As Told To

Student journalist and first-time documentary filmmaker Matthew Winkler joins us to discuss his work on a film chronicling the life and career of Joya Sherrill, an unsung American jazz vocalist who wrote the lyrics to the Billy Strayhorn standard, "Take the A Train," made famous by the Duke Ellington orchestra. Matthew came across Sherrill's name during his freshman year at Tufts University, while...

Podcast guest Michael E. Long calls himself "a professional explainer with a restive mind."   He is just that.   Trained as physicist, Mike is the co-author of the international bestseller The Molecule of More , which has been translated into more than 20 languages, and the sole author of the recently-published follow-up title Taming the Molecule of More .   As a speechwriter, he has written for m...

"No two caregiving journeys are alike," writes Emma Heming Willis, the wife of actor Bruce Willis, who was diagnosed in 2023 with Frontotemporal Dementia (FTD), a rare form of dementia affecting behavior, movement and language. "But we are connected by the same unchosen thread." In The Unexpected Journey: Finding Strength, Hope, and Yourself on the Caregiving Path , Emma writes movingly and hopefu...

"Pull the heart of your work out of your chest and lay it out there for the gods," podcast guest Samuel G. Freedman told his Columbia Journalism School graduate students on the first day of his final semester after 35 years of teaching. "That's all I'm asking of you. Not much."   No, not much. And yet what Sam Freedman asked of his students during his tenure as one of our leading journalism educat...

Jane Leavy is the New York Times best-selling author of Sandy Koufax: A Lefty's Legacy , The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the End of America's Childhood , and The Big Fella: Babe Ruth and the World He Created . She is also the author of the comic novel Squeeze Play , hailed by  Entertainment Weekly as "the best novel ever written about baseball." A longtime sportswriter and feature writer for The W...

Episode originally aired on Nov. 2, 2021. "Don't make it out, make it better." That's a line from podcast guest D. Watkins, offered in the book trailer for his book of essays We Speak for Ourselves: A Word from Forgotten Black Americ a , in which he gives voice to the voiceless and shines meaningful light on what it means to come of age in East Baltimore, in one of America's poorest black neighbor...

Episode originally aired on April 11, 2023 "Writing is not what you start," writes podcast guest Nell Scovell in her scathingly funny memoir Just the Funny Parts . "It's not even what you finish. It's what you start, finish, and put out there for the world to see." Indeed, Nell offers this observation from a place of hard-won experience. A veteran television writer ("Newhart," "The Simpsons," "Lat...

Ivy Pochoda is the author of the critically-acclaimed novels Visitation Street , These Women , Sing Her Down , and the just-published Ecstasy , a reimagined contemporary feminist horror story hailed by the Washington Post as a "stiletto-sharp remake of Euripides."  She is also the co-author of The New York Times best-selling middle-grade Epoca fantasy series , created by the late basketball legend...

Amy Silverberg is a comedian and writer based in Los Angeles. Her stand-up comedy has been featured on Comedy Central, Hulu, NPR, and Amazon Prime. Her short fiction has appeared in  Best American Short Stories ,  The Paris Review , Granta, and The New Yorker. She holds a Ph. D. in Creative Writing from USC, where she now teaches. Prior to publication, Amy's debut novel First Time, Long Time was h...

Veteran journalist Carla Sosenko has written for The New York Times , Cosmopolitan , Marie Claire , People , Self , Newsweek , and numerous other publications. Her work has also appeared in Time Out New York (where she was editor-in-chief), Entertainment Weekly (where she was executive editor), In Touch (where she was managing editor) and Us Weely (where she is currently executive editor at large)...

Heaven Help Us: How Faith Communities Inspire Hope, Strengthen Neighborhoods, and Build the Future —a collection of inspiring profiles of individuals working to make a difference with the help of their faith communities—is podcast host Daniel Paisner's fifth collaboration with former Ohio governor John Kasich.   The collaboration goes back to the very first book the two wrote together—the 2006 New...

"I never thought I would have a career in the television business," writes podcast guest Art Bell, the founding father of the Comedy Central network and the longtime president of Court TV. While at Comedy Central, which had its origins at HBO as "The Comedy Channel," Art helped to launch the careers of Bill Maher and Jon Stewart, and to provide a platform for up-and-coming comedians. He also found...

"Comedy writers learn early on that we have a high degree of anonymity," writes podcast guest Alan Zweibel in his memoir Laugh Lines: My Life Helping Funny People Be Funnier . "Our words are spoken publicly by others who often have famous faces. Or by unknown people on their way to having famous faces." As one of the founding writers on Saturday Night Live , Alan's words were given voice by a cast...

How much does ego play a role in the art and craft of a book collaborator? That's a question at the heart of this conversation with #1 New York Times best-selling ghostwriter Rachel Holtzman, co-author of more than 60 books on topics ranging from wellness and spirituality, to cooking and entertaining, including collaborations with such celebrated personalities as Shaquille O'Neal , Alicia Silverst...

Adam Ross's second novel, Playworld , is one of the best-reviewed books of the year. A story "dipped in molten nostalgia and flecked with love and sadness," according to The Washington Post , it was hailed immediately upon publication by The Los Angeles Times as "extraordinary" and by The New York Times as "a gorgeous cat's cradle of a book." He is also the author of a previous novel, Mr. Peanut ,...

"Sometimes our own stories get snatched from us, hidden in darkness for years," writes podcast guest Salwa Emerson, "until it's time to reclaim them." Salwa is well-known to publishers as an author, editor and ghostwriter, specializing in memoirs, thought-leadership books, and book proposals. To hear her clients tell it, she has a way of bringing those stories out of hiding and into the light. She...

"My job was to dance so well that it didn't matter who favored me or why." That's a line from the compelling new memoir by world-renowned ballerina Joy Womack, "as told to" podcast guest Elizabeth Shockman. Together, in (dare we say it?) balletic prose, the two recount Womack's storied career as the first American woman to dance under contract for the Bolshoi Ballet Theater in Moscow. "The dancers...

David Peisner is a freelance journalist and ghostwriter/collaborator based in Atlanta. His work has appeared in the New York Times , Rolling Stone , New York , Esquire , Playboy , and other publications. His first book collaboration—with "Steve-O," the legendary co-star of the legendarily out there MTV reality series "Jackass"—grew out of a magazine assignment, taking Peisner on a sidelong career...

"We all have to figure out our own ways to carve out our own creativity," says New York Times best-selling ghostwriter Cynthia DiTiberio about finding time to do her own writing alongside her collaborative work. "Not that our creativity doesn't go into our ghostwritten books, but you can't claim it in the same way." Cynthia knows what it takes to create a successful book. She started her publishin...

We're taking a bit of a pivot here at the podcast factory with this one, pinching from the season-opening episode of Writer's Bone , our flagship podcast at the Writer's Bone Podcast Network.   "As Told To" producer and Writer's Bone host and founder Daniel Ford featured a conversation with the writing team of Hannah Bos and Paul Thureen, co-creators of the enchantingly poignant HBO series "Somebo...

"The work that we do is actually very difficult to detach from when you're writing in somebody's voice," notes veteran collaborator Laura Morton on the emotional connection she often feels when channeling her clients' stories.   Laura comes by this observation honestly, after spending more than thirty years helping to tell other people's stories.  In that time, she has written more than 60 books,...

"You'd be amazed at how far you can get in life having no idea what the subjunctive mood is," writes Benjamin Dreyer, retired managing editor and copy chief of the Random House division of Penguin Random House. "As if it's not bad enough that English has rules, it also has moods." Yes, it does. Happily, the mood of the room for writers in Benjamin's good hands as a copyeditor was cheerful and pati...

This episode originally aired June 20, 2023 First-time author David Jacks, a veteran video editor and music supervisor, ran into legendary music producer Peter Asher at a Santa Monica taco joint in 2003 and asked if he could interview him. Jacks, a long-time admirer of the man said to be the inspiration for Mike Myers' "shagadelic" Austin Powers character, who first came to prominence as one-half...

Here at the podcast factory, we're thrilled to welcome back novelist, translator, collaborator and cultural critic Seth Rogoff to talk about his new novel—a thrilling and unsettling coda to Franz Kafka's unfinished masterwork  The Castle . Seth joined us in Season 2 ( Ep. #35 ) to talk about the also thrilling and decidedly unconventional memoir he helped to write with ESPN basketball analyst and...

"In general, magazine profiles are to biographies as inland lakes are to oceans," writes the late entertainment journalist and ghostwriter Bill Zehme in The New York Times best-selling Carson the Magnificent . "Far less sprawling and easier to navigate."   This is true—and readers need look no further than Zehme's latest (and last) book, completed posthumously, for confirmation. Zehme, who collabo...