A writing podcast for writers and curious readers, featuring interviews with authors, poets, agents and editors. Twice chosen as one of Writer’s Digest Magazine’s 101 Best Website for Writers. Vermont-grown.
Episodes
Thursday Sep 24, 2015
Thursday Sep 24, 2015
Critically acclaimed and bestselling author Julianna Baggott, whose new novel is Harriet Wolf's Seventh Book of Wonders (Little Brown).
This week’s Write The Book Prompt was suggested by my guest, Julianna Baggott, who encourages her students to use “visualization” to move forward in narrative. She suggests that her students close their eyes for each. They can take notes in between each. Here are a few examples she offered, from which you can work. Either now, if you’re all set up to do so, or later, listen to these with your eyes closed, and try to visualize what’s happening, but missing, from each prompt:
- A Man walks out of a house* He’s dressed very strangely* He walks to a car* Opens the trunk, looks inside* reaches in*
- A woman is running, scared – where* She runs out of breath, falls to her knees. She hears a * looks up and sees*
- A man is sitting on a park bench. By his clothes, we assume he works as a _________ . A woman sits next to him and says something that makes no sense to us but means a lot to him, “ -------------“
- A woman is standing in a flooded basement – things float and are soaked around her* -- she finds a footlocker, wades over to it – reaches inside to find *
- A boy in pajamas is outside* -- alone. He hears * but ignores it and keeps heading toward a *
Wednesday Sep 16, 2015
Wednesday Sep 16, 2015
Daniel James Brown, whose award-winning and New York Times Bestselling Book, The Boys in the Boat, has been adapted for young readers.
Wednesday Sep 09, 2015
Wednesday Sep 09, 2015
Author Susan McCarty, whose collection, Anatomies (Aforementioned Productions), debuted at #6 on the Small Press Distribution fiction bestseller list.
This week’s Write The Book Prompt was suggested by my guest, Susan McCarty, whose inspiration for the story "Anatomies" came from the autobiography, Berlin Childhood around 1900 by Walter Benjamin. In it, Benjamin maps his life onto the places and spaces of his youth in Berlin. For instance, he writes about the hallway where the family telephone--which he describes as "an outcast," and "my twin brother"--was hung. He writes about the Tiergarten, a park in Berlin where he first experienced romantic love. Susan suggests that, as a prompt this week, you think about your own places and spaces and map some memories onto them, however small or insignificant-seeming the place, space, memory, or emotion. Limit yourself to 600 words for each memory/place. The point here is to make an active setting for your story, and to notice the way in which setting and plot intertwine to make each other. Susan also shared a link to Dorothy Allison’s wonderful essay, “Place,” in which, she talks about how place is not a backdrop for action, but an integral part of it. For further inspiration, Susan recommends checking out the great website Mapping Salt Lake City, curated by the poet and essayist Paisley Rekdal.
Good luck with this prompt, and please listen next week for another.
Sunday Sep 06, 2015
Sunday Sep 06, 2015
Interview from the archives with Evan Fallenberg, writer, translator and director of fiction for the Shaindy Rudoff Graduate Program in Creative Writing at Bar-Ilan University near Tel Aviv. Author of the novels Light Fell and When We Danced on Water.