Craft Talk Book Club

Latest Episodes:

We’re Taking a Break! Mar 08, 2023

Show notes

Mary and Nicole are taking a break before season 2. Catch up on The Idiot by Elif Batuman before they return later this year. See you next season!

”Persephone’s Children”, part 4: Proximal vs emotional distance... Mar 06, 2023

Show notes

A common challenge for writers of memoir is how to create emotional safety while bringing readers in close. One of the ways McCandless does this is by including photos, artifacts and documents as a starting point for essaying. Nicole + Mary discuss the many ways McCandless brings a sense of play to her exploration of difficult truths in Persephone's Children.

”Persephone’s Children”, part 3: What holds it all together? Feb 27, 2023

Show notes

Persephone's Children doesn't follow a traditional narrative arc; it doesn't even have a consistent first-person narrator. And yet the story McCandless tells feels perfectly cohesive. Nicole and Mary consider key elements that unify the book and speculate on the placement of a visual metaphor that gave them pause.

”Persephone’s Children”, part 2: Hermit Crab Essay 101... Feb 20, 2023

Show notes

A contract, a word search, a play, a grimoire. How does a writer go about finding the right container to shape their story? Mary and Nicole discuss their favorite essays in Persephone's Children, why they work so well, and how a writer might discover the right form to tell their own vulnerable stories.

”Persephone’s Children”, part 1: Mosaic memoir, deconstructed. Feb 13, 2023

Show notes

What is a mosaic memoir? And why go about writing one vs a traditional straightforward narrative? Nicole + Mary dig into the ways crafting a memoir-in-essays helped Rowan McCandless grapple with difficult subject matter like racism, intergenerational trauma, and domestic abuse.

”Black Cake” by Charmaine Wilkerson: Symbols Jan 30, 2023

Show notes

Perhaps the most significant and explicit symbol in this novel is black cake, and it's rich (pun intended) indeed. In this final episode discussing Black Cake, we unpack Wilkerson's choice to build a world around this one dessert, and all the implications of that choice.

”Black Cake” by Charmaine Wilkerson: Character descriptions Jan 23, 2023

Show notes

Writing character descriptions is the bane of Mary's existence...and Wilkerson does it so well in this book. In this episode, we analyze a couple of her character descriptions and why they work so well, and Mary shares a trick she uses to describe characters.

”Black Cake” by Charmaine Wilkerson: Point of view...many of them Jan 16, 2023

Show notes

Black Cake is a story told from many points of view, and not in an omniscient way. Wilkerson skips POVs chapter to chapter, delineating the shifts in point of view with breaks. What are the costs and benefits of writing a novel in this way? We discuss in this episode.

”Black Cake” by Charmaine Wilkerson: Linked narratives Jan 09, 2023

Show notes

Wilkerson structures her novel Black Cake in a series of short, linked chapters that jump from point of view to point of view. How does she do this so that it works? We discuss.

”Solito” by Javier Zamora, part 4: What about memory gaps? Jan 02, 2023

Show notes

Before he wrote Solito, Zamora wrote about his migration to La USA in poetry. For writers dealing with traumatic childhood memories, Nicole + Mary discuss how poetry can be a natural starting point for working with gaps and fragments.

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