From debut authors to Pulitzer Prize winners, Writers on Writing tackles a little of everything — novels, short stories, memoir, poetry, and more, as well as interviews with agents and publishers.
Unlike other shows dedicated to discussing books, we focus on the art, craft, and business of writing. Writers appreciate the opportunity to talk about the artistic elements of their job — the thousands of decisions that must be made to produce a manuscript. There’s no aspect of craft, creativity, and publishing we don’t explore.
We’ve hosted well over 1,500 authors on the show including Elizabeth Strout, S.A. Cosby, Ann Patchett, Amor Towles, and George Saunders. Expert advice from some of the industry’s top writers allows us to offer a show that’s been called “your own personal MFA program” (with no financial strain).
Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Host: Marrie Stone
Music and sound editing by Travis Barrett
Subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Amazon, Spotify, Stitcher, Google, or your favorite podcast app.
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EPISODES
(2001 - present)
Book Coach Jennie Nash, author of “Blueprint for a Book”
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; and Read 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 your 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, author of PLAYHOUSE
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, author of "The House of Eve"
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, author of SCORCHED GRACE
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 on her latest collection, “White Cat, Black Dog”
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, author of EVERYBODY KNOWS
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
Dani Shapiro, author of “Still Writing: The Perils and Pleasures of a Creative Life”
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, author of I Have Some Questions For You
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
Tiffany McDaniel, author of “On the Savage Side”
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
Rerun…Melissa Bank, author of The Wonder Spot
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
Jessamine Chan, author of “The School for Good Mothers”
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, author of Refuse to be Done: How to Write and Rewrite a Novel in Three Drafts
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
V.V. Ganeshananthan, author of “Brotherless Night”
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, author of The Forever Witness: How DNA and Genealogy Solved a Cold Case Double Murder
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
Rachel Kauder Nalebuff, editor of “Our Red Book”
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
Lisa Cupolo, author of Have Mercy on Us
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, author of “A Tiny Upward Shove”
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
Novelists Erica Ferencik & Aaron Phillip Clark
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, author of “Very Cold People”
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
Literary agent Jennie Dunham
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-Barrett
Co-Host: Marrie Stone
Music and sound design: Travis Barrett