Writers on Writing

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REPLAY: fiction writer Melissa Bank Oct 28, 2025

Show notes

Melissa Bank, who passed away in 2022, was a fabulous writer and an incredible person. We met a few times in person, out here in Southern California when we were both speakers at the Literary Guild, and in NYC when I traveled there for conferences. She came on the show a couple of times, for Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing and The Wonder Spot. Her output was modest though her books became bestsellers. She received an MFA from Cornell University and won the Nelson Algren Award for short fiction from the Chicago Tribune. I’ll always remember when I asked her to talk about how to write a novel, she said, “I don’t know how to write a novel.” What she knew how to do, she was, was write stories. Stories became chapters and chapters become a book. If you’ve never read these two books, check them out. My guess is you will become a fan.

For more information on Writers on Writing and to become a supporter, visit our Patreon page. For a one-time donation, visit Ko-fi. You can find hundreds of past interviews on our website. You can help out the show and indie bookstores by buying books at our bookstore on bookshop.org. It’s stocked with titles by our guest authors, as well as our personal favorites. And on Spotify, you’ll find an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. It’s perfect for writing. Look for the artist, Just My Type. Email the show at writersonwritingpodcast@gmail.com. We love to hear from our listeners!

(Recorded on October 7, 2007)

Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Host: Marrie Stone
Music: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)

REPLAY: fiction writer Melissa Bank Barbara DeMarco-Barrett Download

Gish Jen, author of BAD, BAD GIRL Oct 20, 2025

Show notes

Gish Jen describes her childhood as “a master class in perseverance.” The daughters of withholding mothers learn to reject rejection, she writes. And that’s proven great training for a writer.

Jen’s 10th book — Bad, Bad Girl — is part novel, part memoir, part autofiction. When her mother passed in 2020, Jen began keeping a journal, and writing notes to her mother in an attempt to understand her. She also wanted to create a record of her life for her children and grandchildren. Not believing she could bridge the gap from family story to publishable book, Jen took a leap of faith and created a novel that everyone can relate to, or at least sympathize with. She joins Marrie Stone to talk about it.

Jen shares what fiction gave her that strict memoir did not, and how she overcame her own doubts. She talks about the distinction between fine art and therapy, and what the creative process can give to writers. So much wisdom in this conversation for readers, writers, mothers and daughters.

(Recorded on October 17, 2025)

Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Host: Marrie Stone
Music: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)

Gish Jen, author of BAD, BAD GIRL Marrie Stone Download

REPLAY: Literary agent MATTHEW CARNICELLI Oct 13, 2025

Show notes

Matthew Carnicelli is the president of Carnicelli Literary Management, located in New York City and the Hudson Valley. He represents bestselling and award-winning authors publishing books in the areas of history, current events, sports, business, memoir, biography, health, literary fiction, and graphic novels. Since becoming an agent in 2004, he has focused on helping leading thinkers, journalists, academics, and others with exceptional stories or messages develop clear and original book ideas and partnering them with the best editors and publishers for their books.

Matthew is a graduate of Washington University, with a B.A. in English literature and political science, and received an M.A. from the University of Toronto in English literature. He has taught college-level nonfiction writing and is a frequent guest on various writing and publishing-industry panels.

I’ve known Matthew for a long time, he’s articulate and funny, and I simply like him. I’d recommend him in a minute to anyone who writes the kind of nonfiction he handles. On the show we talked about what he’s looking for, comps, the author bio, ageism, interpreting rejection, referrals. and much more.

(Recorded on December 1, 2023)

Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Host: Marrie Stone
Music: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)

REPLAY: Literary agent MATTHEW CARNICELLI Barbara DeMarco-Barrett Download

Janelle Brown, author of WHAT KIND OF PARADISE Oct 06, 2025

Show notes

Janelle Brown is the New York Times bestselling author of the novels I’ll Be You, Pretty Things, Watch Me Disappear, All We Ever Wanted Was Everything, and This Is Where We Live. Pretty Things—named a Best Book of 2020 by Amazon—is currently being adapted for television.

Before becoming a novelist, Janelle worked as a senior writer at Salon, and began her career as a staff writer at Wired, working on seminal Web sites like HotWired and Wired News. In the 1990s, she was also the editor and co-founder of Maxi, an irreverent (and now, long-gone) women’s pop culture Webzine. All that information becomes very relevant when you read her latest, What Kind of Paradise.

She joins Marrie Stone to talk about it. What Kind of Paradise draws on that tech reporter past and subtly asks the question: What if Ted Kazinsky had a kid? They discuss how fiction, and our bestselling authors, are grappling with this technological moment. They also discuss writing in the first person and how to use other textures and devices to gain access to other major characters, capturing bygone time periods, conveying cultural messages without preaching to your readers, and much more.

(Recorded on September 24, 2025)

Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Host: Marrie Stone
Music: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)

Janelle Brown, author of WHAT KIND OF PARADSISE Marrie Stone Download

Replay: ELMORE LEONARD, legendary writer Sep 29, 2025

Show notes

Today we’re going to replay a show from 2007. Barbara DeMarco-Barrett is joined by Elmore Leonard, an American novelist, short story author and screenwriter many of you are familiar with. He was, according to British journalist Anthony Lane, "hailed as one of the best crime writers in the land." Mostly working in the genres of westerns and crime, more than 30 of his stories were adapted to the screen over the course of a writing career spanning 60 years.He wrote Get Shorty, Freaky Deaky, and Glitz. The series Justified was inspired by his book, Fire in the Hole. He had a few rule of writing, and one was, leave the boring parts out. He passed away in 2013 at the age of 87.

(Recorded in 2007.)

Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Host: Marrie Stone
Music: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)

2025-9-28_WOW_Elmore_Leonard.logicx Barbara DeMarco-Barrett Download

Bruce Holsinger, author of CULPABILITY Sep 22, 2025

Show notes

Bruce Holsinger’s Culpability was Oprah’s big pick this summer. No surprise. It’s a novel that gives book clubs a lot of contemporary ethical issues to talk about. From self-driving cars to drones to chatbots, technology isn’t just changing our daily lives, it’s changing our laws, our relationships, our sense of self. And it’s reshaping the way we talk about responsibility and culpability.

Culpability is Bruce’s third contemporary family drama, following The Displacements and The Gifted School. He’s also the author of the historical thrillers A Burnable Book and The Invention of Fire as well as many nonfiction books. In his “spare time,” Bruce teaches in the Department of English at UVA, where he specializes in medieval literature and modern critical thought and edits their quarterly journal New Literary History. He also teaches craft classes and serves as board chairman for WriterHouse, a nonprofit in Charlottesville.

Bruce joins Marrie Stone to talk about Culpability and his unusual writing backstory. He discusses jumping genres and how that impacted his brand, how Bruce mastered the contemporary family drama, and how to write about hyper-contemporary issues without that writing feeling stale or outdated a year from now. Bruce also talks about the advantages of writing from the first person, present tense point of view, injecting other textures of narrative — like text conversations and book excerpts — into your narrative without breaking the story’s flow. He shares his experiences with agents and different publishing houses, and so much more.

If you’re in the Orange County area, Bruce will be at the quarterly “Evening with an Author” series in Laguna Beach on October 15th. More information on that event can be found here.

(Recorded on September 12, 2025)

Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Host: Marrie Stone
Music: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)

Bruce Holsinger, author of CULPABILITY Marrie Stone Download

Barbara DeMarco-Barrett, author of POOL FISHING Sep 16, 2025

Show notes

Today, the microphone turns on Writers on Writing founder and host Barbara DeMarco-Barrett. She joins Marrie Stone to talk about her latest story collection, Pool Fishing. Barbara’s venture into noir fiction began with the short story, “Crazy for You,” originally published in Akashic Book’s, Orange County Noir, later included in USA Noir: Best of the Akashic Noir Series. She’s also the editor and contributor to Palm Springs Noir(Akashic)and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize for her short story, “Rowboat,” in Kelp Journal (Dec. 2023). Both “Crazy for You” and “Rowboat” appear in her latest collection.

Barbara’s fiction and poetry have been published extensively, including in Coolest American Stories 2022, CrimeReads, Dark City Crime & Magazine and elsewhere. Her first book, Pen on Fire: A Busy Woman’s Guide to Igniting the Writer Within, was a Los Angeles Times best-seller and honored with an American Society of Journalists and Authors Outstanding Book Award. She’s taught creative writing at various colleges for decades. All that means she has much to teach us, and tell us, about the creative process.

She joins Marrie to talk about the creative germ for many of these 15 stories, why setting is so critical in noir, the attributes she believes necessary to make a successful writer, why she’s such an advocate for small presses, and so much more.

Barbara will be appearing at Arvida Books in Tustin on Friday, September 19th, at 6pm (with Maddie Margarita) and Knoll’s in Laguna Niguel on Sunday, September 21, at 7pm (with Marrie Stone). For more information, check out her website here.

(Recorded on September 1, 2025)

Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Host: Marrie Stone
Music: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)

Barbara DeMarco-Barrett, author of POOL FISHING Marrie Stone Download

Patrick Ryan, author of BUCKEYE Sep 08, 2025

Show notes

One Story Magazine Editor Patrick Ryan cut his teeth on the short story form. Author of the critically acclaimed collections The Dream Life of Astronauts and Send Me, Ryan has spent a career editing masters like Joy Williams, Colum McCann, Alice Munro and Ann Beattie. For forty years, he’s tried his hand at novels, but nothing stuck. Until now.

Ryan’s debut novel is Buckeye. The book has already become a Read With Jenna pick (which she calls a “once-in-a-decade epic”). It’s one of those cancel-your-plans, move-into-the-guestroom, forget-about-getting-anything-else-done-for-three-days novels. It is a 450-page wholly immersive book that sweeps across generations and wars and dives deep down into its characters’ lives. It follows two couples in a small Ohio town in the lead-up and aftermath of WWII, how their lives intertwine and the impact of their relationships on the generation that follows, who fight wars of their own.

Ryan captures the intimacy of what happens inside people’s bedrooms and inside their own minds as well as what has happened to our nation and the arc of history across the 20th century. He joins Marrie Stone to talk about it. They discuss pacing a novel versus short stories, the research required to render a novel as detailed as this — and how to make it not feel like you’ve done a lot of research — managing characters across generations, how to avoid sentimentality in intimate fiction, what editing writers like Joy Williams and Alice Munro has taught Patrick about writing, and so much more. They also talk about Ryan’s longtime friendship with Ann Patchett (parts of this novel were written in her basement and the book is dedicated to Ann and her husband, Karl), and how that friendship feeds both their work.

(Recorded on August 20, 2025)

Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Host: Marrie Stone
Music: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)

Patrick Ryan, author of BUCKEYE Marrie Stone Download

Paul Bradley Carr, author of THE CONFESSIONS Sep 01, 2025

Show notes

Paul Bradley Carr is the author of the new novel, The Confessions. He has written three memoirs about his adventures in and around Silicon Valley. He was the Silicon Valley columnist for The Guardian, senior editor at TechCrunch, and cofounder of PandoDaily. His writing has also appeared in The Wall Street Journal, HuffPost, and National Geographic. He lives in Palm Springs with his family and is the co-owner of The Best Bookstore in Palm Springs. Find out more at PaulBradleyCarr.com, and follow him on Instagram.

Paul joins Barbara DeMarco-Barrett to talk about writing female protagonists, outlining, POV characters, how running a bookstore affects his writing, writing with little bits of time, how people really do judge a book by the cover, what sells books, and much more.

(Recorded on August 29, 2025)

Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Host: Marrie Stone
Music: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)

Paul Bradley Carr, author of THE CONFESSIONS Barbara DeMarco-Barrett Download

Michelle Huneven, author of BUG HOLLOW Aug 25, 2025

Show notes

Michelle Huneven is the author of six novels including Round Rock, Jamesland, Off Course, Blame, Search and — most recently — Bug Hollow. Bug Hollow is a story about the Samuelsons, who lose their 18-year-old son in an accident. The book ripples out from there in a kaleidoscopic way, following the parents, siblings, girlfriend and others into the distant future and around in time to see how their lives play out. It’s told in chapters – or stories – from each character’s perspective. And it’s largely set in Altadena, where Michelle is from. It’s really a love letter to that town that was so devastated by the wildfires this past January (though written well before the fires). While in the process of publishing Bug Hollow, Michelle lost two homes in the fire.

She joins Marrie to talk about the book, as well as writing through tragedy and how she might process this event in her work. She also talks about the risks of being a perfectionist as a writer, and what helped her through that challenge. (She recommends this essay by Leslie Jamison). She shares how writing prompts led her to write this novel, the importance of having a trusted reader, the best training she received as a writer, and so much more.

After the podcast ended, Michelle shared her 76 favorite writing prompts with us. These are prompts she used to write this novel, prompts she shares with her students, and prompts she uses in her own writing practice. We’re offering those prompts (one per day) over the next 10 weeks to our subscribers on Patreon.

(Recorded on August 13, 2025)

Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Host: Marrie Stone
Music: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)

Michelle Huneven, author of BUG HOLLOW Marrie Stone Download

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