First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing

Robert Macfarlane is a British writer internationally known for his writing on nature, people, and place.  His best-selling books include Underland, Landmarks, The Old Ways, The Wild Places and Mountains of the Mind.  They have been translated into more than 30 languages and won many prizes around the world and have been adapted for film, music, theatre, radio, and dance.  He has also written oper...

Andrew Porter is the author of four books, including 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, an IndieBound “Indie Next” selection, and the San Antonio Express News’s “Fictional Work of the Year,” the short story collection The Dis...

André Alexis was born in Trinidad and grew up in Canada. His novel, Fifteen Dogs, won the 2015 Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. His internationally acclaimed debut, Childhood, won the Books in Canada First Novel Award, the Trillium Book Award, and was shortlisted for the Giller Prize and the Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. In 2017, he was awarded the Windham-Campb...

Salar Abdoh is the author of Out of Mesopotamia, Tehran at Twilight, Opium, and The Poet Game, and editor and translator of the celebrated crime collection, Tehran Noir.  He divides his time between New York City and Tehran, Iran. He is a professor at the City University of New York’s City College campus in Harlem, where he teaches in the English Department’s MFA program and also directs undergrad...

Lori Ostlund is the author of After the Parade, which was a Barnes & Noble Discover pick and a finalist for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and the Ferro-Grumley Award. Her story collection, The Bigness of the World, won the 2008 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, the California Book Award for First Fiction, and the Edmund White Debut Fiction Award, and was a Lambda Finalist and a...

  Ethan Rutherford’s new novel is The North Sun or the Voyage of the Whaleship Esther. He is the author of two story collections—Farthest South and The Peripatetic Coffin and Other Stories—and for these works has been named a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, a finalist for the John Leonard Prize and CLMP’s Firecracker Award, received honorable mention for...

Shelley Read’s debut novel, Go as a River, is an international bestseller that has been translated into thirty-four languages and is in development for film with the Mazur Kaplan Company. Winner of the High Plains Book Award for Fiction, the Reading the West Book Award for Debut Fiction, and le Prix de l’Union Interalliée, Go as a River is also a Sunday Times bestseller, Goodreads Choice Award fin...

Madeleine Thien is the author of four books, including Do Not Say We Have Nothing, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, The New York Review of Books, and elsewhere. She lives in Montreal.  Her new novel is The Book of Records. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Lauren Groff is a three-time National Book Award finalist and The New YorkTimes–bestselling author of the novels The Monsters of Templeton, Arcadia, Fates and Furies, Matrix, and The Vaster Wilds, and the celebrated short story collections Delicate Edible Birds and Florida. She has won The Story Prize, the ABA Indies’ Choice Award, France’s Grand Prix de l’Héroïne, and the Joyce Carol Oates Prize,...

Kate Folk is the author of the novel Sky Daddy and the short story collection Out There. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in the New Yorker, n+1, the New York Times, Granta, and The Baffler, among other venues. A former Stegner Fellow, she’s also received fellowships and residencies from MacDowell, the Headlands Center for the Arts, and Willapa Bay AiR. She lives in San Francisco. Learn...

Bob Johnson is an award-winning short story writer and graduate of the lowa Writers’ Workshop. His work has been published by The Common, Philadelphia Stories, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, The Barcelona Review, and elsewhere. His story "The Continental Divide" was named Short Story of the Year in The Hudson Review. He lives in South Bend, Indiana. His collection is called The Continental Divide. Learn more ab...

Lynn Steger Strong is the author of the novels Hold Still, Want, Flight and The Float Test. Her non-fiction has appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, New York, The Paris Review, Time, and elsewhere. She has taught writing at The Pratt Institute, Fairfield University, Catapult, and Columbia University. She was born and raised in South Florida. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit me...

Vauhini Vara has been a reporter and editor for The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and the New York Times Magazine, and is the prize-winning author of The Immortal King Rao and This is Salvaged. She lives in Fort Collins, Colorado. Her new nonfiction book is called Searches. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda is a literary translator.  Born in Tokyo, and raised in Texas, she is the co-translator of Ryke Akutagawa’s Kappa and the translator for Yuko Tsushima’s Wildcat Dome.  She lives in New York City. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Lynne Tillman is a novelist, short story writer, and cultural critic. Her novels are Haunted Houses; Motion Sickness; Cast in Doubt; No Lease on Life, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; American Genius, A Comedy, and Men and Apparitions. Her nonfiction books include The Velvet Years: Warhol’s Factory 1965–1967, with photographs by Stephen Shore; Bookstore: The Life and Times of...

Colum McCann is the Dublin-born author of thirteen books. He has won numerous international honors including the U.S National Book Award and an Oscar. His work has been published in over 40 languages. He is the co-founder of Narrative 4, a global non-profit that uses storytelling to build community engagement in schools around the world. His new novel is called Twist. Learn more about your ad choi...

Karen Russell is the author of six books of fiction, including the New York Times bestsellers Swamplandia! and Vampires in the Lemon Grove. She has received MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellowships and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Born and raised in Miami, Florida, she now lives in Portland, Oregon with her husband, son, and daughter. The Antidote is her second novel. Learn more about your a...

Mai Der Vang is the author of Primordial, Yellow Rain, and Afterland. Her honors include th Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets, an American Book Award, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, the First Book Award from the Academy of American Poets, among others. The recipient of a Guggenheim and Lannan Literary Fellowship, she teaches in the MFA Program in Creative...

Erika Krouse writes fiction and nonfiction.   Her book Tell me Everything: The Story of a Private Investigationwon the Colorado Book Award for Creative Nonfiction and the 2023 Edgar Award for Best Fact Crime.  Erika’s novel, Contenders, was a finalist for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. Her previous short story collection Come Up and See Me Sometime, won the Paterson Fiction Award, was a New...

Sarah Gerard is the author of the essay collection Sunshine State, a New York Times Critics’ and NPR Best Book of the Year, a finalist for the Southern Book Prize, and longlisted for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award; the novels True Love and Binary Star, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times First Fiction Prize; a coauthored art book, Recycle; and the chapbook The Butter House. Her new book of...

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. 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 Li...

Paul Theroux is the author of many highly acclaimed works of fiction and nonfiction, including The Great Railway Bazaar, The Mosquito Coast, Riding the Iron Rooster, and Mr. Bones: Twenty Stories.   In 2015, Paul Theroux was awarded a Royal Medal from the Royal Geographical Society for “the encouragement of geographical discovery through travel writing.”  His new short story collection is The Vani...

Lidia Yuknavitch is the National Bestselling author of the novels Thrust, The Book of Joan and The Small Backs of Children, winner of the 2016 Oregon Book Award's Ken Kesey Award for Fiction as well as the Reader's Choice Award, the novel Dora: A Headcase, a critical book on war and narrative, Allegories Of Violence, and the short story collection Verge.  Her widely acclaimed memoir The Chronology...

Sarah Chihaya is a book critic, essayist, and editor. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The Nation, New York magazine, The Atlantic, and The Yale Review, among other places, and she is the co-author of The Ferrante Letters: An Experiment in Collective Criticism. She has taught at Princeton University, New York University, and UC Berkeley. She is currently a con...

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer has been writing and sharing a poem a day since 2006—a practice that especially nourished her after the death of her teenage son in 2021. Her daily poems can be found on her blog, A Hundred Falling Veils, or a curated version (with optional prompts) on her daily audio series, The Poetic Path, available with the Ritual app. Her poetry collection Hush won the Halcyon Prize....