Story Behind the Story

Charlie Jane Anders is an award-winning, best-selling author of speculative fiction based in the Bay Area. She is the winner of the 2017 Nebula, Locus, and Crawford awards; winner of the 2020 Locus Award; a co-creator of the transgender Marvel Comics superhero, Escapade; a founding editor of the science fiction website io9 ; a co-host, with Annalee Newitz, of the podcast Our Opinions Are Correct ;...

Christopher Blackwell is an award-winning journalist currently incarcerated at the Washington Corrections Center, where he is serving a 45-year prison sentence for taking another human’s life during a drug robbery (something he takes full accountability for). Deborah Zalesne is a legal expert and law professor at the City University of New York School of Law, where she teaches contracts, corporate...

Alka Joshi spent 10 years working on her debut novel, The Henna Artist , before it was published in March 2020, just before the world locked down as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Then, a few months later, Reese Witherspoon selected it as a Reese's book club, changing the trajectory of Joshi's life and writing career forever. At a time when many debut artists were struggling to connect with th...

In this episode of Story Behind the Story , host Clara Sherley-Appel talks to British novelist Kirsty Capes about her latest book, Daughters , which was recently released in the US following its debut in the UK in 2024 (under the title Girls ). Daughters follows Mattie and Nora, whose neglectful and abusive mother was the acclaimed artist Ingrid Olssen. On her deathbed, Olssen asks them to destroy...

In this episode of Story Behind the Story , host Clara Sherley-Appel talks to journalist John Gibler about his 2014 book, Torn from the World: A Guerrilla's Escape from a Secret Prison in Mexico . Torn from the World tells the story of Andrés Tzompaxtle Tecpile, a member of an armed resistance group who was forcibly disappeared and tortured by the Mexican military long after the government claimed...

Laura Spinney is the author of two novels and three non-fiction books, including Pale Rider , a historical exploration of the 1918 flu epidemic, which came out in 2017. In this interview, we discuss her latest book, Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global , which traces the evolution of Proto-Indo-European — the hypothetical, reconstructed common ancestor of all languages in the Indo-European...

Holly Goddard Jones is an author and educator best known for literary fiction. She was a recipient of The Fellowship of Southern Writers’ Hillsdale Prize for Excellence in Fiction and the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, and her work has appeared in several literary publications, including The Best American Mystery Stories , New Stories from the South , and Tin House magazine, in addition to...

Muriel Leung is a recipient of fellowships to Kundiman, VONA/Voices Workshop and the Community of Writers, and she has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Her writing can be found in The Baffler , Cream City Review , Gulf Coast , The Collagist , and the Fairy Tale Review , among others. Her first book of poetry, Bone Confetti , won the 2015 Noemi Press Book Award. Of it, one reviewer said, “It...

Hilary Leicther's particular brand of surrealist fiction takes metaphors and makes them tangible. Her debut novel, Temporary , followed a nameless, archetypal temp worker from one gig to the next. As the jobs grow progressively stranger, their strangeness bleeds into her personal life. In this episode, I talk to Leichter about her new novel, Terrace Story , in which a struggling family find a spac...

Hanna Pylväinen has been writing fiction about the small Finnish fundamentalist sect she was raised in for years. In her 2012 debut novel, We Sinners , she follows a large, Midwestern family as they navigate their relationships to each other and to the church at the heart of their lives. Over the years since she wrote that novel, Pylväinen has learned more about the origins of that religious order...

In 2014, hot on the heels of the success of his Magicians trilogy, Lev Grossman announced that he was writing a Arthurian epic. As the project took shape, world events kept intruding: Donald Trump ascended to the presidency, a novel respiratory virus launched a pandemic, and Britain exited the European Union. Admist all this, Grossman realized that the question that had driven him to write this no...

For ten years, Tanzila "Taz" Ahmed organized an annual poem-a-day project during the month of Ramadan. She began the project as an alternative form of reflection to prayer, which she had struggled to connect with, shortly after the death of her mother. In the decade that followed, the project turned into a community, and Taz's poetry turned into a collection, Grasping at This Planet Just to Believ...

Tedd Siegel retired from his career as an academic administrator in late 2019 after wrestling with extreme stress, burnout, and PTSD — caused, in part, by the conditions of work as it is formulated today. He wrote Signs of the Great Refusal: The Coming Struggle for a Postwork Society in part to work through his own experiences and, more broadly, to understand what it was about contemporary work th...

Novelist, screenwriter, and translator Katya Apekina returns to Story Behind the Story to talk about her latest novel, Mother Doll — an intergenerational ghost story, tying together a Russian revolutionary and her great-granddaughter, adrift in her 20s in LA. Special Guest: Katya Apekina.

Marcus Gazaway got his start as a writer right here on the central coast, when he joined the staff of CSU Monterey Bay’s student newspaper, The Otter Realm . Today, he works as a full-time author in Sarasota, Florida, where he can be seen reading and writing in coffee shops across the Gulf Coast. His first novel, the sci-fi thriller Bridgewater , follows a neurologist whose desperation to give his...

This month, host Clara Sherley-Appel talks to poet and educator Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo. A former Steinbeck Fellow and Poets & Writers California Writers Exchange winner, Xochitl’s writing has been featured in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day , On Being’s Poetry Unbound , and Poetry Unbound: 50 Poems to Open Your World . She has received residencies from Hedgebrook, Ragdale, Yefe Nof,...

Sam Sax is a queer Jewish poet, writer, and educator. Their debut poetry collection, madness , won the National Poetry Series Competition when it came out, and their second collection, bury it , won the 2017 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. They are the two time Bay Area Grand Slam Champion with poems published in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Poetry Magazine, and Grant...

Jenn Shapland's first book, My Autobiography of Carson McCullers , was a finalist for the 2020 National Book Award and the Southern Book Prize, and it won the 2021 Lambda Literary Award, the Judy Grahn Award, and the Christian Gauss Award. In her new essay collection, Thin Skin , Shapland explores the porousness of boundaries between humans and the environments we inhabit, between us and other peo...

Host Clara Sherley Appel speaks with Brett Christophers, author of Rentier Capitalism . A geographer based out of the Institute for Housing and Urban Research at Uppsala University, Brett's work focuses on various aspects of Western capitalism, both historically and in the present day. In 2018, he wrote The New Enclosure , about Margaret Thatcher’s immensely successful program to privatize land in...

Cheryl Harawitz is an artist and retired social worker living in Alameda. A few years ago, she published her debut middle-grade novel, When the Magpie Calls , the story of a nine year old girl named Morgwyth with special abilities and a remarkable connection to animals, for which she is bullied by her peers and targeted by supernatural forces who see her as a threat. But as Morgwyth begins to acce...

This month, Clara talks to author Joss Lake. A trans writer and educator based in New York, Joss teaches critical and creative writing throughout the city and runs a literary sauna series called Trans at Rest . His work has been supported by the Queens Council of the Arts, the Women and Performance Studies Collective, the Watermill Center, and Columbia University. Joss's debut novel, Future Feelin...

In Elaine Hsieh Chou's 2022 debut novel, Disorientation , a Taiwanese-American graduate student named Ingrid Yang discovers that the subject of her dissertation is a fraud: Xiao-Wen Chou is not a Chinese-American poet, but is in fact a white man who built his career on stereotypes and yellowface. This discovery launches her own awakening to the racism she has faced her entire life and the many way...

Host Clara Sherley-Appel talks to author Ruthanna Emrys about her hopepunk novel, A HALF-BUILT GARDEN.

Isaac Fellman is an author and archivist living in San Francisco. His debut novel, The Breath of the Sun , won the 2019 Lambda Literary Award for LGBT Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror. In this episode, we discuss about his second novel, Dead Collections , which was published by Penguin Random House in 2022. It follows Sol, who works – like Isaac – as an archivist at a queer historical society...

Gretchen Felker-Martin is a writer, film critic, and self-described professional cenobite who writes about sexual revulsion, body horror, and how violence forms and fits into our lives. In addition to her fiction and essays available on Patreon, she has written criticism for outlets like Polygon , FanByte , The Outline , and Nylon . Her 2022 novel, Manhunt , follows two trans women trying to survi...