Memoir Nation

All August we’re celebrating with our favorite guests of the past year—but with a fresh take on the topic at hand and a new book trend. This week’s episode basks in the smart, intimate, and insightful energy of Ashley C. Ford and Melissa Febos, two wonderful memoirists who share about writing intimate truths. Brooke gives her take on why memoir is a force that’s changing the culture, and we celebr...

Anthologies date all the way back to the Renaissance and earlier, when important works of various authors were collected and bound. This week, Brooke and Grant discuss the modern anthology—what kinds of works lend themselves to collections and what publishers are looking for. Guest Stephanie Raffelock joins the show to discuss her latest book, Art in the Time of Unbearable Crisis, a joint project...

Romance often gets the short-shrift for being not a serious genre, or for being a guilty pleasure—and yet, it’s the best-selling genre there is. Which is why Grant and Brooke chose to explore with Angelina Lopez, touching upon the sexiness of romance, yes, but also the fact that it’s so much more than that. Romance can be socially conscious, and importantly—there’s romance out there for every kind...

Do you have to be a comedian or a humorist to execute funny in memoir? We don’t think so—and this episode tackles how humor shows up in the everyday, in universal experiences, and through the journey of looking inward. Guest David Sipress, whose New Yorker cartoons are recognizable worldwide, talks about his own insecurities in approaching memoir and how he worked through them, how he mines for fu...

We’re having fun this holiday week talking about genre-blending and bending, and why it’s fun and freeing, but also often problematic from an industry standpoint when stories are not easily categorized. Join Brooke and Grant this week in their conversation with Barbara Graham, a long-time nonfiction writer who breaks the mold with her debut novel, and shares about how intuitive her process was, an...

This week’s episode brings to the fore why meaning in all its outward, bigger-than-a-single-individual forms is so profound in writing. The notion that your story is broader than your limited experience is something memoirists know, but too often fail to fully execute on the page. Kathryn Schulz is a master of this form. Tune in to hear about what Brooke calls “litle-T takeaway” and the conversati...

Omission—it’s something writers understand as meaningful to story, but don’t often execute well on the page. In this week’s episode, guest Charmaine Wilkerson offers solid pointers on how to think about omission and why it will make your writing more meaningful. Join Grant and Brooke for this week’s craft-based conversation on the power of omission as we consider some of the best books we’ve read...

Write-minded is celebrating Episode #200 and a move to be part of the Lit Hub Radio family this week with guest Linda Holmes, host of NPR’s  Pop Culture Happy Hour , who joins Grant and Brooke to talk about her recent novel, imposter syndrome, and following the path life offers up. This episode is a celebration of shape-shifting and getting bitten by the novel bug—with a fun guest who knows a thin...

Write-minded is honored to be celebrating a few milestones this week—with guest Zakiya Dalila Harris’s paperback release and our announcement that starting next week, we are joining the Lit Hub Radio family! It’s a perfect episode to talk about publishing, since Zakiya’s novel, The Other Black Girl, points a finger at the industry—and because there’s so much else to say. Also, since this week’s bo...

This week’s episode inspires and challenges and encourages all of us to embrace the magic of subversive reading. This conversation with Azar Nafisi, the best-selling author of  Reading Lolita in Tehran , about her new book,  Read Dangerously , is a reminder of what’s at stake for us right now in the US, why we need to engage and not check out, or worse, employ the same tactics as extremists in the...

This week we’re focusing on how to step into the point of view of another character in memoir. Increasingly memoirists are wanting to take risks with memoir, to fill holes in their knowledge but not be relegated to writing fiction. Guest Julie Metz provides a beautiful template for how to do this with her new memoir, Eva and Eve, which reconstructs her family’s 1940 escape from Vienna when Hitler...

This week we’re looking at book coaching—who might need one, why you might want one, or maybe you even want to become one. Guest Jennie Nash has resources and answers for anyone in this space because she trains book coaches through her Author Accelerator program, and has an incredible stable of coaches that authors can work with. So much good food for thought this week! Also, in today’s book trend...

Sensual details, it’s said, make scenes come alive on the page. Today’s guest Leesa Cross-Smith is a master of the sensual, and you’ll see why when you listen to her interview. A listmaker, a word handler, a Janeite who owns 25 copies of Pride and Prejudice, Cross-Smith helps us think about the sensual and how to bring it to your awareness and to your writing. We touch upon form, too, short and lo...

Imagining the life you might have had. Assessing mistakes you undoubtedly made. Voicing the truth about your true feelings and desires. All terrifying, and all fodder for good storytelling. This week’s episode goes right to the heart of all that with guest Ashley Woodfolk, whose most recent book, Nothing Burns As Bright As You, is an exploration in verse of what might have been had she realized at...

If you’ve been listening to Write-minded for a while, you might know we have indie fever, and we hope our show is catching that way because “indie” is key to a thriving book ecosystem—which is exactly at the center of this week’s show. We’re joined by Bookshop.org founder and CEO Andy Hunter to talk about book culture, what “literary” means, and why we can’t trust Amazon when it comes to books—and...

In this week’s episode, Grant and Brooke probe at questions of moral ambiguity with guest Quentin Lee, whose new book, The Secret Diary of Edward Ng, is a sexual coming of age story set in the 1990s. Centering queerness and the Asian and Asian American experience, this work of short fiction is a meditation on otherness, and raises lots of good conversation about auto-fiction, what and how we explo...

This week’s show is a love letter to book festivals—and a conversation about why they matter, how authors can pitch themselves and get involved in local festivals, and what the considerations entail for those people who are behind the scenes organizing such festivals. This week’s guest, Cherilyn Parsons, is the founder and executive director of the Bay Area Book Festival based in Berkeley, Califor...

This week’s episode features the editor and a contributor to the new anthology, The Sentences That Create Us: Crafting A Writer’s Life in Prison. This book is at the heart of today’s interview as we explore the power of writing—and how it can set us free, literally and metaphorically. Editor Caits Meissner shares with us PEN America’s mission and vision, and why there’s a Prison and Justice Writin...

The idea that creativity and "madness" are connected has been around since humanity’s earliest days. As such, this notion of "suffering artists" often gets idealized, even romanticized. Psychotherapist and author Lee Kravetz shares his take on the correlation between mental illness and creativity in this week’s episode, in the context of his new book, The Last Confessions of Sylvia P., that explor...

No author or aspiring author will want to miss this week’s episode with marketing guru M.J. Rose, who doles out some tough love about the realities of publicity and marketing. Though she calls herself the Voice of Doom, her message is surprisingly inspiring and reassuring, because the realities of this industry are twofold: it’s hard to sell books, and writing books is one of the most rewarding ex...

Rarely are writers encouraged to be angry on the page, and this is especially true for women writers of personal narratives. In this week’s episode, we’re exploring anger’s purpose in writing with guest Lilly Dancyger, who gives permission to lean into anger, and whose memoir, Negative Space, has, by Lilly’s own estimation, an angry central protagonist (her younger self) and an angry narrator (her...

In this week’s episode, Grant and Brooke tackle the question of whether writing can be taught—and why this is even a question that’s up for debate in the first place. Guest Lisa Stringfellow has a lot of great insights about the intersection of writing and teaching, what she’s learned about writing through her teaching, and the rewards of writing to an audience in the form of her students. We cove...

This week’s episode champions personal narrative, which is one of guest Melissa Febos’s primary goals in her new book, Body Work. We talk about why memoir needs badasses this week, and if ever there was one, it’s Melissa. An enlightening conversation that touches upon diary-writing, confession, secret-keeping, tell-alls, the essay, and memoir craft, any writer who thinks about writing (all of you!...

This week’s powerful episode features Ashley C. Ford, sharing about writing influences, forgiveness, and how superheroes influence her writing, among other topics. Ford has written one of the most powerful memoir scenes we’ve read in a long while, and she speaks to the process and evolution of that story and what she learned in the telling of it. Lots of inspiration in this interview, and we want...

In celebration of Valentine’s Day week, this week’s podcast honors heart-centeredness, and writing from the heart and with openness, and the inherent and implicit ways that makes the world a better place. Join Brooke and Grant to bask in the wisdom of Parker J. Palmer’s words on everything from welcoming the stranger, to what he loves about speaking, to the legacy of his friend and colleague, the...