GrottoPod

Journalist and writer Roberto Lovato has spent his life running toward -- rather than away from -- conflict. Through it all, he has never stopped seeking the truth and has never wavered from his belief in the spirituality of the written word.

Critically-acclaimed poet, Grotto member and former New York Times poetry editor Matthew Zapruder releases his newest book, Why Poetry?, today. To celebrate, we're revisiting his April interview with GrottoPod hosts Bridget Quinn and Larry Rosen, where he talked about his life in poetry and the reasons this often-misunderstood genre of writing is so important. Zapruder embarks on a book tour this...

Laura Fraser is, among other things, a best-selling memoirist; an instinctive muckraking journalist; a celebrated travel writer; the founder of Shebooks, a publishing imprint dedicated to women authors; and a Grotto O.G. (Original Gangsta).

Why do you write? Or, rather, how do you write? This week, hosts Bridget Quinn and Larry Rosen address these issues, landing on questions of motivation, ambition and outcome as they share their respective “state-of-the-writer” stories.

Can you create community and ritual without religion, raise moral and ethical children without the guiding hand of the church, find grace without God? This week, we address big questions like these when award-winning journalist Katherine Ozment joins t...

Bridget Watson Payne is the embodiment of the GrottoPod motto “read, write and just keep working.” In addition to her responsibilities as Chronicle Books' art books editor, she is an illustrator and artist and recently published two (!) books,

Oscar Villalon didn’t set out to become a literary gatekeeper, but that’s part of his job description as the managing editor of Zyzzyva, arguably the most prominent literary journal in the Bay Area. Join us this week as we welcome Oscar to the GrottoPod and discuss his career as a reader, writer and journalist and pull away some of the opaque drapery that often shrouds the publishing process.

Can you “catch” a behavior like you’d catch a cold? Lee Kravetz, co-author of Supersurvivors, thinks so. This week, he joins the GrottoPod to explain how. Kravetz (also a producer of our podcast) lays it out in his new book, Strange Contagion, which is released this week. Strange Contagion explores how social contagion -- communicable ideas, thoughts and actions -- turned volatile in Kravetz’s hom...

Michael Frank, author of the acclaimed new memoir The Mighty Franks, grew up in an unusual, “intertwined” family. He was swept up into the world of his childless aunt and uncle, a pair of prominent Hollywood screenwriters who helped create such films as Norma Rae and The Long, Hot Summer. They taught him about art, literature and culture — and that “fitting in is death.” Things got complicated, th...

To retreat or not to retreat? That is the question on this week's special, guest-free episode of the GrottoPod. Join BQ and Larry as they engage in a spirited conversation about what makes writing retreats and conferences irresistible (BQ) or easily resistible and somewhat enigmatic (Larry) -- and where writers of all kinds can go to find their community. Also, in a GrottoPod first, BQ gets bleepe...

How does a “typical Nigerian-Norse American girl” get from rural Washington State to Harvard, Thailand and then San Francisco? Faith Adiele, the product of Sunnyside, Washington’s “only mixed-race, Marxist anti-war family," who became Thailand’s first black Buddhist nun, joins the GrottoPod this week to share the fantastical twists, turns and happy accidents that led her to become a celebrated mem...

You may not find working with inmates at San Quentin uplifting, but prominent tech journalist Yukari Kane does. This week Kane, a one-time Wall Street Journal reporter who wrote the definitive book on Apple after Steve Jobs, fills the GrottoPod with tales of health challenges, snap career decisions, suspicious sources, world tours and the genesis of her decision to teach at one of California’s mos...

Todd Oppenheimer was an actor, a mime and a successful journalist who published in all the major magazines and won a National Magazine Award for Public Interest Reporting. But it wasn’t until he started his own publication, Craftsmanship Quarterly, that he found his life’s work. This week, Todd joins us in the GrottoPod to talk about his magazine, the Craftsmanship Initiative, his passion for craf...

Some writers take unorthodox paths to success; for Joe Loya, author of The Man Who Outgrew His Prison Cell, that path includes a childhood full of spiritual, sometimes violent and tragic, twists and turns, followed by a stint as a bank robber known as “The Beirut Bandit." He spent seven years in federal prison, where a months-long stint in solitary confinement led to the epiphany that began his wr...

What if the hand of God (in the form of Stephen Colbert) reached down and helped make your first published novel a New York Times best-seller? It happened to Edan Lepucki, whose post-apocalyptic novel California was the unwitting beneficiary of a Colbert vs. Amazon feud in 2014. Now, on the publication day of her new book, Woman No. 17, Lepucki joins us in the GrottoPod to explain how she went fro...

How are the stakes changed when a journalist pursues a personal story? This week, veteran tech writer Fred Vogelstein enters the GrottoPod to share his journey from Freshman remedial English to Wired, Fortune, U.S. News & World Report and his book Dogfight: How Apple and Google Went to War and Started a Revolution. He also addresses the challenges he faced when he chose to write about his fami...

Matthew Zapruder, poetry editor for the New York Times Magazine and author of four award-winning poetry collections, enters the GrottoPod this week to discuss his latest work -- a book of prose due out this summer called Why Poetry? -- and the challenges and rewards of teaching poetry. Zapruder examines a life of poetry and muses on the role The Grotto has played in his life and career, the path t...

Author Frances Stroh joins the GrottoPod to discuss her best-seller, “Beer Money: A Memoir of Privilege and Loss,” just ahead of its release in paperback May 30. Invigorated and rested after spending 2016 juggling motherhood and book promotion, Stroh recounts her roller-coaster life as a fifth-generation member of the once-mighty Stroh’s Beer family and how she’s used her book tour to “give back”...

Journalist, memoirist, activist and lifelong Boston Red Sox fan Christopher Cook enters the GrottoPod this week to discuss a life lived in pursuit of doing good and doing well. An award-winning muckraker whose work has appeared in Harper’s, The Economist, Mother Jones, The Christian Science Monitor and Atlantic.com, Cook is the author of the 2004 book Diet for a Dead Planet: Big Business and the C...

Feminist, Muslim, Iranian-American comedian Zahra Noorbakhsh joins us on the GrottoPod this week to talk about her love of performing onstage, politics, her relationship with her Iran-born parents -- who appear frequently in her stand-up tales -- and T-Rex erotica. Noorbakhsh’s shows include All Atheists are Muslim, On Behalf of All Muslims and Hijab and Hammerpants. She’s also the co-host of the...

In this week's episode, Vanessa Hua -- journalist, columnist, fiction writer, and mother of 5-year-old twins -- talks about how she juggles everything, stays on top of social media and manages to be such a generous colleague. (No, knitting is not the secret.) She shares time-management tips, thoughts on meaningful publicity, how running and swimming help her sort out ideas, and where she finds ins...

Bridget Quinn removes her co-host hat and gives us the backstory of her first book, Broad Strokes: 15 Women Who Made Art & Made History (in That Order). Born and raised in Montana, Quinn followed a nonlinear path to NYU’s Institute of the Arts, where she dropped the dream of a Ph. D in art history in favor of the dream of writing a Vasari-like Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, a...

Ethel Rohan published two story collections (Goodnight Nobody and Cut Through the Bone), a chapbook (Hard to Say), and a short memoir (His Heartbeat in my Hand) before releasing her first novel, The Weight of Him, in February. In this week's episode of the GrottoPod, she talks about her characters and her family (“what we don’t know about our own flesh-and-blood”), the unanswered questions about t...

How do writers get by, financially? We put that impertinent question to our colleague Manjula Martin, author of Scratch: Writers, Money, and the Art of Making a Living. In the book, she gathers intel from established and rising authors, but she has good insight herself, having created Who Pays Writers? -- and having written for the Virginia Quarterly Review, Pacific Standard, Aeon magazine and man...

Joshua Mohr is the author of five novels, including Damascus (2011), which The New York Times called “Beat-poet cool.” But he joins us in the GrottoPod to talk about why he just released a memoir, Sirens (2017). It’s a raw and stripped-down chronicle of drug and alcohol addiction, a literal hole in his heart and family compassion. He calls it a “relapse memoir,” something far removed from “a linea...