Writers on Writing

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 discusses writing 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-BarrettHost: Marrie StoneMusic 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-BarrettHost: Marrie StoneMusic 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-BarrettHost: Marrie StoneMusic 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-BarrettHost: Marrie StoneMusic 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-BarrettHost: Marrie StoneMusic 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-BarrettHost: Marrie StoneMusic 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-BarrettHost: Marrie StoneMusic 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-BarrettHost: Marrie StoneMusic 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 is the 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-BarrettHost: Marrie StoneMusic 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-BarrettHost: Marrie StoneMusic 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.)