-selling debut novel, The Nix, which was named the #1 book of the year by Audible and Entertainment Weekly, and one of the year’s best books by The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, Slate, and many others.
Wellnesscame out this year. It’s also a New York Times bestseller and was selected by Oprah Winfrey for her book club in September. Nathan joins Marrie Stone to talk about it, along with how his characters reveal themselves to him, how he manages time in a novel, how he weaves copious amounts of research into the narrative, how he plays with unconventional points of view, and much more. He also shares his thoughts on getting an MFA, how he found his agent, and his advice to aspiring novelists who feel stuck on the outside of the publishing industry.
Along the way, the conversation references an article Nathan wrote for Oprah’s Magazine, “How to Write a Novel in 7 Easy Steps.” It’s funny, irreverent, but has some great advice.
For more information on Writers on Writing and additional writing tips, visit our Patreon page. To listen to past interviews, visit our website. We’re also excited to announce the opening of our new bookstore on bookshop.org. We’ve stocked it with titles from our guests, as well as some of our own personal favorites. By purchasing through the store, you’ll support both independent bookstores and our show. New titles will be added all the time (it’s a work in progress). Finally, on Spotify you can listen to an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. Look for the artist, Just My Type. Email the show at writersonwritingpodcast@gmail.com. We love to hear from our listeners.
(Recorded on November 21, 2023)
Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Host: Marrie Stone
Music and sound editing: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)
Matt Coyle, author of the new novel, Odyssey’s End, is the author of the best-selling Rick Cahill crime novels. He knew he wanted to be a crime writer when he was 14 and his father gave him The Simple Art of Murder by Raymond Chandler. He graduated with a degree in English from University of California at Santa Barbara. His foray into crime fiction was delayed for 30 years as he spent time managing a restaurant, selling golf clubs for various golf companies, and in national sales for a sports licensing company. His tenth crime novel is Odyssey’s End. Matt lives in San Diego, where he’s at work at his next novel.
Matt joined Barbara to talk about writing a series versus a standalone, being a pantser, how he keeps the tension going, writing about emotional experiences he hasn’t personally gone through, time locks, and much more.
For more information on Writers on Writing and additional writing tips, visit our Patreon page. To listen to past interviews, visit our website. We’re also excited to announce the opening of our new bookstore on bookshop.org. It’s stocked with titles from our guests, as well as some of our own personal favorites. By purchasing through the store, you’ll support both independent bookstores and our show. New titles will be added all the time (it’s a work in progress). Finally, on Spotify you can listen to an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. Look for the artist, Just My Type. Email the show at writersonwritingpodcast@gmail.com. We love to hear from our listeners.
(Recorded on October 20, 2023)
Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Host: Marrie Stone
Music and sound editing: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)
Back in the 80s, literary agent Susan Golomb plucked Jonathan Franzen’s manuscript from her slush pile. They’ve worked together ever since. She founded the Susan Golomb Literary Agency in 1988 with Franzen as her first client, and joined Writers House in 2015. Susan represents other notables such as Glen David Gold, William T. Vollmann, Rachel Kushner, Imbolo Mbue, Angie Kim, and Nell Zink. She joined me to talk about the state of publishing and how it’s changed, where A.I. is taking the industry, what she looks for in her clients, query letter dos and don’ts, why comp titles frustrate her, her feelings about MFAs, and much more.
Along the way, we referenced two articles. The first, a recent New Yorker article about how changes in the publishing industry impact writers. And the second, an essay her client — Vauhini Vara — wrote about her own experiences with artificial intelligence.
For more information on Writers on Writing and additional writing tips, visit our Patreon page. To listen to past interviews, visit our website. We’re also excited to announce the opening of our new bookstore on bookshop.org. We’ve stocked it with titles from our guests, as well as some of our own personal favorites. By purchasing through the store, you’ll support both independent bookstores and our show. New titles will be added all the time (it’s a work in progress). Finally, on Spotify you can listen to an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. Look for the artist, Just My Type. Email the show at writersonwritingpodcast@gmail.com. We love to hear from our listeners.
(Recorded on November 3, 2023)
Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Host: Marrie Stone
Music and sound editing: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)
Kim Foster is the author of the memoir The Meth Lunches: Food and Longing in an American City. Kim is a James Beard Award-winning food writer who writes about people at the intersection of food and mental illness, family separation, poverty, addiction, trauma, and incarceration. You can read her work on her weekly newsletter on Substack and find her on Instagram. She lives in Las Vegas, Nevada with her husband, David, their four kids, and many animals.
Kim joins Barbara DeMarco-Barrett to discuss hybrid publishing, surprises in writing her memoir, when she knew this would be a book, writing about food that isn’t pretty, learning to never write anyone off, and much more.
For more information on Writers on Writing and additional writing tips, visit our Patreon page. To listen to past interviews, visit our website. We’re also excited to announce the opening of our new bookstore on bookshop.org. We’ve stocked it with titles from our guests, as well as some of our own personal favorites. By purchasing through the store, you’ll support both independent bookstores and our show. New titles will be added all the time (it’s a work in progress). Finally, on Spotify you can listen to an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. Look for the artist, Just My Type. Email the show at writersonwritingpodcast@gmail.com. We love to hear from our listeners.
(Recorded on October 13, 2023)
Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Host: Marrie Stone
Music and sound editing: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)
Betsy Amster is the principal agent of the Betsy Amster Literary Agency, which she opened in 1992. Located in Los Angeles, the agency handles publishing rights and all ancillary rights such as film, TV, audio, electronic, and foreign. They work with both first-time and established writers and represent literary fiction, upscale commercial women's fiction, voice-driven mysteries and thrillers, narrative nonfiction (especially by journalists), travelogues, memoirs (including graphic memoirs), social issues and trends, psychology, self-help, popular culture, women's issues, history & biography, lifestyle, careers, health and medicine, parenting, cooking and nutrition, gardening, and quirky gift books.
Before opening the agency, Betsy spent ten years as an editor at Pantheon and Vintage and two years as editorial director of the Globe Pequot Press. She has been described in the Los Angeles Times as “a dogged prospector of literary talent” and celebrated in a profile in the ASJA newsletter for her “no-nonsense style and whimsical sense of humor.” She frequently teaches classes on publishing at UCLA Extension’s Writers Program and participates in panels at the LA Times Festival of Books.
Betsy has been on the show at least six times in the past (you can find those interviews in our archives). But much has been happening in both the publishing world and the world at large lately. Betsy joins Marrie to talk about all those changes, including her take on the consolidation of many of the publishing houses, the impact of A.I. on writers and how she feels about writers using ChatGPT to write their query letters, as well as projects she’s working on now that have her excited. They chat about query letters, how long to wait before assuming a rejection, what writers can do to improve their odds, and much more.
For more information on Writers on Writing and additional writing tips, visit our Patreon page. To listen to past interviews, visit our website. We’re also excited to announce the opening of our new bookstore on bookshop.org. We’ve stocked it with titles from our guests, as well as some of our own personal favorites. By purchasing through the store, you’ll support both independent bookstores and our show. New titles will be added all the time (it’s a work in progress). Finally, on Spotify you can listen to an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. Look for the artist, Just My Type. Email the show at writersonwritingpodcast@gmail.com. We like to hear from our listeners.
(Recorded on October 17, 2023) Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett Host: Marrie Stone Music and sound editing: Travis Barrett
Clémence Michallon, author of The Quiet Tenant, was born and raised near Paris, France. She studied journalism at City, University of London, received a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University, and has written for The Independent since 2018. Her essays and features cover true crime, celebrity, culture, and literature. She divides her time between New York City and Rhinebeck, New York.
Clémence joins Barbara DeMarco-Barrett to discuss how The Quiet Tenant began; multiple point of view; how she kept the tension ratcheted up throughout the novel; how it is that crime writers write dark stories yet often appear to be happy, perky people; revising; the crossover from journalism to fiction; and getting an agent.
For more information on Writers on Writing and additional writing tips, visit our Patreon page. To listen to past interviews, visit our website. We’re also excited to announce the opening of our new bookstore on bookshop.org. We’ve stocked it with titles from our guests, as well as some of our own personal favorites. By purchasing through the store, you’ll support both independent bookstores and our show. New titles will be added all the time (it’s a work in progress). Finally, on Spotify you can listen to an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. Look for the artist, Just My Type. Email the show at writersonwritingpodcast@gmail.com. We love to hear from our listeners.
(Recorded on Sept. 19, 2023)
Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Host: Marrie Stone
Music and sound editing: Travis Barrett
Angie Kim came to fiction in her 40s, after careers in both law and business, and some challenging years mothering three boys who each faced medical complications. Her debut novel, Miracle Creek, won the Edgar Award, the ITW Thriller Award, the Strand Critics’ Award and the Pinckley Prize, and was named one of the best books of the year by Time, The Washington Post, Kirkus Reviews and the “Today” show.
Her second novel, Happiness Falls, came out in August by Hogarth. A NYT bestseller and Good Morning America Book Club pick, it will appeal to mystery and thriller lovers, philosophers, those active in the special needs and autism communities, and anyone who generally loves a thought-provoking and engaging read.
Angie joins Marrie Stone to talk about it. They discuss how both her childhood and her prior careers influence her fiction, how she used a combination of freewriting and her obsession with narrative architecture to structure this novel, how mysteries can be used as a Trojan horse in fiction, using creative literary devices to reveal character in a novel, the perils and pleasures of first person, and so much more. Angie also shares her story of finding her agent, what to look for in an agent, query letters, and shares other book business insights.
For more information on Writers on Writing and additional writing tips, visit our Patreon page. To listen to past interviews, visit our website. We’re also excited to announce the opening of our new bookstore on bookshop.org. We’ve stocked it with titles from our guests, as well as some of our own personal favorites. By purchasing through the store, you’ll support both independent bookstores and our show. New titles will be added all the time (it’s a work in progress). Finally, on Spotify you can listen to an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. Look for the artist, Just My Type. Email the show at writersonwritingpodcast@gmail.com. We like to hear from our listeners.
(Recorded on October 7, 2023) Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett Host: Marrie Stone Music and sound editing: Travis Barrett
David L. Ulin is the author, most recently, of the novel, Thirteen Question Method. His other books include Sidewalking: Coming to Terms with Los Angeles, The Lost Art of Reading: Books and Resistance in a Troubled Time; and Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology, which won a California Book Award. For Library of America, he has edited Didion: The 1960s and 70s and Didion: The 1980s and 90s.
David Ulin is the books editor of Alta and the former book editor and book critic of the Los Angeles Times. His work has appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times, Harper's, The Paris Review, and The Best American Essays 2020. The recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, and Ucross Foundation, as well as a COLA Individual Master Artist Grant from the City of Los Angeles. He is a Professor of English at the University of Southern California, where he edits the journal Air/Light.
David Ulin joined Barbara DeMarco-Barrett to talk about cinematic writing, Chekhov’s gun, embodying a protagonist, the “literature of disintegration” and why he’s a fan, tulpas, noir, and much more.
For more information on Writers on Writing and additional writing tips, visit our Patreon page. To listen to past interviews, visit our website. We’re also excited to announce the opening of our new bookstore on bookshop.org. We’ve stocked it with titles from our guests, as well as some of our own personal favorites. By purchasing through the store, you’ll support both independent bookstores and our show. New titles will be added all the time (it’s a work in progress). Finally, on Spotify you can listen to an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. Look for the artist, Just My Type. Email the show at writersonwritingpodcast@gmail.com. We like to hear from our listeners.
(Recorded on September 22, 2023) Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett Co-Host: Marrie Stone Music and sound editing: Travis Barrett
Shelley Read’s debut novel, Go As a River, published last February to instant international bestseller success. The story follows 17-year-old Victoria Nash through the mid-20th century as she endures grief, hardship, and loss in her western Colorado town. It’s a coming-of-age novel, an environmental novel, and a novel about displacement and reclamation. It’s also an incredible apprenticeship for novelists on excellent writing, and its publication backstory is almost as great as the story itself. Shelly joined Marrie Stone to talk about all of it.
In addition to discussions about craft, voice, and rooting the themes of your novel in specific scenes, they talk about Shelley’s road to publication, finding her agent, enduring rejection, and why Shelley finally committed to writing a novel after three decades of encouraging her students to do the same.
For more information on Writers on Writing and additional writing tips, visit our Patreon page. To listen to past interviews, visit our website. We’re also excited to announce the opening of our new bookstore on bookshop.org. We’ve stocked it with titles from our guests, as well as some of our own personal favorites. By purchasing through the store, you’ll support both independent bookstores and our show. New titles will be added all the time (it’s a work in progress). Finally, on Spotify you can listen to an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. Look for the artist, Just My Type.
(Recorded on September 19, 2023)
Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Co-Host: Marrie Stone
Music and sound editing: Travis Barrett
Ben Purkert is the author of the poetry collection, For the Love of Endings. His work appears in The New Yorker, The Nation, and The Kenyon Review, among others. He is the founder of Back Draft, a Guernica interview series focused on revision and the creative process. He holds degrees from Harvard and New York University, and he currently teaches at Rutgers. The Men Can’t be Saved is his first novel.
Ben joins Barbara DeMarco-Barrett to talk about making unlikeable characters redeemable, how Judaism plays a role in Ben’s life and his fiction, the crossover from poetry to fiction, choosing POV, and more.
For more information on Writers on Writing and additional writing tips, visit our Patreon page. We’re excited to announce the opening of our new bookstore on bookshop.org. We’ve stocked it with titles from our guests, as well as some of our own personal favorites. By purchasing through the store, you’ll support both independent bookstores and our show. New titles will be added all the time (it’s a work in progress). To listen to past interviews, visit our website. Finally, on Spotify you can listen to an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. Look for the artist, Just My Type.
(Recorded on August 17, 2023)
Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Co-Host: Marrie Stone
Music and sound editing: Travis Barrett
Lisa Teasley is the author of two novels (Heat Signature and Dive) and two short story collections (Glow in the Dark and, most recently, Fluid).
She joined Marrie Stone to talk about her latest collection, Fluid, which publishes on September 26th. Along the way, she shared why she gave up publishing for over 15 years (although she never gave up writing) and what brought her back around. She also shared her unique but likely relatable perspectives on agents, how to market your work without an agent, and the advantages of small presses.
The conversation also covered structure (including references to Jane Alison’s Meander, Spiral, Explode), various approaches to ordering stories in a collection, flash versus traditional short fiction, Lisa’s approach to visual versus written art, and so much more.
For more information on Writers on Writing and additional writing tips, visit our Patreon page. We’re excited to announce the opening of our new bookstore on bookshop.org. We’ve stocked it with titles from our guests, as well as some of our own personal favorites. By purchasing through the store, you’ll support both independent bookstores and our show. New titles will be added all the time (it’s a work in progress). Finally, to listen to past interviews, visit our website.
(Recorded on September 6, 2023)
Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Co-Host: Marrie Stone
Music and sound editing: Travis Barrett
Ashley Audrain’s debut novel, The Push, was an instant New York Times bestseller. She has served as the publicity director of Penguin Books Canada, and prior to that, worked in public relations. She lives in Toronto, where she and her partner are raising their two young children. The Whispers is her second novel and a #1 international bestseller.Ashley joins Barbara DeMarco-Barrett to talk about writing interiority, the importance of the ticking clock, writing unlikeable characters, writing chronologically, naming characters, and why she writes short chapters.For more information on Writers on Writing and additional writing tips, visit our Patreon page. To listen to past interviews, visit our website.(Recorded on August 11, 2023) Host: Barbara DeMarco-BarrettCo-Host: Marrie StoneMusic and sound editing: Travis Barrett
Anne Enright is the author of eleven novels, including the 2007 Booker Prize winner The Gathering. She’s written many short stories and a non-fiction work called Making Babies: Stumbling into Motherhood. She also served as the first Laureate of Irish fiction from 2015 – 2018.
Anne joined Marrie Stone from Galway, Ireland to talk about her latest novel, The Wren, the Wren, forthcoming by Norton later in September. The book has already been named a Most Anticipated Book of the Year by The Millions and Literary Hub. They talk about poetry – writing poetry as a non-poet and how Anne used it to structure the novel. They discuss the Irish literary tradition (and what national literary traditions really mean). Anne talks about rendering characters from different generations, how her novels are in conversation, and much more. For more information on Writers on Writing and additional writing tips, visit our Patreon page. A big thanks to new patrons Amy Brown and Mariah Martin. To listen to past interviews, visit our website. (Recorded on August 23, 2023)
Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett Co-Host: Marrie Stone Music and sound editing: Travis Barrett
Halley Sutton is a writer and editor who lives in Los Angeles. She graduated from Otis College of Art and Design with a master's degree in writing, and from University of California, Santa Cruz with a degree in creative writing. Her first novel, The Lady Upstairs, was published by Putnam in 2020, and was nominated for a Lefty award. Her second novel, The Hurricane Blonde, was published by Putnam in August 2023. Her writing has appeared in Ms., The Daily Beast, The Los Angeles Review of Books, CrimeReads, CrimeSpree Magazine, and more.
Halley Sutton joins Barbara DeMarco-Barrett to talk about Hollywood history, writing backstory, naming and creating characters, revision, what to leave out, and more.
For more information on Writers on Writing and additional writing tips, visit our Patreon page. To listen to past interviews, visit our website.
(Recorded on July 21, 2023) Host: Barbara DeMarco-BarrettCo-Host: Marrie StoneMusic and sound editing: Travis Barrett
Formerly a Hollywood screenwriter (My Favorite Year, Welcome Back, Kotter), Dennis Palumbo is a licensed psychotherapist whose work with creative people has been featured on CNN, NPR, and in The New York Times and Los Angeles Times.
He’s also the author of the popular nonfiction book, Writing From The Inside Out. His mystery fiction has appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and The Strand, and is collected in From Crime to Crime. His series of award-winning mystery thrillers (the latest of which is Panic Attack) feature Daniel Rinaldi, a psychologist and trauma expert who consults with the Pittsburgh Police. Recently, Dennis served as consulting producer on the Hulu TV series The Patient.
Dennis joins Barbara Demarco-Barrett to talk about the why writers procrastinate, self-worth, the habit of endlessly revising, finding time to write, the writers strike, and writers’ worries.
For more information on Writers on Writing and additional writing tips, visit our Patreon page. To listen to past interviews, visit our website.
(Recorded on July 21, 2023) Host: Barbara DeMarco-BarrettCo-Host: Marrie StoneMusic and sound editing: Travis Barrett
Julie Schumacher is the author of nine novels, including five for younger readers. Three of those adult novels follow Jason Fitger, an English professor at an obscure midwestern liberal arts college known as Payne University. Dear Committee Members, The Shakespeare Requirement and, now, The English Experience all shine satirical light on academia and our cultural shift away from the humanities.
Julie joins Marrie Stone to talk about the state of satire and how she was able to satirize a profession she’s still working in (and the people involved in that profession). She also discusses the challenges and constraints she sets up for herself when writing, handling a big cast of characters, using letters and essays in fiction, and how she organizes her written notebooks. They also discuss Julie’s thoughts on MFAs, turning real life events into fiction, and much more. For more information on Writers on Writing and additional writing tips, visit our Patreon page. To listen to past interviews, visit our website. (Recorded on August 9, 2023)
Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett Co-Host: Marrie Stone Music and sound editing: Travis Barrett
T. Coraghessan Boyle is the author of thirty books of fiction, including, most recently, The Harder They Come (2015), The Terranauts (2016), The Relive Box (2017), Outside Looking In (2019), Talk To Me (2021) and I Walk Between the Raindrops (2022).
He received a Ph.D. degree in Nineteenth Century British Literature from the University of Iowa in 1977, his M.F.A. from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1974, and his B.A. in English and History from SUNY Potsdam in 1968. He has been a member of the English Department at the University of Southern California since 1978, where he is Distinguished Professor of English.
His stories have appeared in most of the major American magazines, including The New Yorker, Harper's, Esquire, The Atlantic Monthly, Playboy, The Paris Review, GQ, Antaeus, Granta and McSweeney's, and he has been the recipient of a number of literary awards, including the PEN/Faulkner Prise for best novel of the year (World's End, 1988); the PEN/Malamud Prize in the short story (T.C. Boyle Stories, 1999); and the Prix Médicis Étranger for best foreign novel in France (The Tortilla Curtain, 1997). He currently lives near Santa Barbara with his wife and three children.
His most recent novel is Blue Skies.
T.C. Boyle joins Barbara DeMarco-Barrett to talk about writing climate fiction, dealing with heavy themes while keeping it light and not didactic, his influences, short stories, revision, crickets, and more.
A shout-out to our patrons: thank you, as always, for your support. For more information on Writers on Writing and additional writing tips, visit our Patreon page. To listen to past interviews, visit our website.
(Recorded on June 30, 2023) Host: Barbara DeMarco-BarrettCo-Host: Marrie StoneMusic and sound editing: Travis Barrett
Ellen Keith is the author of the international bestselling novel, The Dutch Wife and, most recently, The Dutch Orphan. Both novels take place during the WWII occupation of The Netherlands.
Ellen joined Marrie Stone from her home in Amsterdam. They discussed finding new stories in saturated literary topics, why third person works well for historical fiction, the benefits of multiple points of view, working with dark material, managing backstory, how to humanize unsympathetic characters, and much more. A shout-out to our new July patrons — Lodi, Anne, Erin, Dawn, and Thomas. Thank you for your support. For more information on Writers on Writing and additional writing tips, visit our Patreon page. To listen to past interviews, visit our website. (Recorded on July 26, 2023)
Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett Co-Host: Marrie Stone Music and sound editing: Travis Barrett
Today we’re focusing on noir and Barbara DeMarco-Barrett is with the perfect guests to talk about it: Molly Odintz and Gary Phillips. Molly is senior editor for CrimeReads and editor and contributor to Austin Noir (Akashic). She grew up in Austin and was a bookseller at BookPeople. Gary Phillips has published various novels, comics, short stories and edited several anthologies including the Anthony-winning The Obama Inheritance: Fifteen Stories of Conspiracy Noir and South Central Noir, recently published by Akashic. The Washington Post named his novel One-Shot Harry as one of the best mysteries of 2022, and it’s been nominated for a Nero and Macavity awards. He was also a staff writer and co-producer on Snowfall, streaming on Hulu about crack and the CIA in 1980s South Central where he grew up. And Barbara edited and contributed a story to Palm Springs Noir, also published by Akashic.
Molly and Gary joined Barbara to talk about noir (what it is, it's history), putting together an anthology, the Writers Guild strike, beginning stories, the role of an editor when putting together an anthology, and more.
For more information on Writers on Writing and additional writing tips, visit our Patreon page. To listen to past interviews, visit our website.
(Recorded on May 26, 2023) Host: Barbara DeMarco-BarrettCo-Host: Marrie StoneMusic and sound editing: Travis Barrett
Kelly McMasters is an essayist, professor, and former bookshop owner. She is the co-editor of This Is the Place: Women Writing About Home (Seal Press, 2017) and the ABA national bestseller Wanting: Women Writing About Desire (Catapult, 2023).
Her first book, Welcome to Shirley: A Memoir from an Atomic Town, was listed as one of Oprah's top 5 summer memoirs and is the basis for the documentary film ‘The Atomic States of America,’ a 2012 Sundance selection.
Kelly joins Marrie Stone to talk about her latest release, The Leaving Season: A Memoir-in-Essays (WW Norton, 2023). They discuss how this form mirrors the novel-in-short-story form and its differences. They discuss flash versus conventional essays, discovering what your essay is really about, and one piece of advice Kelly always uses during her revision process. Kelly also shares her insights about making a living as a writer and artist, what it requires, and why she won't compromise. There are also references to advice Kelly gave in her TedX Talk about experiencing “voice block” (as opposed to “writer’s block”). For more information on Writers on Writing and additional writing tips, visit our Patreon page. To listen to past interviews, visit our website. (Recorded on June 28, 2023)
Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett Co-Host: Marrie Stone Music and sound editing: Travis Barrett
Candi Sary is a graduate from the University of California, Irvine. Her novel, Black Crow White Lie, won a Reader Views Literary Award, a Chanticleer International Book Award, and was First Runner-Up in the Eric Hoffer Book Award. Her new novel, Magdalena, will be released by Regal House Publishing on July 11. A mother of two adult children, Sary lives in Southern California with her husband, a dog, a cat and several ducks.
Candi Sary joins Barbara DeMarco-Barrett to talk about Magdalena and the path to publication. She also talks about creating a playlist to put you in the head of your protagonist and the world of your story, her influences, ghosts, taking your time, how Magdalena affected the writing of her current novel, and more
For more information on Writers on Writing and additional writing tips, visit our Patreon page. To listen to past interviews, visit our website.
(Recorded on June 16, 2023) Host: Barbara DeMarco-BarrettCo-Host: Marrie StoneMusic and sound editing: Travis Barrett
Andrew Porter is the author of the short story collection The Theory of Light and Matter, which won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, the novel In Between Days, which was a Barnes & Noble “Discover Great New Writers” selection and an IndieBound “Indie Next” selection, and the short story collection The Disappeared, which was published in April 2023. Andrew’s short stories have appeared in One Story, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, The Threepenny Review, and Prairie Schooner, among others. He has had his work read on NPR’s Selected Shorts and twice selected as one of the Distinguished Stories of the Year by Best American Short Stories. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Andrew is currently a Professor of English and Director of the Creative Writing Program at Trinity University in San Antonio. Andrew joins Marrie Stone to talk about The Disappeared. He talks about the state of the short story in contemporary fiction (with references to Rebecca Makkai’s article about why we should be reading short stories), and what short stories can do for readers that novels cannot. He shares insights from his former professor, Marilynne Robinson, about endings. He talks about how he approaches flash fiction. He discusses why three is such a magical number of characters for a story, and much more. For more information on Writers on Writing and additional writing tips, visit our Patreon page. To listen to past interviews, visit our website. (Recorded on June 13, 2023)
Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett Co-Host: Marrie Stone Music and sound editing: Travis Barrett
Jude Atwood is the author of the new novel, Maybe There Are Witches. Jude grew up on a farm in small-town Illinois. After graduating from Bradley University and Chapman University, he became a community college professor in Orange County, California. His first novel, Maybe There Are Witches, published by Regal House, won the Kraken Prize for Middle Grade Fiction.
Jude joins Barbara DeMarco-Barrett to talk about creating a fictional town, how plotting allows you to write chapters out of order, beginning with character, writing side characters, submitting to publishers, book banning and more.
For more information on Writers on Writing and additional writing tips, visit our Patreon page. To listen to past interviews, visit our website.
An eternal thanks to our patrons. Your support enables us to do what we do. We appreciate every one of you. Thank you.
(Recorded on June 16, 2023) Host: Barbara DeMarco-BarrettCo-Host: Marrie StoneMusic and sound editing: Travis Barrett
Janelle Brown is the New York Times bestselling author of the novels I’ll Be You, Pretty Things, Watch Me Disappear, All We Ever Wanted Was Everything, and This Is Where We Live. Her books have been sold in two dozen countries around the world. Pretty Things - named a Best Book of 2020 by Amazon - and I’ll Be You are both currently being adapted for television. Janelle joins Marrie Stone to talk about her latest, I’ll Be You. She talks about her former journalism career and how it serves her fiction, why she enjoys working with characters afflicted by addiction, how winding back to a character’s childhood often unlocks their psychology, the writing challenges and exercises she gave herself to find her characters’ voices, and much more. For more information on Writers on Writing and additional writing tips, visit our Patreon page. To listen to past interviews, visit our website. Thank you to our new patrons — Dan Conway, Dina Andre, Kelly Gates, and Jan Mannino —who joined us in June. Thank you to our May patrons Judi Ulrey, Susan Nolen and Robert Leming. And a very special thanks to our longtime and loyal patrons who have been with us and stayed with us — Maureen Dunphy, Helena Touseull, Deana Pink, Valerie Kurita, Stephanie King, Elizabeth Duran, Maura Conlon-McIvor, Jace Burgess, Elizabeth Benedict, Lacey Beattie, Connie Nash, Lisa Cupolo, Holly Norton, Victor Mariano, Aimee Wing, Tanya, Patti Jazanoski, Leslie Archibald, Candi Sary, Melora Leiser, Robin Kalota, Craig Elbe, Debra Cross, Amy Muia, Deborah Gaal, Anne Dunham, Kathleen Peterson, Annabel Daguerre, Maggie Ginsberg, Richard Polt, Dennis McNamara, Kimber Grey, and Nathan Sandiford. Your support enables us to do what we do. We appreciate every one of you. Thank you. (Recorded on June 6, 2023)
Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett Co-Host: Marrie Stone Music and sound editing: Travis Barrett
Andre Dubus III is the author of The Cage Keeper and Other Stories, Bluesman, and the New York Times bestsellers, House of Sand and Fog, The Garden of Last Days, and his memoir, Townie. He’s been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, The National Magazine Award for Fiction, Two Pushcart Prizes, and an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature. His books have been published in more than 25 languages, and he is a Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. His new novel is Such Kindness, published by Norton.
On the show, Andre Dubus and Barbara DeMarco-Barrett discuss how ideas take form, how much he knows about his characters before he begins, writing interiority, writing in his car, having a father who was a writer, why he’s haunted by his novel The House of Sand and Fog, and his big problem with social media.
For more information on Writers on Writing and additional writing tips, visit our Patreon page. To listen to past interviews, visit our website.
(Recorded on May 12, 2023) Host: Barbara DeMarco-BarrettCo-Host: Marrie StoneMusic and sound editing: Travis Barrett
Lisa See’s twelfth book, Lady Tan’s Circle of Women, follows the life of Tan Yunxian, a 15th century doctor during the Ming Dynasty in China (a relatively unheard of concept back then). It explores marriage, motherhood, and medicine through her eyes, as well as the lives of the women around her (midwives, concubines, her powerful mother-in-law, and even the Chinese empress).
Lisa joins Marrie Stone to talk about the book, and how her research and writing process changed as a result of the pandemic. She talks about how much she outlines the story before beginning to write, how she approaches the research, how she tackles “cringy” scenes, how she accesses her minor characters, how losing her own mother (the writer Carolyn See) has impacted her subsequent novels, and how she’ll approach future writing differently in light of what this book taught her.
For more information on Writers on Writing and additional writing tips, visit our Patreon page. To listen to past interviews, visit our website.
(Recorded on May 31, 2023)
Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Co-Host: Marrie Stone
Music and sound design: Travis Barrett
Danya Kukafka is the author of the nationally bestselling novels Notes on an Execution and Girl in Snow. Her books have been reviewed favorably in outlets like The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post, and have been translated into over a dozen languages worldwide. Notes on an Execution recently won the Edgar Award for Best Novel, and is currently in development as a feature film. Danya works as a literary agent with Trellis Literary Management.
Danya joined Barbara DeMarco-Barrett to talk about using a time lock, keeping a process journal, point of view, how being an agent affects her own writing, genres and categories, and much more.
For more information on Writers on Writing and additional writing tips, visit our Patreon page. To listen to past interviews, visit our website.
(Recorded on May 26, 2023)
Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Co-Host: Marrie Stone
Music and sound design: Travis Barrett
Cathleen Schine is the author of 13 novels, including The Love Letter, which was made into a movie starring Kate Capshaw, Rameau’s Niece, The Three Weissmanns of Westport, and The Grammarians. Her articles have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Sunday Magazine, and The New York Times Book Review, among other publications. Her essays have been included in Best American Essays 2005, an Anthology of New Yorker Humor, and elsewhere.
Cathleen joins Marrie Stone to talk about her latest novel, Künstlers in Paradise. She talks about writing during the pandemic and how it influenced this novel, as well as whether humor can still be an appropriate tone, given world events. Cathleen shares insights about writing dialogue and dialect across cultures and generations, how addressing problematic things within the novel can help solve the problem, her research process, organizing her materials, and much more.
For more information on Writers on Writing and additional writing tips, visit our Patreon page. To listen to past interviews, visit our website.
(Recorded on April 28, 2023)
Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Co-Host: Marrie Stone
Music and sound design: Travis Barrett
Anthony Chin-Quee is a board certified Otolaryngologist (Ear, Nose, and Throat surgeon) with degrees from Harvard University and Emory University School of Medicine. He has done multiple performances for The Moth, where he’s won their local Story Slam, placed as a runner-up in the Detroit Grand Slam, and performed on their NYC mainstage. He was a medical consultant for ABC’s Grey’s Anatomy and a member of the writing staff of FOX’s The Resident for two seasons, distilling complex medical and social issues into palatable and understandable mainstream storylines. His memoir, I Can’t Save You: A Memoir— a candid account of the ways in which medical residency training shattered the mind of an empathetic, well-intentioned doctor, and the arduous task of piecing it back together again through painful and overdue self-discovery—was released by Riverhead Books on April 4th, 2023 to critical acclaim. He has published opinions in Forbes and been interviewed by NPR on the topic of systemic racism in medical education. Anthony currently resides in England with his wife and daughter.
Tony talked with Barbara about the path to publishing his debut memoir, nailing the voice, finding an agent, dealing with rejection, honesty in memoir, writing with a reader in mind, and more
For more information on Writers on Writing and additional writing tips, visit our Patreon page. To listen to past interviews, visit our website.
(Recorded on May 12, 2023) Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett Co-Host: Marrie Stone Music and sound design: Travis Barrett
Ann Napolitano’s latest novel, Hello Beautiful, was an instant New York Times bestseller and Oprah’s 100th Book Club pick. Her last novel, Dear Edward, was published by Dial Press in January 2020 and was also a New York Times bestseller, a Read with Jenna selection, and was released on February 3rd as an Apple TV+ series. You can find an interview with Ann about that novel in our archives.
Ann is also the author of A Good Hard Lookand Within Arm’s Reach. She was the Associate Editor of One Story literary magazine from 2014-2020.
Ann joins Marrie Stone to talk about Hello Beautiful. In addition to the book’s backstory, they talk about the many months Ann forces herself to spend on a book before beginning to write, how to pay attention to your unique inner magnetic board as a writer, the advice about endings she follows from George Saunders, and much more.
For more information on Writers on Writing and additional writing tips, visit our Patreon page. To listen to past interviews, visit our website.
(Recorded on May 3, 2023)
Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Co-Host: Marrie Stone
Music and sound design: Travis Barrett
Kenan Orhan’s fiction has appeared in The Atlantic, The Paris Review, The Common, Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere and has been anthologized in The O. Henry Prize Stories and The Best American Short Stories. His story collection, I Am My Country and Other Stories, is published by Random House. Kenan teaches literature and creative writing at the Kansas City Art Institute and lives in Kansas.
He joins Marrie Stone to talk about the collection, his relationship with Turkey, how his approach to the short story form has changed over time, how his stories exemplify and depart from the Joy Williams’ rules of short stories, and much more. Kenan also talks about finding his agent and his path to publication.
A reminder that April is the one-year anniversary of our Patreon page, and 2023 marks the 25th anniversary of the show. We’re winding down the month, but still offering some additional perks and incentives through the end of April. To learn more, visit our Patreon page. To listen to past interviews, visit our website.
(Recorded on April 11, 2023)
Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Co-Host: Marrie Stone
Music and sound design: Travis Barrett
Idra Novey’s new novel is Take What You Need, published by Viking. She is also the author of Those Who Knew, a New York Times Editors’ Choice. Her first novel Ways to Disappear, received the 2017 Sami Rohr Prize, the 2016 Brooklyn Eagles Prize, and was a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize for First Fiction. Her poetry collections includeExit, Civilian, The Next Country, and Clarice: The Visitor, a collaboration with the artist Erica Baum. Her fiction and poetry have been translated into a dozen languages and she’s written for The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, New York Magazine, and The Paris Review. She is the recipient of awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Poets & Writers Magazine, the PEN Translation Fund, and the Poetry Foundation. Her works as a translator include Clarice Lispector’s novel The Passion According to G.H. She teaches fiction at Princeton University.
On the show Barbara talked with Idra about being a genre misfit, the lack of quotation marks, subtext, the crossover from poetry and translation, welding, and much more.
A reminder that April is the one-year anniversary of our Patreon page, and 2023 is the 25th anniversary of the show. To celebrate, we’re offering some additional perks and incentives all month long. To learn more, visit our Patreon page. To listen to past interviews, visit our website.
(Recorded on April 15, 2023)
Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Co-Host: Marrie Stone
Music and sound design: Travis Barrett
Jennie Nash is the founder of Author Accelerator, a book coaching service that has helped hundreds of writers complete their book projects. Her clients have landed top New York agents; snagged 5- and 6-figure deals from publishers such as Scribner, Simon & Schuster, Penguin, Norton, and Hachette; hit the New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller list; been chosen for the Reese Witherspoon Book Club; and won dozens of national indie book awards.
Jennie has spent 30 years on all sides of the publishing industry and is the author of four novels, three memoirs, and four self-help books for writers including The Writer’s Guide to Agony and Defeat: The 43 Worst Moments in the Writing Life and How to Get over Them; Blueprint for a Book: Build Your Novel From the Inside Out; Blueprint for a Nonfiction Book: Plan and Pitch Your Big Idea; andRead Books All Day & Get Paid For It.
Jennie joins Marrie to talk about the art and business of book coaching, what coaches can (and cannot) do for you, how to know when you need one, when in the process to hire one, and how they differ from having an editor or MFA advisor. She also walks through some of the strategies in her Blueprint manuals and how they can be combined with other writing methods (such as Save the Cat, Robert McKee’s Story, John Truby’s The Anatomy of Story, etc.). She says spending a few weeks asking yourself some foundational questions about you book at the beginning might save you hundreds of pages and years of work.
A reminder that April is the one-year anniversary of our Patreon page, and 2023 is the 25th anniversary of the show. To celebrate, we’re offering some additional perks and incentives all month long. To learn more, visit our Patreon page. To listen to past interviews, visit our website.
(Recorded on April 5, 2023)
Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Co-Host: Marrie Stone
Music and sound design: Travis Barrett
Richard Bausch is the author of 13 novels and 8 collections of short stories. He’s been published everywhere: The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, and Narrative, to name a few. He’s been awarded a Guggenheim, and has won too many awards to mention. He’s currently a professor at Chapman University in Orange, California. Visit his website to learn more.
On the show Barbara DeMarco-Barrett talked with Richard Bausch about his current novel, Playhouse, writing multiple POV characters, not staying in your lane, what he does when he hits a wall, what’s most useful to writers who want to get better, and so much more.
For more information on Writers on Writing and additional writing tips, visit our Patreon page. To listen to past interviews, visit our website.
(Recorded on March 31, 2023)
Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Co-Host: Marrie Stone
Music and sound design: Travis Barrett
Sadeqa Johnson’s latest novel, The House of Eve, hit the New York Times bestseller list as soon as it was published. It was also a Reese Witherspoon Book Club Pick for the month of February. But Sadeqa fought for her success. The House of Eve was her fifth published novel and her second historical fiction novel. Getting off the ground took perseverance and ingenuity.
Sadeqa shares her unconventional path to success, her move from contemporary domestic fiction to historical fiction and how she approaches the two genres, how her background in acting serves her fiction, her approach to research, revision, dialogue and more, and how she’s learned to speak — and listen — to her characters.
For more information on Writers on Writing and additional writing tips, visit our Patreon page. To listen to past interviews, visit our website.
(Recorded on March 20, 2023)
Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Co-Host: Marrie Stone
Music and sound design: Travis Barrett
Margot Douaihy earned a BA in Writing from the University of Pittsburgh Writing Program, an MA in Creative & Life Writing from Goldsmiths, University of London, and a PhD in Creative Writing from Lancaster University. Douaihy is the author of the true-crime poetry project Bandit/Queen: The Runaway Story of Belle Starr; Scranton Lace; the Lambda Literary Finalist Girls Like You (Clemson University Press); and I Would Ruby If I Could (Factory Hollow Press). Douaihy’s sleuth fiction inhabits and reconstructs hardboiled PI tropes through a queer lens. Douaihy’s work has been featured in PBS NewsHour, Colorado Review, Madison Review, Tahoma Literary Review, North American Review, among others. Honors include the Aesthetica Magazine Creative Writing Award, Finalist (2020), Red Hen Press Quill Prose Award, Finalist (2019), C&R Press Best Novel Award, Longlist (2018), Lambda Literary Award Poetry, Finalist (2015), and River Styx Micro-Fiction Contest Finalist (2015).
Margot joins Barbara to talk about Scorched Grace, the first imprint of Gillian Flynn/Zando. They talk about the irreverent nun protagonist, Sister Holiday in the mystery novel, naming characters, writing dialogue, backstory, and so much more.
For more information on Writers on Writing and additional writing tips, visit our Patreon page. To listen to past interviews, visit our website.
Recorded in March, 2023.
Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Co-Host: Marrie Stone
Music and sound design: Travis Barrett
Kelly Link is the author of four previous story collections including Get in Trouble, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize (a link to her interview with Marrie about that book can be found here). Her short stories have been widely published in literary magazines including The Best American Short Stories and Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards. She is a 2018 MacArthur Fellow and has received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. She’s also the co-founder of Small Beer Press and co-edits the occasional zine Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet.
Kelly joins Marrie to talk about her latest collection, White Cat, Black Dog, out later this month and published by Random House. They talk about the role of fairy tales, Scottish ballads, and 17th century French lore in her work. Kelly walks through the evolution of several stories, the ways some of them surprised her, and how her illustrator was able to communicate something about one story that Kelly was not willing to include. Kelly talks about the Joy Williams’ list of 8 essential things every story needs and much more.
For more information on Writers on Writing and additional writing tips, visit our Patreon page. To listen to past interviews, visit our website.
(Recorded on March 2, 2023)
Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Co-Host: Marrie Stone
Music and sound design: Travis Barrett
Jordan Harper, the Edgar-Award winning author of She Rides Shotgun and Love and Other Wounds, has been an ad man, a rock critic, and a writer/producer for television. He was born and raised in Missouri and now lives in Los Angeles. His new novel is Everybody Knows. On the show Jordan talked about his path to crime fiction, the Los Angeles setting, beginning and ending the novel, renting a room at the famed Chateau Marmont to write the first chapter, and so much more.
This interview was done on Zoom on Sunday, Feb 26, 2023 for Sisters in Crime Orange County. If you prefer watching the interview, visit Barbara’s YouTube channel (Barbara DeMarco-Barrett) or the YouTube channel for Sisters in Crime Orange County. On both channels, there are a number of interviews.
For more information on Writers on Writing and additional writing tips, visit the show’s Patreon page. To listen to past interviews, visit our website.
(Recorded on February 26, 2023, for Sisters in Crime Orange County.)
Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Co-Host: Marrie Stone
Music and sound design: Travis Barrett
In 2013, novelist and memoirist Dani Shapiro published her craft/memoir Still Writing: The Perils and Pleasures of a Creative Life. This year, the book celebrates its 10th anniversary with a re-release and new foreword.
Dani joined Marrie Stone in 2013 to talk about it (that interview can be found here), and now joins her again to revisit it. They talk about that intervening decade and what’s happened in Dani’s life and career since the book’s first publication. Dani discusses what aspects of Still Writing are truer today than before, how her thinking has evolved around issues such as dealing with distractions, self-sabotage, writerly authority, memoirs versus novels, and much more. (In the interview, she recommends an essay by Alexander Chee that can be found here.)
Dani uses her own experiences across her many novels and memoirs to shed light on the writing process, its many hardships, and great gratifications.
For more information on Writers on Writing and additional writing tips, visit our Patreon page. To listen to past interviews, visit our website.
(Recorded on February 23, 2023)
Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Co-Host: Marrie Stone
Music and sound design: Travis Barrett
Rebecca Makkai’s novel, The Great Believers, was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award; it was the winner of the ALA Carnegie Medal, the Stonewall Book Award, and the LA Times Book Prize; and it was one of the New York Times' Ten Best Books of 2018. Her other books are the novels The Borrower and The Hundred-Year House, and the story collection, Music for Wartime. Her new novel is I Have Some Questions For You, released Feb 21, 2023.
On the show, Rebecca spoke with Barbara DeMarco-Barrett about pantsing vs plotting, titles, categorization, what she does when she hits a wall, and more.
For more information on Writers on Writing and additional writing tips, visit our Patreon page. To listen to past interviews, visit our website.
(Recorded on February 3, 2023)
Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Co-Host: Marrie Stone
Music and sound design: Travis Barrett
In 2015, several women from the small town of Chillicothe, Ohio began disappearing. Some were found dead in a nearby river and others were never found at all. The victims were drug addicted and supported their addiction with prostitution. They became known as the “Chillicothe Six,” although the body count kept rising. The case caught the attention of novelist Tiffany McDaniel, who grew up near the town and went to school with one of the victims.
On the Savage Side reimagines the lives of women like these. Set in the 1990s, before iPhones and social media, McDaniel brings backstories, faces, names and humanity to women society often forgets.
Author of the international bestselling novel Betty (2020) and the award-winning novel The Summer That Melted Everything(2016), McDaniel is of Cherokee heritage and brings those myths and legends to her novels. As a self-taught author with no formal education, McDaniel wrote over 20 unpublished novels before her first publication in 2016. McDaniel joins Marrie Stone to talk about On the Savage Side, as well as working without an agent, selling a novel 20 years after it was written, how social and cultural changes allowed her to publish previously rejected work, and more. She also shares some craft insights regarding structure, character development, incorporating visual arts into her novels, and more.
For more information on Writers on Writing and additional writing tips, visit our Patreon page. To listen to past interviews, visit our website.
(Recorded on February 9, 2023)
Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Co-Host: Marrie Stone
Music and sound design: Travis Barrett
A more personal author description than usual: I recently learned that fiction writer Melissa Bank passed away last August. (When I recorded the intro to this rerun, I thought it had been longer. My apologies.) I loved Melissa Bank’s fiction, her light touch. Girls Guide to Hunting and Fishing was wonderful, as was The Wonder Spot. When I was in NYC, Melissa and I would meet for coffee or lunch. I loved her writing and her entire vibe.
Melissa Bank won the 1993 Nelson Algren Award for short fiction and taught at Stony Brook University. When The Wonder Spot came out, I asked her to talk about how to write a novel. She said, “I don’t know how to write a novel.” What she knew how to do, she was, was write stories. Stories became chapters and chapters become a book, she said.
Melissa died from lung cancer on August 2, 2022. She was 61 years old.
For more information on Writers on Writing and additional writing tips, visit our Patreon page. To listen to past interviews, visit our website.
(Recorded on January 25, 2023)
Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Co-Host: Marrie Stone
Music and sound design: Travis Barrett
Barack Obama called Jessamine Chan’s The School for Good Mothers one of his favorite reads of 2022. The NYT bestseller comes out in paperback on February 7.
Every year, thousands of children are removed from their parents’ custody by the state, often for good reasons, but not always. Set in a dystopian future not so far from now, The School for Good Mothers follows Frieda’s tortured journey after losing her daughter following “a very bad day.” Chan calls the book “1984 for mothers.”
Jessamine joins Marrie Stone to talk about the 20 years she spent writing before the book was published, and how one inspiring day of writing changed everything (spoiler alert: don’t try this at home). She talks about writing in longhand, over-writing and learning to cut, how visiting her setting changed the feel of the book, naming her characters and other craft insights. She also discusses MFAs and writing residencies, finding an agent, the long editing process after the book was sold and more.
For more information on Writers on Writing and additional writing tips, visit our Patreon page. To listen to past interviews, visit our website.
(Recorded on January 25, 2023)
Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Co-Host: Marrie Stone
Music and sound design: Travis Barrett
Matt Bell is the author most recently of the novel Appleseed(a New York Times Notable Book) and the craft book Refuse to Be Done, a guide to novel writing, rewriting, and revision.
He is also the author of the novels Scrapper and In the House upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods, as well as the short story collection A Tree or a Person or a Wall, a non-fiction book about the classic video game Baldur's Gate II, and several other titles. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Esquire, Tin House, Fairy Tale Review, American Short Fiction, Orion, and many other publications. A native of Michigan, he teaches creative writing at Arizona State University.
Matt joins Barbara DeMarco-Barrett to talk about—what else—revision, and his new book, Refuse to be Done.
For more information on Writers on Writing and additional writing tips, visit our Patreon page. To listen to past interviews, visit our website.
(Recorded on January 12, 2023)
Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Co-Host: Marrie Stone
Music and sound design: Travis Barrett
Writers use language with intention. So when V.V. (Sugi) Ganeshananthan’s Brotherless Night uses the word “terrorist” six times on the first page of a novel about the Sri Lankan civil war, and incorporates the second person, the reader understands they’re as much active participant as passive observer in the book.
Sugi joins Marrie Stone to talk about the novel’s origin and why she initially didn’t have the “chops” to write it. She talks about her own relationship with Sri Lanka and the research that went into rendering this period of history to life.
Writers may find interest in Sugi’s decision to write in the first (and second) person; the power of writing in the subjunctive; how to describe a foreign time and place (with its particular dishes and unfamiliar names) without being overly explanatory; how Sugi deals with difficult writing challenges the same way she deals with going to the dentist; finding trusted readers; and more.
Sugi is the author of Love Marriage, which was longlisted for the Women's Prize and named one of the best books of the year by The Washington Post. Her work has appeared in Granta, The New York Times, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading, among other publications. She teaches in the MFA program at the University of Minnesota and co-hosts the Fiction/Non/Fiction podcast on Literary Hub, which is about the intersection of literature and the news.
Read more about Brotherless Night in the January 15, 2023 NYT Book Review.
For more information on Writers on Writing and additional writing tips, visit our Patreon page. To listen to past interviews, visit our website.
(Recorded on January 12, 2023)
Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Co-Host: Marrie Stone
Music and sound design: Travis Barrett
Ed Humes is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of more than a dozen nonfiction books, including Mississippi Mud, Door to Door: The Magnificent, Maddening, Mysterious World of Transportation and Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair With Trash, and Burned: A Story of Murder and the Crime that Wasn’t. Ed received his Pulitzer for his newspaper coverage of the military, and a PEN Award for nonfiction for No Matter How Loud I Shout: A Year in the Life of Juvenile Court. He has taught writing, journalism, and literary nonfiction at graduate and undergraduate levels, and has written for The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Sierra Magazine, and Los Angeles Magazine.
Ed joins Barbara DeMarco-Barrett to talk about his new book, The Forever Witness: How DNA and Geneology solved a cold case double murder.
For more information on Writers on Writing and additional writing tips, visit our Patreon page. To listen to past interviews, visit our website.
(Recorded in December 2022)
Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Co-Host: Marrie Stone
Music and sound design: Travis Barrett
Menstruation is a strangely taboo topic in our culture. Back in the 1970s and 80s, teenagers read Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret and Our Bodies, Ourselves under their covers with a flashlight. Girls were largely left to figure things out for themselves or confide in each other to discover what was normal.
After hearing a harrowing coming-of-age story from her great aunt, Rachel Kauder Nalebuff started gathering stories about menstruation in her family that had never been told. What began as an oral history project quickly snowballed. Our Red Book (Simon & Schuster, 2022) takes us through stories of first periods, last periods, missing periods, and everything about bleeding that people wish they had been told.
Rachel joins Marrie Stone to talk about publishing her first anthology (My Little Red Book, 2009) when she was a college freshman and how a high school English teacher gave her the confidence of her convictions. Much has changed in our society in those intervening years and Rachel talks about how Our Red Book expanded the conversation to be more gender inclusive, as well as inviting voices from different generations and cultures.
Their conversation also covers several writing-related topics, including advice about assembling and structuring an anthology, finding contributors, the delicate process of editing, book proposals, Rachel’s work at 3 Hole Press, and more.
For more information on Writers on Writing and additional writing tips, visit our Patreon page. To listen to past interviews, visit our website.
(Recorded in December 2022)
Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Co-Host: Marrie Stone
Music and sound design: Travis Barrett
The youngest of six children, Lisa Cupolo grew up in the Honeymoon Capital of the World: Niagara Falls, Canada. At thirteen, she was diagnosed with Juvenile Rheumatoid Arthritis, and spent much of her teens and twenties battling illness. She has spoken about how this trial was actually one of the blessings of her life, because it led her to writing. She learned to escape, creating stories when reality got difficult, and she imagined herself living the lives of her characters, and in the real world, she became an observer. Always a spiritual seeker, Lisa has a BA in philosophy from The University of Western Ontario. In her second year, her single mother put a second mortgage on their suburban home so Lisa could study in Nice, France. That changed everything.
She spent the next decade in Europe and her health improved dramatically. She completed a graduate degree in Portrait Photography from The London Institute in England and worked a stint as a paparazzi photographer in London and published celebrity photos in Hello Magazine and The Daily Telegraph and travel shots with Dorling Kindersley and Thomas Cook travel guidebooks. She continued to dream of being a writer.
Back in Canada, her professional life turned toward championing artists, as a photo editor at a stock agency in Toronto and at the Banff Centre for the Arts supporting visual artist residencies. She spent a year in Kisumu, Kenya working at an orphanage and traveling in east Africa and eastern Europe.
After reading Carol Shield’s novel, "Unless," Lisa knew she had to pursue her passion for writing and was offered an entry level job at HarperCollins back in Toronto. While there, she wrote in the early mornings before work. In time, she became a literary publicist and represented some of her favorite writers: Elmore Leonard, Neil Gaiman, Lionel Shriver, Helen Humphreys, among others, and threw some terrific literary parties with Brick Magazine.
When she met her husband, writer Richard Bausch, Lisa moved to Memphis, Tennessee, where they had their daughter Lila. She completed an MFA in fiction at the University of Memphis and began publishing stories and finished her novel. They now live in Southern California and Lisa is at work on a memoir and teaches creative writing at Chapman University.
For more information on Writers on Writing and additional writing tips, visit our Patreon page. To listen to past interviews, visit our website.
(Recorded in December 2022)
Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Co-Host: Marrie Stone
Music and sound design: Travis Barrett
Melissa Chadburn’s debut novel, A Tiny Upward Shove, is part serial killer thriller, part magical realism folklore, part love story, part coming of age story, and fully riveting. Its narrator is an aswang—otherwise known as a Philippine shapeshifter, a ghoul, a spinstress, a vampire, a soul-sucker with a proboscis. Over a decade in the making, Chadburn’s novel contains beautifully unique prose and haunting imagery. She joins Marrie to talk about it.
Along the way, they talk about how Chadburn struggled with structure, and how real-life serial killer William Pickton provided it. They talk about the different shapes novels can take, including Jane Allison’s Meander, Spiral, Explode and Ursula Le Guin’s The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction. They talk about the power of lists in fiction, how to engage in the writerly art of witnessing, and Lynda Barry’s What It Is. They discuss writing sex and violence, including the best advice Chadburn received from former guest and Tin House editor Steve Almond. And they discuss how being a good literary citizen may have made a difference in marketing this novel, and what it means to be a good literary citizen.
Melissa and Marrie are both fans of Tin House, their workshops, and their craft lectures. To discover some of those craft essays, click here. For the Tin House collection on love and sex, click here.
For more information on Writers on Writing and additional writing tips, visit our Patreon page. To listen to past interviews, visit our website.
(Recorded in December 2022)
Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Co-Host: Marrie Stone
Music and sound design: Travis Barrett
Erica Ferencik, author of Girl in Ice, and Aaron Phillip Clark, author of Blue like Me, join me at Sisters in Crime Orange County to talk about their new novels as well as the art, craft, and business of writing. If you’d like to watch the panel we did on Zoom, visit YouTube.
For more information on Writers on Writing and additional writing tips, visit our Patreon page. To listen to past interviews, visit our website.
(Recorded in November 2022)
Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Co-Host: Marrie Stone
Music and sound design: Travis Barrett
Sarah Manguso is an essayist, memoirist, and now a novelist. She’s written eight books, including 300 Arguments and Ongoingness (links to interviews regarding those books can be found in our archives). Very Cold People is her debut novel. It’s an Amazon Editors’ Pick, a National Indie Bestseller, A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and was named a best book of the year by numerous publications.
Manguso joins Marrie Stone to talk about her decision to write a novel. She discusses setting a book in her childhood town and creating a sense of place and atmosphere. She talks about writing violence as background instead of foreground, as well as writing about shame, class, mothering, and writing about large concepts in intimate and specific ways.
Manguso comes to the podcast from the Miami Book Fair. For more information, visit their website here.
For more information on Writers on Writing and additional writing tips, visit our Patreon page. To listen to past interviews, visit our website.
(Recorded in October 2022)
Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Co-Host: Marrie Stone
Music and sound design: Travis Barrett
Jennie Dunham has been a literary agent in New York, New York since May 1992. In August 2000 she founded Dunham Literary, Inc. She represents literary fiction and non-fiction for adults and children. Her clients have had both critical and commercial success. Books she has represented have appeared on the New York Times Best Seller lists and her clients have won numerous awards including: New York Times Best Illustrated Book, The Schneider Family Award, Boston Globe Horn Book Honor, and Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist. She has been a member of AALA (American Association of Literary Agents, formerly AAR) since 1993. She graduated from Princeton University with a degree in Anthropology and .has a master's degree in Social Work from New York University (although now she only practices with characters on the page).For more information on Writers on Writing and additional writing tips, visit our Patreon page. To listen to past interviews, visit our website.
(Recorded in September 2022)
Host: Barbara DeMarco-BarrettCo-Host: Marrie StoneMusic and sound design: Travis Barrett
When Reading Lolita in Tehran was published 20 years ago, Azar Nafisi had only lived in the United States for six years. Since then, she has watched the subtle and not-so-subtle signs of totalitarianism take root in America.
Read Dangerously: The Subversive Power of Literature in Troubled Times is Nafisi’s latest book. It’s an epistolary piece written to her father about the writers who Nafisi believe inform what our country, and world, are facing. From Plato to Baldwin, Atwood to Coates, Nafisi draws parallels between the treatment of women in Iran and the treatment of African Americans in the U.S. Since its release last March, the book has grown only more relevant with the Dobbs decision, the attack on Rushdie, the rising protests in her home country of Iran.
Nafisi joins Marrie Stone to talk about her decision to write this book. She discusses why governments are so threatened by writers, small acts everyday readers and writers can do, the responsibilities of the artist, how to avoid being didactic in fiction, the power of the epistolary structure and much more.
Nafisi comes to the podcast from the Miami Book Fair. For more information, visit their website here. For more information on Writers on Writing and additional writing tips, visit our Patreon page. To listen to past interviews, visit our website.
(Recorded in October 2022)
Host: Barbara DeMarco-BarrettCo-Host: Marrie StoneMusic and sound design: Travis Barrett
Maggie Ginsberg, author of the new novel Still True, talks with Barbara DeMarco-Barrett about her debut novel, writing in multiple POVs, the crossover from nonfiction to fiction, and so much more.
For more information on Writers on Writing and additional writing tips, visit our Patreon page. To listen to past interviews, visit our website.
(Recorded in November 2022)
Host: Barbara DeMarco-BarrettCo-Host: Marrie StoneMusic and sound design: Travis Barrett
Scott Turow, author of Suspect, talks with Marrie Stone about his new novel, creating enduring characters, writing from the first person POV of a young, bisexual female, creating compelling settings, and so much more.
Scott will appear at the Miami Book Fair on Saturday, November 19 in conversation with Craig Johnson and Brad Meltzer. The Miami Book Fair is the nation's largest gathering of writers and readers of all ages. It takes place Sunday, November 13 through Sunday, November 20. Please visit www.miamibookfair.com.
For more information on Writers on Writing and additional writing tips, visit our Patreon page (www.patreon.com/writersonwriting). To listen to past interviews, visit our website (www.writers-on-writing.com).
(Recorded in November 2022)
Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett Co-Host: Marrie Stone Music and sound design: Travis Barrett
Paul Bradley Carr, author of the new novel 1414 Degrees, talks with Barbara DeMarco-Barrett about his new novel, writing in multiple POVs, the crossover from nonfiction to fiction, opening a bookstore, and so much more.
A former U.S. Marine Corps officer and graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, Brian O'Hare's debut story collection Surrender brings war to life. These 17 interconnected stories explore manhood through the lens of fatherhood, football culture, the military, war, and more.
Brian joins Marrie Stone to talk about the art, craft, and business of fiction. He shares how training as an actor influenced his writing, the "architects and gardeners" in fiction, the importance of writing contests and creating a niche for yourself, how to market your work and so much more.
For more information on "Writers on Writing" and additional writing tips, visit our Patreon page.
Novelist Liska Jacobs, author of The Pink Hotel (FSG), talks with Barbara DeMarco-Barrett about influences, first drafts, bloglines, synopses, and the art, craft, and business of writing.
Liska Jacobs is also author of Catalina and The Worst Kind of Worst. She holds an MFA from the University of California, Riverside. Her essays and fiction have appears in The Rumpus, Los Angeles Review of Books, Literary Hub, the Millions, and The Hairpin, among other publications. The Pink Hotel is her third novel.
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(Recorded on September 27, 2022)
Music and sound design by Travis Barrett
Visit our Patreon page to become a supporter here. There are perks!
Barbara DeMarco-Barrett: www.barbarademarcobarrett.com
Marrie Stone: www.marriestone.com
Travis Barrett: https://travisbarrett.mykajabi.com
George Saunders joins Marrie to talk about his latest collection of stories (and first collection since Tenth of December in 2013). The nine stories in Liberation Day contain his signature humor and compassion, broken characters and strange landscapes. Time Magazine calls Saunders "the best short-story writer in English." He spends the hour sharing a bit of his process.
In addition to breaking down several of these stories and sharing their backstory and inspiration, Saunders talks about using the whole page, including elegant line and word spacing techniques, to render syntax and dialect for his characters. He discusses how his engineering background helps him as a writer, how to trust your intuition, and so much more.
If you find this or other interviews useful, consider supporting the show on Patreon.
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(Recorded on October 3, 2022)
Music and sound design by Travis Barrett
Barbara DeMarco-Barrett: www.barbarademarcobarrett.com
Marrie Stone: www.marriestone.com
Travis Barrett: https://travisbarrett.mykajabi.com
Novelist Celeste Ng, author of Our Missing Hearts and Barbara DeMarco-Barrett discuss her latest novel (NYT review, 10/2/22). They talk about world building, developing characters, reading for writers, and much more.
Celeste Ng is the author of three novels, Everything I Never Told You, Little Fires Everywhere, and Our Missing Hearts.Celeste grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Shaker Heights, Ohio. She graduated from Harvard University and earned an MFA from the University of Michigan (now the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan). Her fiction and essays have appeared in the New York Times, The Guardian, and many other publications, and she is a recipient of the Pushcart Prize, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, among other honors.
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(Recorded on 9/23/2022)
Music and sound design by Travis Barrett
We are now on Patreon! If you've gleaned useful tidbits over the years--24 years we've been broadcasting the show--consider becoming a supporter. Visit Patreon.com/writersonwriting
Barbara DeMarco-Barrett: www.penonfire.com
Marrie Stone: www.marriestone.com
Travis Barrett: https://travisbarrett.mykajabi.com
Literary agent Lori Galvin of Aevitas Creative Management represents both adult fiction (especially women's fiction and crime fiction) and non-fiction (memoir, food writing, and cookbooks). A few of her clients include Hannah Kirshner's Water, Wood, and Wild Things (Viking '21), Cambria Brockman's Tell Me Everything (Ballantine '19), and Wanda M. Morris's All Her Little Secrets (Morrow '21). Some projects have been optioned by A24 and Netflix.
Galvin joins Marrie to talk about changes in the publishing industry, what she looks for in effective query letters, the importance of the first five pages, the dos and don'ts of finding an agent, what you can do to improve your chances of finding a good match with an agent, and so much more.
If you find this or other interviews useful, consider supporting the show on Patreon.
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(Recorded on September 21, 2022)
Music and sound design by Travis Barrett
Barbara DeMarco-Barrett: www.penonfire.com
Marrie Stone: www.marriestone.com
Travis Barrett: https://travisbarrett.mykajabi.com
Novelist Antoine Wilson, author of Mouth to Mouth, and Barbara DeMarco-Barrett discuss setting, plotting, creating characters, ironic endings, and more. About Mouth to Mouth, one of Barack Obama's favorite books of 2022, Kirkus said, "A deliciously nasty morality play in the guise of a thriller."
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(Recorded on August 18, 2022)
Music and sound design by Travis Barrett
Support the show on Patreon.
Barbara DeMarco-Barrett: www.penonfire.com Marrie Stone: www.marriestone.com Travis Barrett: https://travisbarrett.mykajabi.com
Anthony Marra is the New York Times bestselling author of The Tsar of Love and Techno and A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, longlisted for the National Book Award. He joins Marrie Stone to talk about his latest novel, Mercury Pictures Presents, and how a book he began over eight years ago suddenly took on new and unsettling relevance in today's America.
Marra shares his struggles with writing this book, managing a large cast of characters and an enormous amount of research, as well as some general writing advice for novelists. He stresses the importance of filling your notebook with questions, reading broadly, writing daily and more.
If you find this or other interviews useful, consider supporting the show on Patreon.
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(Recorded on September 8, 2022)
Music and sound design by Travis Barrett
Barbara DeMarco-Barrett: www.penonfire.com
Marrie Stone: www.marriestone.com
Travis Barrett: https://travisbarrett.mykajabi.com
Isaac Fitzgerald, author of the new memoir, Dirtbag, Massachusetts: A Confessional, talks with Barbara DeMarco-Barrett about the art, craft, and business of writing his memoir.
Fitzgerald is the New York Times bestselling author of Dirtbag, Massachusetts. He appears frequently on The Today Show and is also the author of the bestselling children's book How to Be a Pirate as well as the co-author of Pen & Ink: Tattoos and the Stories Behind Them and Knives & Ink: Chefs and the Stories Behind Their Tattoos (winner of an IACP Award). His writing has appear in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Esquire, The Guardian, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, and numerous other publications. He lives in Brooklyn.
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(Recorded on July 15, 2022 via Zoom)
Music and sound design by Travis Barrett
Support the show on Patreon. Marrie and I appreciate every dollar.
Barbara DeMarco-Barrett: www.penonfire.com
Marrie Stone: www.marriestone.com
Travis Barrett: https://travisbarrett.mykajabi.com
In 1957, when Amy Turner was four years old, her father stepped out onto the ledge of his high-rise hotel room and threatened to jump. More than 50 years later, Turner faced her own near-death experience when she was struck by a truck in a pedestrian crosswalk. Those two incidents, happening over half a century apart, led Turner to understand the legacy of anxiety and depression she inherited from her family, and the role of trauma in forming her identity.
Turner joined Marrie Stone to talk about her memoir, On the Ledge, as well as coming to writing later in life, how being an attorney impacted her writing, and how she knew when it was time to publish this book. Turner shares the struggles she had with structure, knowing what material to cut, and how to deal with time gaps in her story. She also discusses choosing She Writes Press (a small press who publishes women writers), foregoing the need for an agent, marketing her memoir and choosing a publicist.
For more information about the show, as well as additional writing tips, prompts, and perks, visit our Patreon page here.
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(Recorded on August 27, 2022)
(Broadcast date: August 29, 2022)
Music and sound design by Travis Barrett
Barbara DeMarco-Barrett: www.penonfire.com
Marrie Stone: www.marriestone.com
Travis Barrett: https://travisbarrett.mykajabi.com
Jacinda Townsend, author of the novel Mother Country (Graywolf), and Barbara DeMarco-Barrett discuss her new book and the setting of Morocco, alternating POVs, slavery, writing with the senses, and more.
During her Fulbright year, on a layover in Morocco, Jacinda discovered the city of Marrakech and fell in love. Later that same year, on a trip to Northern Mali, she also first witnessed modern-day slavery: that incident inspired the research that eventually took her to Mauritania, where she met with escaped slaves and anti-slavery activists and began the work that would become her newly published novel, Mother Country (Graywolf, 2022). Mother Country is told in the voices of an American woman struggling with infertility who kidnaps a young Moroccan girl, and the young mother, escaped from Mauritanian slavery, who loses her. Jacinda is also the author of Saint Monkey (Norton, 2014), which is set in 1950’s Eastern Kentucky and is a love letter to a Black community that has all but disappeared. Saint Monkey won the 2015 Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for best fiction written by a woman and the James Fenimore Cooper Prize for that year’s best historical fiction. Saint Monkey was also the 2015 Honor Book of the Black Caucus of the American Library Association.
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(Recorded via Zoom on July 28, 2022)
Music and sound design by Travis Barrett
Check out our Patreon page!
Barbara DeMarco-Barrett: www.penonfire.com Marrie Stone: www.marriestone.com Travis Barrett: https://travisbarrett.mykajabi.com
Tom Perrotta joins Marrie to talk about his latest novel, Tracy Flick Can't Win. The author of nine previous works of fiction, Perrotta wrote Election, The Leftovers, Little Children and Mrs. Fletcher, all of which have been adapted to screen.
The conversation covers the #metoo movement and how feminism and the women's rights movement has evolved since Election came out 25 years ago. Perrotta discusses how he approaches politics in fiction, and what he failed to see coming in this country despite setting his novels in America's suburbs. He also shares insights into his writing process including the importance of drawing a distinct time-frame around your novel, writing from various points of view, how writing for the screen has helped his fiction, and so much more.
For more information about the show, as well as additional writing tips, prompts, and perks, visit our Patreon page here.
Download audio.
(Recorded on August 11, 2022)
(Broadcast date: August 15, 2022)
Music and sound design by Travis Barrett
Barbara DeMarco-Barrett: www.penonfire.com
Marrie Stone: www.marriestone.com
Travis Barrett: https://travisbarrett.mykajabi.com
Susan Straight, author of the novel, Mecca, which Michael Connelly called "a masterpiece," talks with Barbara DeMarco-Barrett about her new novel and how it came to be. Susan Straight was born in Riverside, CA, and still lives there with her family. She’s passionate about home, California, the Santa Ana River, the foothills and the deserts, and has been writing about southern California and the inland area for forty years. From her kitchen window, she can see the hospital where she was born, which her three daughters find kind of hilarious and pathetic; most days, she walks her dog Angel beside the Santa Ana River as she has since childhood, and then past the classrooms at Riverside City College, where she wrote her first short story, at 16, which is also kind of hilarious, but hopeful. She has written about the people of California for her new memoir, In the Country of Women, based on women’s stories told for five generations to Straight and her daughters, in driveways and trucks, at parks and funerals. She’s published that memoir, eight novels, and two books for children. Her short stories and essays have been published everywhere from The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and The Guardian to Alta, The Believer, McSweeneys, Zoetrope, Reader’s Digest, Real Simple, and Family Circle. She’s been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Lannan Prize for Fiction, a California Gold Medal for Fiction, and the Kirsch Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Los Angeles Times Book Prizes.
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(Recorded on July 12, 2022)
Music and sound design by Travis Barrett
Support the show on Patreon! Barbara DeMarco-Barrett: www.penonfire.com Marrie Stone: www.marriestone.com Travis Barrett: https://travisbarrett.mykajabi.com
Monique Roffey is the author of six works of fiction and the 2012 memoir, With the Kisses of His Mouth. The British-Tobagonian author's latest book, The Mermaid of Black Conch, was released by a small press during the height of the 2020 pandemic. But, much like Roffey's outcast mermaid, the novel is enjoying a second life, winning prestigious awards, getting picked up by Knopf in the United States, and garnering praise in the press.
Roffey joins Marrie Stone to talk about the novel's unlikely journey, from her decision to launch a crowdfunding campaign in 2019 to the book's ultimate award-winning success. She also discusses writing compelling sex scenes, how Jungian analysis changed the trajectory of her writing, using television-style treatments for her manuscripts, why she needs 20 strong scenes before she begins writing, and so much more.
For more information about the show, as well as additional writing tips, prompts, and perks, visit our Patreon page here.
Download audio.
(Recorded on July 29, 2022)
(Broadcast date: August 1, 2022)
Music and sound design by Travis Barrett
Barbara DeMarco-Barrett: www.penonfire.com
Marrie Stone: www.marriestone.com
Travis Barrett: https://travisbarrett.mykajabi.com
Memoirist Tad Friend, author of In the Early Times, and Barbara DeMarco-Barrett discuss getting to the truth in memoir, what to do when you're asked to record your own audio book (and don't want to), revision, backstory vs. front story, and so much more.
Tad Friend has been a New Yorker staff writer since 1998. An excerpt of this book was published in an April issue, which is when we became aware of the memoir and knew we had to have Tad on the show.
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(Recorded via Zoom on July 7, 2022)
Music and sound design by Travis Barrett. More typewriter music on Spotify: Just My Type
Consider becoming a Patreon supporter. Now that we're no longer at the station, it's a bit more complicated producing shows so every donation helps more than you know. Here's the link.
Barbara DeMarco-Barrett: www.penonfire.com Marrie Stone: www.marriestone.com Travis Barrett: https://travisbarrett.mykajabi.com
Dwyer Murphy is the editor-in-chief of CrimeReads, Literary Hub‘s crime fiction vertical and a popular destination for thriller readers. A former litigator, Murphy is the author of the debut novel An Honest Living (publishing on July 26, 2022 by Viking).
Murphy joins Marrie Stone to talk about writing crime fiction and what he's learned about crime writing in his years working in the industry. He gives insights into New York in the early 2000s and setting a novel before the social media and technology boom. He also talks about creating recurring characters, how to maintain suspense, and other aspects of creating compelling crime fiction.
For additional writing tips, prompts, and perks, visit our Patreon page here.
Download audio.
(Recorded on July 7, 2022)
(Broadcast date: July 18, 2022)
Music and sound design by Travis Barrett
Barbara DeMarco-Barrett: www.penonfire.com
Marrie Stone: www.marriestone.com
Travis Barrett: https://travisbarrett.mykajabi.com
Julie Clark, author of the new novel, The Lies I Tell, talks with Barbara DeMarco-Barrett about how she found her way to the domestic thriller genre, why she finds female con artists fascinating, her revision process, how she finds time to teach full-time and get her writing done, and so much more.
Julie Clark is the New York Times bestselling author of The Last Flight. It has earned starred reviews from Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, and Library Journal, and the New York Times has called it “thoroughly absorbing.” It’s been named an Indie Next Pick, a Library Reads Pick, and a Best Book of 2020 by Amazon Editors and Apple Books. Her debut, The Ones We Choose, was published in 2018 and has been optioned for television by Lionsgate. She lives in Los Angeles with her two sons and a golden doodle with poor impulse control.
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(Recorded in June, 2022)
Support the show on Patreon.com/WritersonWriting!
Music and sound design by Travis Barrett
Barbara DeMarco-Barrett: www.penonfire.com
Marrie Stone: www.marriestone.com
Travis Barrett: https://travisbarrett.mykajabi.com
Eric Nguyen's debut novel, Things We Lost to the Water, was one of President Obama's favorite books of 2021. It's recently out in paperback.
Eric joined Marrie Stone to talk about understanding his own history through the lens of fiction, how he came to know his characters, writing about a well-known city in a new light, how bilingualism serves his fiction, and so much more.
If you're a regular listener or like this episode, check out our new Patreon page, where we offer weekly writing tips and prompts, as well as other goodies for our listeners.
Thanks for listening!
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(Recorded on June 24, 2022)
Music and sound design by Travis Barrett
Barbara DeMarco-Barrett: www.penonfire.com
Marrie Stone: www.marriestone.com
Travis Barrett: https://travisbarrett.mykajabi.com
Erica Ferencik, author of Girl in Ice, talks with Barbara DeMarco-Barrett about her new novel, creatures that can freeze and thaw out alive, why she's a plotter, writing the book she wished existed, and more.
Erica Ferencik is an award-winning novelist who writes adventure novels featuring women who brave not only internal struggles but face extreme challenges in their environment: remote forests, steaming jungles, and desolated ice scapes. To research GIRL IN ICE, (Scout Press, an imprint of Simon & Schuster), she explored the desolate iceberg-packed fjords of Greenland.
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(Recorded in June 2022)
Music and sound design by Travis Barrett
Barbara DeMarco-Barrett: www.penonfire.com Marrie Stone: www.marriestone.com Travis Barrett: https://travisbarrett.mykajabi.com
Visit our Patreon page at www.patreon.com/writersonwriting
Alexis Schaitkin joins Marrie Stone to talk about her latest novel, Elsewhere (to be published by Celadon on June 28, 2022).
The speculative fiction story explores the perils and pleasures of motherhood, how mothers judge one another, how women can often disappear into motherhood — and into aging — and how sometimes they can find themselves again. The setting is evocative and the issues are profound.
Schaitkin shares several backstories behind the novel, including the inspiration for this hauting fictional village, her many attempts to find her way into the story, how she let go of her expectations for the novel, and how she once again managed a large cast of characters. For novelists, there's mounds of advice for character development and structure. For speculative fiction writers, there are insights for creating effective rules for your world. For Schaitkin's fans, there's fun backstories on how she constructs her novels and the themes she remains interested in exploring.
Schaitkin's first novel, Saint X, was a NYT Notable Book of 2020 and is being adapted into a miniseries by Hulu.
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(Recorded on June 9, 2022)
Music and sound design by Travis Barrett
Barbara DeMarco-Barrett: www.penonfire.com
Marrie Stone: www.marriestone.com
Travis Barrett: https://travisbarrett.mykajabi.com
Steve Almond, author of All the Secrets of the World (Zando, 2022) joins Barbara DeMarco-Barrett to discuss his new novel and why he wanted to write a social novel, how it took him five tries to get it right, and much more on the process of writing. Steve is the author of twelve books of fiction and nonfiction, including the New York Times bestsellers Candyfreak and Against Football. His recent books include William Stoner and the Battle for the Inner Life, which is about reading and writing and the struggle to pay attention to our lives, and Bad Stories, a literary investigation of the 2016 election. For four years, Steve hosted the New York Times Dear Sugars podcast with Cheryl Strayed. His short stories have been anthologized widely, in the Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize, Best American Erotica, and Best American Mysteries series. His new book is a novel called All the Secrets of the World.
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(Recorded on May 27, 2022, via Zoom audio)
Music and sound design by Travis Barrett
Check out his typewriter compositions at Just My Type on Spotify
Barbara DeMarco-Barrett: www.penonfire.com
Marrie Stone: www.marriestone.com
Travis Barrett: https://travisbarrett.mykajabi.com
Find us on Patreon.com/writersonwriting
Novelist and short story writer Jess Walter joins Marrie Stone to talk about his latest collection, The Angel of Rome. Jess is the author of seven novels (including The Cold Millions and Beautiful Ruins), two collections of short stories, and a non-fiction book. He is the recipient of the Edgar Allan Poe Award (Citizen Vance), and was a finalist for the National Book Award (The Zero).
Walter talks about assembling the collection, choosing these 12 thematic stories out of 40 or 50 choices. He discusses effective humor, the difference between sentiment and sentimentality, and how to avoid cliches and stereotypes. He also talks about his ability to access elderly characters, writing a Gen X collection while not identifying completely with Gen X, and so much more.
For more information about Jess Walter, upcoming events, and more visit his website here.
We also invite you to check out our new Patreon page, where we offer weekly writing tips and prompts, as well as other goodies for our loyal listeners. This week's tip was inspired by this conversation.
Thanks for listening!
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(Recorded on June 2, 2022)
Music and sound design by Travis Barrett
Barbara DeMarco-Barrett: www.penonfire.com
Marrie Stone: www.marriestone.com
Travis Barrett: https://travisbarrett.mykajabi.com
Jeffrey Fleishman, author of the brand new novel, Good Night, Forever (Blackstone), and Barbara DeMarco-Barrett talk about setting your book where you live, side characters, crime fiction and social issues, and so much more.
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Jeff Fleishman is foreign and national editor at the Los Angeles Times. Previously, he was a senior writer on film, art and culture. A 2002 Nieman fellow at Harvard University, Fleishman was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in feature writing. A longtime foreign correspondent, he served as bureau chief for The Times in Cairo and Berlin, and was previously based in Rome for the Philadelphia Inquirer. He has been a finalist for the Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting and a finalist for the Center for Public Integrity’s Award for Outstanding International Investigative Reporting. He is the author of three novels: “My Detective,” “Shadow Man” and “Promised Virgins: A Novel of Jihad.”
(Recorded on April 27, 2022.)
Music and sound design by Travis Barrett
Barbara DeMarco-Barrett: www.penonfire.com Marrie Stone: www.marriestone.com Travis Barrett: https://travisbarrett.mykajabi.com
Immersion journalist A.J. Jacobs returns to the show to talk with Marrie Stone about his latest book, The Puzzler: One Man's Quest to Solve the Most Baffling Puzzles Ever, from Crosswords to Jigsaws to the Meaning of Life. Along the way he shares mounds of writing advice, including the importance of approaching your work with a curious mindset, how finding a toehold in your writing can help you expand, how constraints lead to creativity and so much more.
A.J. also shares why, after all his many books, the writing process is still difficult and how he overcomes his resistance. Check out this essay for a sneak peek into that conversation.
Beyond the great writing advice, A.J. also shares his infectious love for puzzles and the many wonderful backstories and interviews behind the writing of this book. Geeks, puzzlers, and writers alike will take much away from this conversation.
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(Recorded on May 4, 2022)
Music and sound design by Travis Barrett
Barbara DeMarco-Barrett: www.penonfire.com
Marrie Stone: www.marriestone.com
Travis Barrett: https://travisbarrett.mykajabi.com
Gary Phillips, author of One-Shot Harry, is my guest. Gary has been a community activist, labor organizer and has published various novels, comics, short stories as well as editing several anthologies including Orange County Noir (which is how we met; I have a story in the Akashic anthology) and the award-winningThe Obama Inheritance: Fifteen Stories of Conspiracy Noir. Violent Spring,first published in 1994 was named in 2020 one of the essential crime novels of Los Angeles. He was a senior story editor on FX’s Snowfall, about crack and the CIA in 1980s South Central where he grew up. His newest novel is One-Shot Harry, which has been receiving quite a bit of love from the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere. On the show we discuss why he set his novel in the early 60s, loglines, creating a photographer protagonist, and so much more.
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(Recorded on May 5, 2022)
Music and sound design by Travis Barrett
Barbara DeMarco-Barrett: www.penonfire.com Marrie Stone: www.marriestone.com Travis Barrett: https://travisbarrett.mykajabi.com
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Robert Kerbeck joins Marrie Stone to talk about his memoir, Ruse: Lying the American Dream from Hollywood to Wall Street. From corporate espionage to uncomfortable encounters with O.J. Simpson, Kevin Spacey and others, Kerbeck weaves an incredible tale of deception and redemption, peppered with Forrest Gump-like brushes with fame.
Kerbeck shares both his incredible story, as well as mounds of writing advice and publishing wisdom—from the benefits of reading plays to insights on how to market your book after publication. Memoir writers will take away insights on how to treat chapters as short stories, the benefits of writing short and tight, how writing groups can help your career, the critical role of networking and more.
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(Recorded on March 11, 2022)
(Podcast on May 9, 2022)
Visit our Patreon page here for additional benefits.
Music and sound design by Travis Barrett
Barbara DeMarco-Barrett: www.penonfire.com
Marrie Stone: www.marriestone.com
Travis Barrett: https://travisbarrett.mykajabi.com
Kim Dower, West Hollywood poet laureate, instructor at UCLA Extension and Antioch LA, and book publicist, talks with Barbara DeMarco-Barrett about her latest volume, I Wore This Dress for You, Mom (Red Hen Press). They talk about inspiration, on not getting an MFA, what to do when you hit a wall, and more.
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(Recorded in April 2022)
Music and sound design by Travis Barrett
Visit our Patreon page at www.patreon.com/writersonwriting
Barbara DeMarco-Barrett: www.penonfire.com
Marrie Stone: www.marriestone.com
Travis Barrett: https://travisbarrett.mykajabi.com
Annie Hartnett, author of the 2017 novel Rabbit Cake, returns with what The Millions calls "One of the most anticipated books of 2022." Part mystical, part mystery, Unlikely Animals is filled with quirky characters, problematic animals, and chatty ghosts.
Hartnett joins Marrie Stone to talk about the importance of following your obsessions and establishing a strong writing routine, as well as good tips on how to do it. (Hint: check out this article by Aimee Bender.) Hartnett also talks about mistakes she made in finding an agent and how to avoid them. Perhaps best of all, she shares some insightful tips for how to approach the revision process.
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(Recorded on April 7, 2022)
(Broadcast on April 24, 2022)
Writers on Writing is now available on Patreon. Check out our fun perks and special offers for members. For the first ten patrons who join, we're offering the benefits of the next highest tier for one month.
Music and sound design by Travis Barrett
Barbara DeMarco-Barrett: www.penonfire.com
Marrie Stone: www.marriestone.com
Travis Barrett: https://travisbarrett.mykajabi.com
T. Jefferson Parker, author of the new novel, A Thousand Steps (Forge) talks with Barbara DeMarco-Barrett about the book he's wanted to write for years, finding his voice, rituals, and more.
This interview was originally recorded as a Sisters in Crime Zoom event (which was Zoom-bombed, but that's another story). If you'd like to view the interview (minus the Zoom-bomb), visit YouTube and search out the Sisters in Crime Orange County channel.
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We are now on Patreon. If you're a loyal listener and would like to show your appreciation, any amount helps. Visit Patreon.
(Recorded in March and April, 2022)
Music and sound design by Travis Barrett
Barbara DeMarco-Barrett: www.penonfire.com Marrie Stone: www.marriestone.com
Travis Barrett: https://travisbarrett.mykajabi.com
In 2007, Tom Sleigh was invited to the Middle East by Munir Akash — who translated works of the famous Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish — to tell a more nuanced and emotional story of the Palestinian and Syrian refugees. Shortly after his arrival, war broke out again in Lebanon and Sleigh's time quickly turned from an archivist poet to an eye-witness journalist.
Sleigh has written eleven collections of poetry, as well as essays and prose on his experiences in war-torn countries, his own lifelong battle with a deadly disease, and other topics. Sleigh is a Distinguished Professor in the MFA program at Hunter College.
He joins Marrie Stone to talk about his latest collection, The King's Touch, published by Graywolf Press. He talks about the current crisis in Ukraine, finding the authority to tell stories about refugees, how most poems take 80 or 90 drafts, how the personal can be married to the political and more.
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(Recorded on March 13, 2022)
Music and sound design by Travis Barrett
Barbara DeMarco-Barrett: www.penonfire.com
Marrie Stone: www.marriestone.com
Travis Barrett: https://travisbarrett.mykajabi.com
Novelist Francine Prose talks with Barbara DeMarco-Barrett about her novel, The Vixen. They also talk about writing about writers, writing during Covid, using McCarthyism as an allegory for Trumpism, and more.
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(Recorded in February 2022)
Music and sound design by Travis Barrett
Barbara DeMarco-Barrett: www.penonfire.com
Marrie Stone: www.marriestone.com
Travis Barrett: https://travisbarrett.mykajabi.com
Charlotte McConaghy, author of the novels, Migrations and Once There Were Wolves, talks with Barbara DeMarco-Barrett about wolves' role in bringing the forests back to life, writing in the close first person, and defying categories.
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(Recorded on Feb. 17, 2022)
Music and sound design by Travis Barrett
Barbara DeMarco-Barrett: www.penonfire.comMarrie Stone: www.marriestone.comTravis Barrett: https://travisbarrett.mykajabi.com
Lee Cole grew up in Kentucky and set his debut novel, Groundskeeping, in his childhood home. He joins Marrie Stone to talk about establishing a strong sense of place within the novel, tackling dialect, and the physical and psychological distance required to write about home.
As a graduate of the University of Iowa's MFA program, Cole talks about the lessons he learned there, including the importance of staying in scene, establishing a strong sense of interiority in his characters, and more.
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Record date: February 22, 2022
Broadcast date: March 28, 2022
Lee Kravetz—author of Supersurvivors: The Surprising Link Between Suffering and Success and Strange Contagion: Inside the Surprising Science of Infectious Behaviors and Viral Emotions and What They Tell Us About Ourselves—takes on the life and legacy of Sylvia Plath in his debut novel, The Last Confessions of Sylvia P.
Kravetz joins Marrie Stone for a deep dive into the enduring influence of Sylvia Plath and her work, and how she—along with Anne Sexton—pioneered the genre of confessional poetry, leading in part to punk rock and the memoir as we know it today. The Last Confessions of Sylvia P. is at once a compelling mystery, a psychological study, a slice of historical literary fiction, and an homage to some of the greatest poets of the mid-20th century.
Kravetz spent years in the publishing industry. He decided on an advanced degree in psychology instead of an MFA. And he opted to leave nonfiction behind in favor of fiction. He shares all the insights and wisdom he's gained along the way, as well as mounds of writing advice. Listeners will learn the importance of putting on their shoes, and how a dog determined Kravetz next project, among many other great stories.
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Record date: February 28, 2022
Broadcast date: March 14, 2022
This show was especially fun for me because I got to talk with Mark Wish, editor of Coolest American Stories 2022, an anthology that includes my story, "Blue Martini," along with stories I loved by two other writers in the book, Mary Taugher and David Ebenbach.
More than 125 of Mark Wish's short stories have appeared in print venues such as Virginia Quarterly Review, The Georgia Review, Triquarterly, Best American Short Stories and Pushcart Prize 2000. His three novels, published by two small presses and Putnam, have been praised by the Los Angeles Times and The Wall Street Journal.
Mary Taugher’s short stories have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Narrative Magazine, Santa Monica Review, Epiphany, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, and Redivider. She has worked as a journalist in Ohio and Southern California, and as a writer and editor for public relations, political consulting, and fundraising agencies. She lives in San Francisco, where she is working on a collection of short stories.
David Ebenbach is the author of nine books of fiction, poetry, and non-fiction, including his recent novel How to Mars. He lives with his family in Washington, DC, where he teaches at the Center for Jewish Civilization and promotes student centered teaching through the Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship. More at davidebenbach.com.
More about show host B. DeMarco-Barrett at www.penonfire.com.
Learn more about COOLEST AMERICAN STORIES 2022 at www.coolestamericanstories.com The anthology is considering stories for the 2023 edition.
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(Recorded: Feb 11, 2022)
Music and sound editing by Travis Barrett
Nigerian author Chigozie Obioma was twice shortlisted for the Booker Prize for his novels The Fishermen (2015) and An Orchestra of Minorities (2019). With fluidity in several languages, and immersion in disparate cultures and literature, Obioma brings his unique voice to the page. He also tackles challenging points of view, from a madman in The Fishermen to the chi—the Igbo personal life force or guardian angel—in An Orchestra of Minorities.
Obioma teaches in the creative writing program at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and brings the strength of his experience in teaching and writing, as well as the wisdom he's gained in straddling different cultures and languages to the conversation. He joins Marrie Stone to talk about his childhood in Nigeria, how his native language impacts his work, choosing challenging points of view, and the remarkable way he sold his first novel.
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(Broadcast date: February 28, 2022)
Sara Gran, author of The Book of the Most Precious Substance (Dreamland Books) talks with B. DeMarco-Barrett about her new erotic thriller, revising, the book within the book and why she chose to start a publishing company to publish the novel rather than going through an agent and traditional publisher.
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(Broadcast date: Feb. 21, 2022)
Weike Wang planned to pursue a career in medicine. She obtained a bachelor's degree in chemistry and a doctorate in public health, both from Harvard University. But she also earned an MFA from Boston University and it changed the trajectory of her career. Joan is Okay is her second novel. Her debut novel, Chemistry, won the Pen/Hemingway Award in Fiction and a Whiting Award in 2018.
Joan is Okay tackles issues of race, culture, gender, family and economics, all set against the backdrop of the pandemic. Wang joined Marrie Stone to talk about unlearning how to write like an academic, finding the voice for an elusive character, how writing in the collage structure paid unexpected dividends, and more.
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(Record date: January 27, 2022
Broadcast date: February 14, 2022)
Benjamin Percy, author of The Unfamiliar Garden, talks with Barbara DeMarco-Barrett about his new book and the writing life.
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(Recorded on January 28, 2022)
Music and sound editing by Travis Barrett
In the spirit of The Lost Daughter, Tessa Hadley's latest novel explores one of the biggest taboos of western culture—women who leave. The British author has penned eight novels and three collections of short stories. She's known in the industry as "a writer's writer," admired by contemporaries like Zadie Smith, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Hilary Mantel and Anne Enright.
Hadley joins Marrie Stone to talk about Free Love. She discusses some of the enduring themes in her fiction, the freedom of setting a novel in the 1960s, how she tackles her sex scenes, and why this novel came easily to her when others mostly don't.
Hadley came late to publishing, her first novel making its debut when the author was 46. She discusses the advantages of publishing later in life, and how she approaches her different roles as novelist versus short story writer.
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(Record date: January 13, 2022)
(Broadcast date: January 31, 2022)
Debut novelist, April Dávila, author of 142 Ostriches, published by Kensington, talks with Barbara DeMarco-Barrett about taking your time writing your book, how a seed of experience turns into a story, and writing setting and place.
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(Recorded on January 4, 2022)
Music and sound editing by Travis Barrett
Kathryn Schulz lost her father in 2016, only a year after falling in love with fellow New Yorker staff writer Casey Cep, whom she would marry in 2018. The confluence of tragedy and discovery moved her to write the memoir, Lost and Found, a book full of personal accounts of loss, discovery and the mystery of what conjoins them. It leads the reader not only through Schulz's experiences, but the more universal experience of loss and revelation by using philosophy, science, poetry and other disciplines. The result is a beautiful meditation on the ordinary experiences of everyday life, as well as the profound mysteries of love and loss.
Schulz joins Marrie Stone to talk about the memoir, how she settled on its structure, how she's built the deep well of scientific, philosophical, spiritual and literary knowledge she drew from, and more.
Schultz is a staff writer for theNew Yorker Magazine. She won the Pulitzer Prize for her 2015 article, "The Really Big One." She's also the author of the 2010 book, Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error.
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(Broadcast date: January 17, 2022)
T. Jefferson Parker, author of A Thousand Steps (Forge), released on Jan. 11, 2022, talks with Barbara DeMarco-Barrett about his new novel, why he wanted to write a novel based in 1968, point of view and tense, merging fact with fiction, and so much more.
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(Recorded via Zoom on Jan. 6, 2022)
Music and sound editing by Travis Barrett
Jacquelyn Mitchard, author of The Good Son, talks with Barbara DeMarco-Barrett about her new novel. Included in their talk is coming up with the midpoint, the 10 or 11 big events in a novel, and balancing narrative with scene.
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(Recorded on Dec. 22, 2021)
Music and sound editing by Travis Barrett
Contact: www.palmspringsnoir.com
Donna Hilbert is the author of nine collections of poetry and two works of fiction. She's taught extensively in private workshops and classroom settings. She joins Marrie Stone to discuss her latest collection, Threnody, and how grief has informed her work for over two decades. She talks about knowing when a poem is finished, the importance is composing with pen and paper, various types of poems, and other insightful advice for poets and writers.
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(Broadcast date: December 17, 2021)
The Mirassou family has been growing grapes and crafting wines in California since 1854, making them one of America's oldest winemaking families. Steven Kent Mirassou joins Marrie Stone to talk about his debut book, Lineage: Life and Love and Six Generations in California Wine.
Part insight into the wine industry and part memoir, the book is a philosophical exploration into what makes a meaningful life and a sensual homage to food, wine, family, and community. Mirassou shares his twin passions (literature and wine) and how he managed to successfully combine them. He talks about structuring the many varied strands of narrative, finding a coherent structure for the book, accessing difficult memories, and much more.
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(Broadcast date: December 3, 2021)
Gary Shteyngart joins Marrie Stone to talk about his latest novel, Our Country Friends. Recognizing the severity of the pandemic in March 2020, Shteyngart abandoned another novel to address what was unfolding in our nation in real time. Our Country Friends has been described as Chekov meets "The Big Chill."
Shteyngart talks about writing a novel contemporaneously with world events, how Russian literature informed the work, when he knows it's time to abandon a novel, avoiding stereotypes and more. He also shares his recent piece in the New Yorker about his botched circumcision, and how that event impacted the novel.
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(Broadcast date: November 22, 2021)
I've been thinking about Barbara Seranella, a wonderful mystery writer who passed away in 2007. I met her when we were both members of the Orange County Fictionaires. I wanted to hear her voice again and wanted to share this interview with our listeners.
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(Broadcast date: Jan. 12, 2006)
Elizabeth Strout, author of the new novel, Oh, William!, joins Barbara DeMarco-Barrett to talk about voice, character, point of view, and so much more.
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(Recorded on Oct 19, 2021)
Music and sound design by Travis Barrett.
In addition to winning the Pulitzer Prize in fiction, and a number of other awards, Robert Olen Butler is a master of teaching craft and process. He's taught fiction workshops for decades, most recently at Florida State University. In 2001, Butler released a 34-hour online craft intensive (available on YouTube) which follows him in every step of the process of writing a short story. He's also the author of the craft book From Where You Dream.
In this episode, Butler shares some of the highlights of his many years of teaching, including the two epiphanies every novel should contain, the benefits of having a bad memory, how to use the "compost of your imagination," how to approach writing like a method actor, and other insights and advice. Butler also reads from his latest novel, Late City.
Butler will be in conversation with Marrie Stone at the Miami Book Fair on Wednesday, November 17, at 12:00 p.m. (ET). You can learn more here.
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(Broadcast date: October 27, 2021)
This is a show I recorded in 2001 with the late poet Diane DiPrima when her memoir, Recollections of My Life as a Woman, was published. City Lights just released Spring and Autumn Annals, which made me remember this interview with Diane. Perhaps you heard it when it was broadcast (and podcast) 20 years ago, not long after Writers on Writing began.
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(Broadcast date: June 2001)
Ha Jin moved to the U.S. from China in his late 20s. He joins Marrie Stone to talk about his immigrant experience, and some of the things he experienced as a child growing up in China, including the Cultural Revolution, his own family’s experience with book burning, and how the 1989 massacre in Tiananmen Square solidified his decision to remain in the United States.
The conversation also covers a lot of craft issues. The importance of knowing the ending of a novel before you begin, the challenges of writing a linear novel (with little to no backstory), how to tackle dialogue, and other advice he imparts to his students.
Jin learned English through the lens of literature, and that’s made all the difference in his writing. A Song Everlasting is published by Pantheon Books.
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(Broadcast date: October 16, 2021)
Lauren Groff, author of MATRIX, joins Marrie Stone to talk about the novel. Author of six books of fiction, Groff's work has won The Story Prize and was twice a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction. She talks about the surprising inspiration for the novel, her time spent in a convent with Benedictine nuns, her research process for this 12th century novel, and so much more.
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(Podcast date: October 1, 2021)
Megan Abbott, author of the new novel, The Turnout, talks with Barbara DeMarco-Barrett about plot, structure, and writing dark fiction.
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(Broadcast date: Sept. 22, 2021)
Musical intro/outro/interludes by Travis Barrett.
Debut novelist Tracey Lange explores issues of familial loyalty, the corrupt power of family secrets, and the possibility of redemption in her novel We Are the Brennans.
She joins Marrie Stone to talk about the novel, the complexities of writing about shame, and choices a character might make that may surprise an audience. She also shares craft wisdom she's learned along the way, including writing from different points of view, passing the baton of dialogue between characters, the importance of writing groups, and much more.
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(Broadcast date: September 15, 2021)
S.A. Cosby, author of Razorblade Tears and Blacktop Wasteland, talks with Barbara DeMarco-Barrett about his new book, writing noir, and...spoilers, but they come 15 minutes before the end of the interview and are carefully announced. You'll have time to get away if you don't want to hear them.
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(Broadcast date: Sept. 8, 2021)
Music (intro, outro, intersticial pieces...) by Travis Barrett
Aimee Bender is the author of six books, including both novels and short story collections. Her latest novel, The Butterfly Lampshade, came out in July of 2020 and was listed by Publisher’s Weekly as one of the best novels of the year.
Bender joins Marrie Stone to talk about the book’s inspiration and construction. In the process, she exposes the creative fodder that’s gifted to us by our own childhoods. She talks about how imposing time limitations on her writing allows her access to scary places, and how to listen to words that "shimmer." Those words and phrases can be the keys that guide your book in the right direction.
Bender teaches creative writing at USC, has taught several other fiction workshops, and written several essays on the craft. She brings that wealth of experience and reflection to this interview to impart a lot of wisdom for both beginning and advanced writers.
Download audio. (Broadcast date: September 1, 2021)
Poet Honoree Fanonne Jeffers produced a stunning debut novel. Before its publication, The Loves Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois was already named by Oprah as her next book club pick. The novel, clocking in at 816 pages, is a sweeping ancestral saga chronicling the American South from before the Civil War to present day.
Scholar W.E.B. Du Bois wrote about the problem of race in America, and what he called “Double Consciousness,” the sensitivity that every African American possesses to survive. The novel's protagonist feels these words deeply as she navigates her history while trying to create her future.
Jeffers joins Marrie Stone to share the history behind the novel, how it grew to over 800 pages, and her struggles along the way. She talks about her attempt to shed her poetic voice, and then reclaim it again. She also hints that she may not be done with these characters.
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(Broadcast date: August 18, 2021)
Palm Springs Noir (Akashic) contributors Barbara DeMarco-Barrett, Alex Espinoza, and Rob Roberge talk with literary maestro Corey Roskin about writing noir fiction.
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(Recorded via Zoom on August 5, 2021)
Music by Travis Barrett.
Tod Goldberg, author of The Low Desert, a new collection of short fiction, talks with Barbara DeMarco-Barrett about the art, craft, and business of writing short stories.
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(Broadcast date: August 11, 2021)
Music by Travis Barrett.
Hear Us:Writing from the Inside During the Time of COVID is a collection of over 50 essays, poems, pieces of fiction, and artwork from—or about—inmates serving time in U.S. correctional facilities. The incarcerated are infected by COVID at a rate five times higher than the general population. Crowded conditions, lack of sanitation, and inadequate medical care all contribute to the desperate conditions inside our prison system. Alongside COVID, our national conversation regarding race, racism, and a long overdue reckoning was also taking place behind bars.
Exchange-for-Change, a nonprofit organization, offers writing courses in prisons and runs letter exchanges between incarcerated students and writers studying on the outside. They partnered with Disorder Press, a sibling owned and operated independent press, to publish this anthology. Alongside living with—and dying of—COVID in our correctional institutions, inmates write about the Black Lives Matter movement, general prison life, and what the past year was like behind bars.
Kathie Klarreich (Executive Director for Exchange-for-Change), Mik Grantham (owner of Disorder Press) and Tina Barrett (sister of a former incarcerated student of Exchange-for-Change who died of COVID last year, and a contributor to the anthology) join Marrie Stone to talk about the anthology and the organization that supported its creation.
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(Broadcast date: August 4, 2021)
Dan Duling, scriptwriter for Pageant of the Masters (Laguna Beach, CA) and award-winning playwright talks with Barbara DeMarco-Barrett about the pageant and playwriting.
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(Recorded on August 3, 2021)
Music by Travis Barrett
Halley Sutton, author of The Lady Upstairs, talks with Barbara DeMarco-Barrett about her noir thriller and about the art, craft, and business of writing.
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(Broadcast date: July 28, 2021)
Music by Travis Barrett.
Even casual readers will be familiar with Shirley Jackson's classic works: The Haunting of Hill House, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, and her iconic and widely anthologized short story "The Lottery." Stephen King called The Haunting of Hill House "one of the most important horror novels of the 20th century."
In
the course of her two-decade career, Jackson wrote six novels, two
memoirs, and over 200 short stories. A film based loosely on her life,
starring Elisabeth Moss, was released last year (though the portrayal is
far from accurate).
Although Jackson died in
1965, her work is enjoying a renaissance. Thanks in part to her eldest
son, Laurence Jackson Hyman, several of her books and stories are now
being made into movies. Hyman published two story collections
posthumously and now, for the first time, has revived a collection of
Jackson's letters dating from 1938 to 1965.
Hyman joins Marrie Stone to talk about The Letters of Shirley Jackson, his mother's legacy, the woman behind the thrillers, and domestic life and memories with Jackson growing up. We also learn about Jackson's husband, Stanley Hyman, a staff writer for the New Yorker, professor at Bennington College, and literary critic. Shirley Jackson fans won't want to miss this intimate insider's look inside her life. Download audio.
(Broadcast date: July 21, 2021)
Chris Offutt, author of the new novel, The Killing Hills (Grove Press) talks with Barbara DeMarco-Barrett about his new work, as well as the art, craft, and business of writing.
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(Broadcast date: July 14, 2021
Musical intro/outro and interludes by Travis Barrett.
Two years ago, Jane Alison set out to redefine how writers might
think about structure in their work. Most novelists are trained on the
narrative arc (better known as Freytag’s Pyramid)—arguing that a story should begin
with an enticing incident, build to a climax, and fall into some form of
resolution. By examining patterns in nature, Alison argues there are many other
ways novelists can structure a story. Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Patterns in Narrative provides eight examples, with plenty of supporting literary evidence.
She joins Marrie Stone to talk about how she’s used these methods in her own
work, what inspired her to seek out these structures, and how novelists can use
these techniques to their creative advantage. For further reading, check out Alison's book recommendation, Exercises in Style, by Raymond Queneau.
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(Broadcast date: June 25, 2021)
Patricia Engel, author of Infinite Country, talks with Barbara DeMarco-Barrett about writing about immigration, class, and the art, craft, and business of writing.
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(Broadcast date: June 30, 2021)
Joan Silber is the author of nine books of fiction. She joins Marrie Stone to talk about the most recent, Secrets of Happiness, which came out last month. They talk about what Marrie has coined as “The Silber Method" of storytelling, which uses the short story structure to create a novel-length work.
Silber shares her proclivity for being a miniaturist working on a big canvas, and how she discovered that form. She talks about how travel has influenced her writing, her research methods, organizing her material, generating ideas, creating effective dialogue, and so much more.
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(Broadcast date: June 23, 2021)
Mary Camarillo, author of the debut novel, The Lockhart Women, talks with Barbara DeMarco-Barrett about the challenges of being a debut novelist, why her novel is set during the OJ Simpson trial, and more.
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(Broadcast date: June 16, 2021)
"Lionel Shriver’s contrarianism has made her famous, but fiction is what she believes changes minds,” said the New Yorker last year. Since her 2003 breakout novel, We Need to Talk About Kevin (later turned into the 2011 film starring Tilda Swinton), Shriver has pushed people’s political buttons. She’s a pro-Brexit, anti-woke, #MeToo-skeptical Democrat who eats one meal a day, dislikes babies, and refuses the comforts of either heat or air conditioning.
Her novels have tackled tricky American issues such as school shootings, an ongoing healthcare crisis, morbid obesity, and the widening wealth gap. Her latest novel, Should We Stay or Should We Go, confronts aging and western civilization’s obsession with immortality. Kay and Cyril, a couple not keen on facing the indignities of growing old, made a middle-aged suicide pact to occur on Kay’s 80th birthday, which happens in March of 2020. What will they decide when the day arrives? Shriver explores every last possibility.
She joins Marrie Stone to talk about the book, writing contemporaneously with the pandemic, and constructing a novel with several diverse outcomes. They have a candid discussion about aging, death, suicide, and the ethics of behind every decision along the road to the bitter end.
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Broadcast date: June 9, 2021
Lisa Scottoline, author of the novel, Eternal, talks with Barbara DeMarco-Barrett about the art, craft, and business of writing.
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(Broadcast date: June 2, 2021)
Music by Travis Barrett
When essayist Jo Ann Beard came on the show in 2018, she swore she was done publishing books. While some writers knock out novels every year, Beard takes decades to assemble a small collection. But she realized these past 23 years had produced nine pieces and, together, they worked.
The consequence of taking this much time at craft are essays so distilled, the reader feels like an ant under Beard’s sun-pierced glass. Not all the pieces are pure nonfiction. Beard blends factual events with imagined inner lives to create experiences so searing, it’s difficult not to flinch. As a writer, Beard never flinches. She takes us all the way into a young woman’s final moments with Dr. Kevorkian. She forces us to jump from a burning building. We endure the agony of a beloved dog’s last hours.
Beard joins Marrie Stone to talk about Festival Days, a book the NYT calls "ferocious" by an author they call a "towering talent." She is as compassionate an interview subject as she is a writer. She takes us inside her mind, her creative decisions, and her private obsessions. Enjoy the ride.
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(Broadcast date: May 26, 2021)
Jean Hanff Korelitz, author of The Plot, talks with Barbara DeMarco-Barrett about the art, craft, and business of writing.
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(Broadcast date: May 19, 2021)
Music by Travis Barrett. Find him on Spotify or here.
A.J. Jacobs is an author, journalist, lecturer and human guinea pig. He has written several New York Times bestsellers that combine memoir, science, humor, and a dash of self-help.
A.J. read the Encyclopedia Britannica in its entirety (The Know It All), spent a year following every last biblical commandment (The Year of Living Biblically), assembled the world’s largest family tree (It’s All Relative), and got himself into superhuman shape (Drop Dead Healthy). He joins Marrie Stone to talk about his latest gratitude challenge wherein he undertook thanking every person responsible for getting his morning cup of coffee (Thanks a Thousand).
A.J. talks about the genesis of his ideas, how he keeps himself organized, and how he pushes himself into successive George Plimpton-esque feats of psychological strength. He shares mounds of writing and journalistic wisdom, as well as lots of backstories and humorous insights.
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(Broadcast date: May 12, 2021)
Jonathan Small, writer, editor, and host of the podcast Write About Now, talks with Barbara DeMarco-Barrett about the art, craft, and business of writing.
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(Broadcast date: May 5, 2021)
Music by Travis Barrett.
Ethan Rutherford returns to talk with Marrie about his latest collection, Farthest South. He shares how his writing has changed since his last publication, letting projects go, following his instincts, and how different writers get their work done (Ethan writes about 47 words a day to his wife’s several thousand). He talks about the advantages of working with a small publishing house (A Strange Object), and how he was able to incorporate images into the stories. Their conversation covers craft concerns, the power of fairy tales, and the general state of our world.
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(Broadcast date: April 28, 2021)
Willy Vlautin, author of The Night Always Comes, talks with Barbara DeMarco-Barrett about the art, craft, and business of writing.
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(Broadcast date: April 21, 2021)
Music by Travis Barrett. Find him on Spotify, Patreon, etc.
Joshua Mohr, author of the memoir, Model Citizen, talks with Barbara DeMarco-Barrett at the Pen on Fire Speaker Series & Salon on March 25, 2021 about his new book and about writing memoir. This event was recorded live on Zoom.
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(An abbreviated version of this interview aired on KUCI FM on April 7, 2021)
Musical intro, outro, and interludes by Travis Barrett. Find him on Soundcloud, Spotify, and Patreon.
For forty years, Trinidad, Colorado was known amongst locals, and those in the transgender community, as the “sex-change capital of the world.” An estimated 6,000 gender reassignment surgeries took place in this remote ranch town between 1969 and 2010.
Veteran journalist and award-winning author Martin J. Smith joins Marrie Stone to talk about his latest, Going to Trinidad: A Doctor, a Colorado Town, and Stories from an Unlikely Gender Crossroads. He discusses finding the subjects of the book, and their willingness to open the most private aspects of their lives to him. He talks about researching Trinidad and Dr. Stanley Biber, a larger-than-life figure who perfected the surgery after serving as a trauma medic during the Korean War. And he discusses writing about this most vulnerable and misunderstood population from an outsider’s perspective, the challenges he faced, and how he overcame them. Smith also talks about how his own mindset shifted as a result of this project.
Throughout the conversation, there’s wonderful advice for aspiring journalists, nonfiction writers, and those committed to the art of storytelling.
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(Broadcast date: April 14, 2021)
Don and Mimi Galvin
epitomized the mid-20th century American dream. After WWII, Don's work
with the U.S. Air Force took the family to Colorado where the Galvins
raised 12 children spanning the entire baby boom generation. But even as
the perfect family was being assembled, it began to disintegrate. Six
of the ten boys were diagnosed with schizophrenia. The family was
plagued by sexual abuse, clergy abuse, a murder/suicide, and other
stressors.
Robert Kolker joins Marrie Stone to talk about Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family.
He talks about finding the Galvins, and their decision to open their
lives—and their painful story—up to him. He shares how he tackled the
complicated science and research behind this misunderstood mental
illness. He also discusses how he managed an overwhelming cast of characters—and the immense
tragedies they endured—while delivering a compelling,
impossible-to-resist narrative. He provides great advice to
aspiring journalists about how to launch their careers, what to look for
in a story, and much more.
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Record date: March 3, 2021
Broadcast date: March 31, 2021
Russell Shorto, author of Smalltime: A Story of My Family and the Mob (Norton) talks with Barbara DeMarco-Barrett about the art, craft, and business of writing memoir, especially when you had no intention of doing so. Shorto is the author of the bestselling The Island at the Center of the World, Amsterdam, and Revolution Song.
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(Broadcast date: March 24, 2021)
Intro, outro, and musical interludes by Travis Barrett. Find more of his music on Spotify and Soundcloud.
Los Angeles-based literary agent Betsy Amster talks with Barbara Demarco-Barrett about the business of writing.
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(Broadcast date: March 10, 2021)
Julia Cooke joins Marrie to talk about her latest narrative nonfiction book, Come Fly the World. She follows three primary, and two secondary, retired Pan-Am stewardesses who flew for the airline in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. At once a nostalgic romp through the heyday of glamorous air travel, the book is also a chronicle of mid-century America and the larger world. Crews ferried soldiers in and out of Vietnam, and hit the feminist and Civil Rights movements head on. They endured hijackings, attacks by the Vietnamese military, and a general air of sexism and racism.
Julia talks about finding her subjects, structuring their stories, and the renewed relevance of this book sixty years after it took place.
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(Record date: February 10, 2021)
Russell Banks returns to the show to talk about his latest novel, Foregone. He shares how his childhood upbringing and young adulthood have fed his fiction, and why this novel feels more autobiographical than most. He also talks about a wild week spent with Jack Kerouac in the 1960s, and experiencing the fall of a literary hero. He discusses how this novel couldn't have been written at any other point in his life, why his characters differ from his readers (and the importance of that difference), a tennis showdown with Chang-rae Lee, and so much more.
There's a lot of advice for writers, including how to surprise your readers, why focusing on contradictions in your characters is more important than consistency, the necessity of learning how to read, and his insights into point of view.
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(Record date: February 25, 2021)
Chang-rae Lee is a Korean-American novelist and a professor of creative writing at Stanford University. He is the author of five previous novels: Native Speaker
(1995); A Gesture Life (1999); Aloft (2004); The Surrendered, which was a
Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; and On Such a Full Sea (2014). My Year Abroad,
published by Riverhead Books, is his latest. He joins Marrie Stone to
talk about creating a sensationalistic novel, in every sense of the
word. He talks about how he surprises himself (and his readers), writing
food, sex, torture and much more.
Karen Russell talks about her prescient novel, Sleep Donation.
Written in 2014, the book that was intended to be whimsical satire on
an insomnia pandemic has become a dark commentary on the times we're
living through. Russell talks about the strange ways the book has taken
on new meaning, serendipitous experiences she encountered while
publishing it, and so much more.
Download audio of Chang-rae Lee's Interview.
(Broadcast date: February 24, 2021)
(Record date: February 8, 2021)
Download audio of Karen Russell's Interview.
(Broadcast date: February 24, 2021)
(Record date: January 26, 2021)
Katherine Seligman is a journalist and author in San Francisco. As a reporter, she’s focused on social issues, from homelessness, mental health and end of life issues to the city’s boom and bust cycles. But she’s also written about everything else, from self-appointed graffiti curators, urban coyotes and embryonic sex selection to what her kids learned growing up in Haight Ashbury.
Katherine joins Barbara DeMarco-Barrett to talk about her novel, At the Edge of the Haight, as well as writing, craft, and process.
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(Broadcast date: February 17, 2021)
Before receiving her Masters from the Program in Writing at UCI, Rebecca Sacks moved to Israel, spending time understanding Israeli and Palestinian culture, learning Hebrew and Arabic, and immersing herself in the cultures, their people, and their conflicts. Her debut novel, City of a Thousand Gates, tackles these tensions from a variety of points of view.
Sacks joins Marrie Stone to talk about her writing process, accessing her characters, keeping 29 points of view balanced and organized, rendering sex and violence on the page, and so much more. She brings all her MFA wisdom and experience to the interview, as well as her personal experience living abroad, getting lost, and finding herself again.
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Record date: January 29, 2021
Broadcast date: February 10, 2021
Tommye Blount, finalist of the National Book Award in poetry last year, joins Marrie Stone to talk about his collection, Fantasia for the Man in Blue. They are daring poems about race, power, desire, sex, and a redefinition of beauty. Blount's work captures the experience of being black and queer in Michigan, about an encounter with the Michigan police, his role as a son, and his observations as a poet.
He talks about his journey into poetry, finding his voice, using media and art in his work, and all the poets who influenced him along the way.
(Disclaimer: Some topics in this interview are intended for mature audiences. There are references to sex and pornography. Listener discretion is advised.)
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(Record date: January 16, 2021)
Lynell George, author of A Handful of Earth, A Handful of Sky: The World of Octavia E. Butler, published by Angel City Press, talks with Barbara DeMarco-Barrett about her new biography of Octavia E. Butler.
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(Broadcast date: Feb. 3, 2021)
Musical intro, outro and interludes by Travis Barrett. Find him on Spotify and Patreon.
For twenty years, George Saunders has taught a select group of graduate students in Syracuse’s MFA program. Relying on 19th century Russian masters, Saunders breaks down the prose—sentence by sentence, line by line—to show students how it’s done. Now he’s broadened his audience. George acts as literary tour guide through seven short stories by four Russian authors in his latest, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain.
George joins Marrie Stone for their third interview, imparting his gentle wisdom to writers about the art and craft of storytelling. He also teaches us how to read deeper and closer. And, through it all, how reading (and writing) often inspires us to lead more empathetic, intentional, and meaningful lives by inhabiting other viewpoints. Conversations with George leave one feeling not only smarter, but better. You can check out their other interviews in the blog’s archives (Tenth of December, 2013 and Lincoln in the Bardo, 2017).
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Record date: January 18, 2021
Broadcast date: January 27, 2021
Vicki Hendricks, called the "Queen of Noir," is Barbara DeMarco-Barrett's guest for the entire hour. Hendricks's novels include Miami Purity, Iguana Love, and Cruel Poetry. She also has a story in Miami Noir (Akashic) and other noir anthologies.
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(Broadcast date: January 20, 2021)
Musical intro and outro and interludes by Travis Barrett. Find him on Spotify.
Argentinian author Mariana Enriquez knows horror first hand. Born in 1973, three years before the U.S.-backed Dirty War that rained state-sponsored terror down on its citizens for seven years, Enriquez grew up in a world where death squads were common and neighbors disappeared.
Enriquez joins Marrie Stone to talk about her second collection of short stories, The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, published in 2009 in Argentina, but translated and released in the U.S. this month. One of the stories in that collection, “Our Lady of the Quarry,” appeared in the New Yorker last month. She shares her complicated childhood, her obsessions with the horror genre, and how American literature influenced her writing. She also talks about working with her translator, America's interest in South American literature, and more.
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(Broadcast date: January 13, 2021)
Ken Layne, author of Desert Oracle, Volume 1: Strange True Tales from the American Southwest, talks with Barbara DeMarco-Barrett about the art, craft, and business of writing, along with fairies and unexplainable goings on in the desert.
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(Broadcast date: December 23, 2020)
Musical intro, outro and interludes by Travis Barrett. Find his music on Spotify and also find him on Patreon.
Anthony Horowitz might be the most prolific and successful author living in the U.K. today. He’s murdered more characters, fictionally, than any other living writer. Creator of the Alex Rider series, commissioned by the Conan Doyle estate to write two new Sherlock Holmes mysteries and the Ian Fleming estate to write a James Bond novel, Horowitz has penned over 50 books. He’s also written for television and screen.
Horowitz joins Marrie Stone to talk about the second in his latest series, Moonflower Murders. He was on the show in 2017 to talk about the first, Magpie Murders. In addition to exploring Horowitz’s obsessive writing personality, they chat about magic, the inspiration of art, and the problems with the recent HBO series The Undoing. They also talk about our current socio-cultural climate and the unseen traps writers can fall into without warning. For mystery writers, Anthony’s insights and advice are invaluable. For fans of his fiction, you’ll enjoy stepping behind the pages to see how the magic is made.
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(Broadcast date: December 30, 2020)
Unrequited love and unconsummated romance is the subject of Michele Morano’s latest memoir-in-essays, Like Love. These fourteen essays explore romantic friendships, dangerous crushes, familial infatuations, and the complicated emotions surrounding parental love. Morano’s essays feel at once daring, vulnerable, insightful, and full of familiar emotions most of us dare not name. She joins Marrie Stone to talk about love, longing, and desire, but also about craft, technique, and the art of writing an effective essay.
What separates an essay from an anecdote? What’s the difference between therapeutic writing and art? What are some effective techniques for accessing old memories? What’s the sign that you’re stumbling into something worthwhile to write about? Morano talks about all this and more.
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(Broadcast date: December 16, 2020)
Literary agent Betsy Amster talks with Barbara DeMarco-Barrett about publishing.
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(Broadcast date: Dec. 9, 2020)
Musical intro/outro/interludes by Travis Barrett. Find him on Spotify and Soundcloud.
Amor Towles, author of A Gentleman in Moscow and The Rules of Civility, talks with Barbara DeMarco-Barrett about his novels, short stories, and the art, craft, and business of writing.
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(Broadcast date: Nov. 25, 2020)
Musical intro, outro, and interludes by Travis Barrett. You can find him on Spotify and Soundcloud.
Nicole Krauss may be best known for her novels, which include Man Walks into a Room, History of Love, Forest Dark, and Great House. But several of her short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Best American Short Stories, the Atlantic, and elsewhere. For the first time, she's published a collection of her stories and joins Marrie Stone to talk about them. To Be a Man explores issues of gender in its many forms—parenthood, childhood, romantic partnerships, and friendships. The men in her stories are fathers, sons, soldiers, artists, and lovers with human fallibility and the desire for redemption.
Krauss talks about how motherhood changed her perspective on gender issues, how films and other art forms inform her work, the reasons she's reluctant to teach writing, and so much more.
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(Broadcast date: December 2, 2020)
(Record date: October 14, 2020)