First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing

Edward Hirsch is a celebrated poet and peerless advocate for poetry. Edward Hirsch’s first collection of poems, For the Sleepwalkers received the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award from New York University and the Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets. His second collection, Wild Gratitude, won the National Book Critics Award. Since then, he has published eight additional poetry collections and five prose books on poetry, including A Poet’s Glossary and How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry. He is currently the president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Megan Pinto is the author of Saints of Little Faith, her debut collection.  Her poems can be found in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Ploughshares, Lit Hub and elsewhere. She has won the Anne Halley Prize from the Massachusetts Review and an Amy Award from Poets & Writers, as well as scholarships and fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, the Port Townsend Writers’ Conference and Storyknife.  Megan lives in Brooklyn and holds an MFA in poetry from Warren Wilson College. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Tracy O'Neill is the author of the memoir Woman of Interest. Her novels include The Hopeful, one of Electric Literature's Best Novels of 2015; and Quotients, a New York Times​ New & Noteworthy Book, TOR Editor's Choice, & Literary Hub Favorite Book of 2020.  In 2015, she was named a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree and long-listed for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. In 2012, she was awarded the Center for Fiction's Emerging Writers Fellowship. She holds an MFA from the City College of New York; and an MA, an MPhil, and a PhD from Columbia University. She teaches at Vassar College. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Charles Baxter is the author of the novels The Feast of Love, nominated for the National Book Award, First Light, Saul and Patsy, Shadow Play, The Soul Thief, and The Sun Collective, and the story collections Believers, Gryphon, Harmony of the World, A Relative Stranger, There’s Something I Want You to Do, and Through the Safety Net. His stories have appeared in several anthologies, including The Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, and The O. Henry Prize Story Anthology. He has won the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story. Baxter lives in Minneapolis.  His new novel is Blood Test. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Edwidge Danticat is the author of several books, including Breath, Eyes, Memory, an Oprah Book Club selection, Krik? Krak!, a National Book Award finalist, The Farming of Bones, The Dew Breaker, Brother, I’m Dying, Create Dangerously, Claire of the Sea Light, The Art of Death, Everything Inside, a Reese’s Book Club selection and National Book Critics Circle Awards winner. She is also the editor of The Butterfly's Way: Voices from the Haitian Dyaspora in the United States, Best American Essays 2011, Haiti Noir, and Haiti Noir 2. She has written seven books for children and young adults. Her new essay collection is We’re Alone. She teaches at Columbia University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Elizabeth Strout is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Lucy by the Sea; Oh William!, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize; Olive, Again; Anything Is Possible, winner of the Story Prize; My Name Is Lucy Barton; The Burgess Boys; Olive Kitteridge, winner of the Pulitzer Prize; Abide with Me; and Amy and Isabelle, winner of the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction and the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize. She has also been a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Orange Prize in London. She lives in Maine. Her new novel is Tell Me Everything. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Richard Powers is the author of fourteen novels, including Bewilderment, The Overstory, and Orfeo.  He is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, the Pulitzer Prize, and the National Book Award.  He lives in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains. His new novel is called Playground. We talked about the ocean, plot and games, the structure of Playground, beguiling endings, water, play, the game Go, science and spirituality, immortality and talking to the dead. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dr. Alan Townsend is a scientist, author and Dean of the Franke College of Forestry & Conservation at the University of Montana. His writing has appeared in multiple national venues, including The Washington Post and Scientific American. Alan's nonfiction book is called This Ordinary Stardust.  He is a highly cited author of more than 140 peer reviewed articles, and received his bachelor’s degree from Amherst College, and a Ph.D. in Biological Sciences from Stanford University.  He is an Aldo Leopold Leadership Fellow, a Google Science Communication Fellow and was featured in the Let Science Speak documentary film series. We talked about science, what we can learn from grief, stardust, our challenges facing our mortality, a promise to write a book and the pressure that may or may not place on a writer, and the beautiful cover of the book. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Natalie Goldberg is the author of fifteen books, including Writing Down the Bones, which has sold over one million copies and has been translated into fourteen languages.  She co-edited a collection of talks by revered zen teacher Katherine Thanas, The Truth of This Life.  Her new book is Writing on Empty: A Guide to Finding Your Voice.   We talked about writer’s block versus losing the regular routines that sustain writing while the Covid pandemic was in full swing, her family history, writing exercises, Zen, and friendship. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Lorrie Moore is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English at Vanderbilt University. She is the recipient of a Lannan Foundation Fellowship, as well as the PEN/Malamud Award and the Rea Award for her achievement in the short story. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jessica Shattuck is The New York Times Bestselling author of the novels Last House, The Women in the Castle, a New York Times Bestseller, #1 Indie Next Pick, and winner of The New England Book Award; Perfect Life, and The Hazards of Good Breeding, which was a New York Times Notable Book, a Boston Globe Editor’s Choice Best Book of the Year, and a finalist for the 2003 PEN/Winship Award. Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Guernica, Glamour, Open City, and The Tampa Review among other publications. She lives in Massachusetts with her husband and three children. We talked about research, setting her novel in two time periods, oil in Iran, the CIA, Vermont, how idealism and activism may change as we age, and patience in the long journey of writing a novel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kaliane Bradley is a British-Cambodian writer and editor based in London. Her short fiction has appeared in Somesuch Stories, The Willowherb Review, Electric Literature, Catapult, andExtra Teeth, among others. She was the winner of the 2022 Harper’s Bazaar Short Story Prize and the 2022 V.S. Pritchett Short Story Prize. Her novel is called The Ministry of Time. This was recorded live at Waterstone’s bookstore in London at the Crouch End locations. We talked about a book about time travel with no time travel, polar exploration, being a British-Cambodian writer and identity, dating for time travelers, and the structure of Bradley's novel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Carl Phillips is the author of 17 books of poetry, most recently Scattered Snows, to the North and Then the War: And Selected Poems 2007-2020, which won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize. His other honors include the 2021 Jackson Prize, the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry, the Kingsley Tufts Award, a Lambda Literary Award, the PEN/USA Award for Poetry, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Library of Congress, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Academy of American Poets. Phillips has also written three prose books, most recently My Trade is Mystery: Seven Meditations from a Life in Writing; and he has translated the Philoctetes of Sophocles. He lives on Cape Cod, in Massachusetts. We talked about how he puts a collection together, vulnerability and guardedness, To the Lighthouse, relationships, darkness, truth and revelation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jodi Picoult is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of 29 novels, including By Any Other Name, Mad Honey, Wish You Were Here, and My Sister's Keeper, and, with daughter Samantha van Leer, two young adult novels, Between the Lines and Off the Page.  Picoult’s books have been translated into thirty-four languages in thirty-five countries.  Picoult also wrote five issues of DC Comic's Wonder Woman. Picoult is the co-librettist for the stage musical adaptation of her two Young Adult novels.  Picoult lives in New Hampshire with her husband. They have three children. We talked about Emilia Bassano as the author of many of Shakespeare’s most popular place, women’s voices being erased, making a bigger table so everyone can be represented in theatre, how Jodi found her love of plays, structuring her novel By Any Other Name, and her love for Gone With the Wind. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Abby Geni is the author of the novels The Wildlands and The Lightkeepers and the short story collections The Last Animal and The Body Farm. Her books have been translated into seven languages and have won the Barnes & Noble Discover Award and the Chicago Review of Books Awards, among other honors. Geni is a faculty member at StoryStudio Chicago and frequent Visiting Associate Professor of Fiction at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. We talked about emotional intelligence, teaching creative writing, science and investigation, the perfect murder (fictional that is), following a story to see where it goes, writing from a place of mystery, and moments that make you cry. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jill Ciment is the author of Small Claims, a collection of short stories and novellas; The Law of Falling Bodies, Teeth of the Dog, The Tattoo Artist, Heroic Measures, Act of God, The Body in Question, and 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. Ciment is a professor emeritus at the University of Florida. She lives in Gainesville, Florida, and New York City. We talked about truth and memory, #metoo, changing cultural norms, interrogating her life and her relationship, having a happy marriage with her husband who was more than 30 years older than her, and finding certainty (or not) when putting words on the page. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kevin Barry is the author of the novels Night Boat to Tangier, which was longlisted for the Booker Prize, Beatlebone, and City of Bohane as well as three story collections including Dark Lies the Island. His stories and essays have appeared in the New Yorker, Granta and elsewhere. He also works as a playwright and screenwriter lives in County Sligo, Ireland.  His new novel is The Heart in Winter. We talked about the Irish in Butte, Montana, watching and writing westerns, Wuthering Heights, voice and character, Kevin’s writing process, comedy, and Annie Proulx. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Amitava Kumar is a writer and journalist. He was born in Ara, and grew up in the nearby town of Patna, famous for its corruption, crushing poverty and delicious mangoes. Kumar is the author of several books of non-fiction and four novels.  His new novel is My Beloved Life. Kumar lives in Poughkeepsie, in upstate New York, where he is the Helen D. Lockwood Professor of English at Vassar College. He serves on the board of the Corporation of Yaddo. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ada Limón the author of six books of poetry, including The Carrying, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her book Bright Dead Things was nominated for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Her most recent book of poetry, The Hurting Kind, was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize. As the 24th Poet Laureate of The United States, her signature project is called You Are Here and focuses on how poetry can help connect us to the natural world. This episode also features Michael Kleber-Diggs and Erika Meitner, both of whom have poems in the collection and are former guests of First Draft. We talk about nature poetry, fear, hope and grief, creating a collection, and inspire people to write their own You are Here poems. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Tracy Chevalier is the author of 11 novels and the editor of one short story anthology.  Her books include Girl with a Pearl Earring, Falling Angels, Remarkable Creatures, At the Edge of the Orchard, and A Single Thread.  She has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia and lives in London.  Her new novel is The Glass Maker. We talked about feeling writing in the body, Tracy’s research process, adding a touch of magical realism to her work, her writing influences for this novel in particular, her female protagonist, glass making, travel and more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices