Writers on Writing

Latest Episodes:

Crissy Van Meter, author of CREATURES Aug 19, 2025

Show notes

Crissy Van Meter’s novel, Creatures (Algonquin Books, 2020), was a Belletrist Book pick, an NPR Book of the Year, a finalist for the WILLA Literary Award, and longlisted for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. Her writing appears in Vice, Guernica, Buzzfeed, and Catapult. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the New School and teaches creative writing at The Writing Institute at Sarah Lawrence College. She is the founder of the literary project Five Quarterly and the contributing editor for Nouvella Books. She served on the board of directors for the youth-focused literary nonprofit Novelly. She lives in Los Angeles where she is the Head of Books forTeaTime Pictures.

Crissy joins Barbara DeMarco-Barrett to talk about writing climate fiction, naming characters, research, fictionalizing real places, setting, and much more.

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!

Order Barbara’s upcoming short story collection, Pool Fishing.

(Recorded on August 15, 2025)

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

Crissy Van Meter, author of CREATURES Barbara DeMarco-Barrett Download

Richard Curtis, literary agent & digital pioneer Aug 11, 2025

Show notes

Literary agent Richard Curtis was a pioneer in the e-book industry. Having worked in publishing for nearly 50 years, he understands nuances, trends, and the long arc of what makes authors and publishers successful. He adapted his agenting model to accommodate the consolidations of the publishing houses and what those changes meant for agents and writers. He’s written several books on those topics, and authors the popular Substack newsletter, Inside Agenting.

But earlier this year, Richard discovered an A.I. tool that shocked even him. NotebookLM, a Google product released in 2023, turns difficult topics into engaging conversations. It can summarize PDFs, websites, YouTube videos, audio files, Google Docs, or Google Slides, and create realistic podcasts about the topic. We tasked it with introducing Richard on the podcast. You’ll hear that introduction, produced in less than five minutes, and what Richard thinks of it.

He talks with Marrie about what these A.I. tools mean for writers and publishers, and how writers should be reacting in the moment. He also provides his thoughts on chasing industry trends, how to target the right agent for your work, how technology has always been upending the industry, and what might happen in this next revolutionary round of upheavals.

(Recorded on July 31, 2025)

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

Richard Curtis, literary agent & digital pioneer Marrie Stone Download

Stefanie Leder, author of LOVE, COFFEE, AND REVOLUTION Aug 06, 2025

Show notes

Stefanie Leder is a TV showrunner and writer whose credits include the MTV teen dramedy Faking It, TBS comedy Men at Work, Netflix’s Boo, Bitch, and the long-running ABC Family comedy Melissa & Joey. She is also a guest lecturer on television writing at the Low Residency MFA at UCR. Bilingual in English and Spanish, she spent a year abroad in Costa Rica and has worked for a nonprofit on Fair Trade Coffee and anti-sweatshop campaigns. Love, Coffee, and Revolution is her first novel. You can also read her award-nominated short story, “Not a Dinner Party Person” in Eight Very Bad Nights; A Collection of Hanukkah Noir, or in the upcoming The Best American Mystery and Suspense 2025.

Stefanie joins Barbara DeMarco-Barrett at Arvida Book Company in Tustin, California, to talk on the patio before a live audience. They talk about bringing out a project after letting it sit for many years, writing for TV, the crossover from scriptwriting to writing fiction, why she plots, structure, and much more.

(Recorded on July 20, 2025)

Barbara’s book of short stories, Pool Fishing, will be published on September 16 by Kelp Books. Read more about it and pre-order here.

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

2025-8-5_WOW_Stefanie_Leder Barbara DeMarco-Barrett Download

Ed Park, author of AN ORAL HISTORY OF ATLANTIS Jul 28, 2025

Show notes

Ed Park is the author of the novels Same Bed Different Dreams (2023), a Pulitzer Prize finalist and winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and Personal Days (2008), a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award. His fiction, essays, and reviews have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Harper’s, The Atlantic, Bookforum, McSweeney’s, and elsewhere. He is a founding editor of The Believer and the former literary editor of The Village Voice, and has worked in newspapers and book publishing.

An Oral History of Atlantis is his debut story collection. These 16 stories are utterly original and very funny. Some were written over a period of years, others in an hour. He joins Marrie Stone to talk about the collection and all the dozens of decisions that went into creating these stories. He also talks about his writing career, the things that made the biggest difference in his training, and his advice to writers.

(Recorded on July 2, 2025)

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

Ed Park, author of AN ORAL HISTORY OF ATLANTIS Marrie Stone Download

Jill Ciment, author of THE BODY IN QUESTION Jul 23, 2025

Show notes

Jill Ciment, author of The Body in Question, was born in Montreal, Canada. She is the author of Small Claims, a collection of short stories, novels, and novellas; The Law of Falling Bodies, Teeth of the Dog, The Tattoo Artist, Heroic Measures, and Act of God, and the memoirs, Half a Life and Consent. She has been the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including the National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, two New York Foundation for the Arts fellowships, the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize, and a Guggenheim fellowship. Jill Ciment is a professor emeritus at the University of Florida. She lives in Gainesville, Florida, and New York City.

Jill joins Barbara DeMarco-Barrett to talk the various aspects of writing, but in particular, Jill’s book, The Body in Question. Warning: There will be spoilers.

A couple of months ago Barbara let our Patreon supporters know there would be talk in depth about the book and if listeners hate spoilers, read the book first—it’s a thin novel—and then listen to the show. “I recently spent two weeks in jury duty on a criminal case,” says Barbara, “and during the first week I reread this book in which a criminal case is the B story. The A story is the affair the narrator has with a fellow juror known only by his number until three-quarters of the way through when the case ends.” Jill was on the show when this book came out around 2020. Barbara says, “I loved the book so much and wanted to bring Jill back to talk about the ending.”

(Recorded on June 27, 2025)

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

Jill Ciment, author of THE BODY IN QUSTION Barbara DeMarco-Barrett Download

Amy Bloom, author of I’LL BE RIGHT HERE Jul 14, 2025

Show notes

The New Yorker has said that Amy Bloom “gets more meaning into individual sentences than most authors manage in whole books.”

She is the author of five novels: White Houses, Lucky Us, Away, Love Invents Us and – most recently – I’ll Be Right Here. She’s also authored three collections of short stories: Where the God Of Love Hangs Out, Come to Me (finalist for the National Book Award), and A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You (finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award). In 2022, she wrote the widely acclaimed New York Times bestselling memoir, In Love.

I’ll Be Right Here spans over 80 years and a kaleidoscopic cast of characters (including a few real-life historical figures). We follow them from France to Poughkeepsie, through unconventional relationships, partnerships, and family unions and Amy accomplishes it all within a compact 200 pages. As always, we want to know how she does it.

Amy joins Marrie Stone to talk about the novel and how she researched this real and fictional cast of characters. She talks about the best advice she ever received about writing from her father, her inventive use of lists, her use of different forms and structures (including using scripts, epistolary chapters, lists, and more), and why she’s always writing in different genres. She saves some of her best advice and insights for the end of the interview, so be sure to stick around.

(Recorded on July 8, 2025)

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

Amy Bloom, author of I'LL BE RIGHT BACK Marrie Stone Download

Richard Bausch, author of THE FATE OF OTHERS Jul 08, 2025

Show notes

An acknowledged master of the short story form, Richard Bausch's work has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, Gentleman's Quarterly, Harper's, The Missouri Review, The New Yorker, Narrative, New Letters, Playboy, Ploughshares, and The Southern Review, and his stories have been widely anthologized, including The Best American Short Stories, O. Henry Prize Stories, and Pushcart Prize Stories, among others. He is the author of thirteen novels and ten collections of stories, including his new collection, The Fate of Others.

Richard joins Barbara to talk about his path to writing fiction, various stories in the collection as well as titling stories, arranging stories in the book, the difference between writing novels and stories, and so much more.

(Recorded on June 27, 2025)

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

2025-7-7_WOW_Richard_Bausch Barbara DeMarco-Barrett Download

Chris Whitaker, author of ALL THE COLORS OF THE DARK Jun 30, 2025

Show notes

Chris Whitaker is the author of four novels including Tall Oaks, All the Wicked Girls, We Begin at the End and All the Colors of the Dark (now out in paperback). The New York Times bestseller has sold more than one million copies. But more extraordinary is Chris’s story of becoming a professional writer and how these bestsellers get written.

He joins Marrie Stone to talk about his unusual path into publishing and how he used writing to overcome trauma. (In fact, Chris is so self-taught that he recently had to Google “MFA” to learn what it stands for.) Chris talks about living in the U.K. but setting his novels in the U.S. and how he masters the research to write about places he’s never visited. One of those tricks is using an online dialect tool to get his dialogue just right. Chris also discusses how he writes in fragments with three computer screens in front of him, and other unconventional writing techniques.

(Recorded on June 23, 2025)

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

Chris Whitaker, author of ALL THE COLORS OF THE DARK Marrie Stone Download

Caroline Fraser, author of MURDERLAND Jun 23, 2025

Show notes

Born in Seattle, Caroline Fraser holds a Ph.D. in English and American literature from Harvard. Formerly on the editorial staff of The New Yorker, she is the author of three previous nonfiction books, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder, God's Perfect Child: Living and Dying in the Christian Science Church, and Rewilding the World: Dispatches from the Conservation Revolution. She served as editor of the Library of America edition of Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House books and has written for The New York Review of Books, The Atlantic Monthly, Outside Magazine, and The London Review of Books. She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, with her husband, Hal Espen. Her new nonfiction book, Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers, published by Penguin Press, is the focus of today’s talk.

Caroline joins Barbara DeMarco-Barrett to talk about the genesis of Murderland, how she decided on structure, the memoir aspect of the book, why she thinks readers and viewers are fascinated with crime, her relationship with research, and much more.

(Recorded on June 6, 2025)

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

Caroline Fraser, author of MURDERLAND Barbara DeMarco-Barrett Download

Wally Lamb, author of THE RIVER IS WAITING Jun 16, 2025

Show notes

Wally Lamb is the author of six New York Times bestselling novels: I’ll Take You There, We Are Water, Wishin’ and Hopin’, The Hour I First Believed, I Know This Much Is True, and She’s Come Undone. He also edited Couldn’t Keep It to Myself and I’ll Fly Away, two volumes of essays from students in his writing workshop at York Correctional Institution, a women’s prison in Connecticut, where he was a volunteer facilitator for twenty years. He’s been on the show three times in the past. Those interviews can be found in our archives.

The River is Waiting is his first novel in nine years. He joins Marrie Stone to talk about it. It’s the first time Wally has put York Correctional Institution into his fiction. And he puts other parts of himself into this novel, as well.

He talks about rendering real life experiences into fiction, how to weave politics and current events into your prose, making unsympathetic characters sympathetic to your reader, what writing in the present tense does to your prose, what Wally may have learned about writing and life from the inmates he’s worked with, a little about the writing group he’s been part of for 20 years, and much more.

(Recorded on April 28, 2025)

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

Wally Lamb, author of THE RIVER IS WAITING Marrie Stone Download

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