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First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing

Latest episodes

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Apr 1, 2024 • 1h 6min

First Draft - Kiley Reid

Kiley Reid is the author of Come and Get It and Such A Fun Age, which was a New York Times Best Seller and longlisted for the 2020 Booker Price. Her writing has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Playboy, The Guardian, and others. Reid is currently an assistant professor at the University of Michigan.We talked about religion and fiction, philosophy, acting, Buddhism, materialism, college age women, grace in fiction, what creative writing can and can’t do, not judging your fictional characters, and the background work she does that doesn’t make it into a novel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Mar 26, 2024 • 53min

First Draft - Debra Spark (Returns Again)

Award-winning author Debra Spark discusses the value of art, the role of women in the art world, parenting, and creating parallel lines in creative writing. Topics also include the real and fictional abusive boarding school in Maine and if beauty can save people.
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Mar 18, 2024 • 1h 5min

First Draft - Téa Obreht (Returns)

Téa Obreht is the author of the novel The Tiger’s Wife, which won the 2011 Orange Prize for Fiction, and was a 2011 National Book Award finalist and an international bestseller.  Her novel Inland won the BRLA Southwest Book Award and the Ballard Prize.  Her work has been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Non-Required Reading, and has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, The Atlantic, Vogue, Esquire and Zoetrope: All-Story, among many others. She currently lives in Wyoming.  Her new novel is called The Morningside.We talked about writing during the pandemic in a fever dream, confronting trauma in writing, besting your therapist, folktales, the world our children will inherit, and crafting a novel from feverish draft to structured finished product. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Mar 11, 2024 • 1h 2min

First Draft - DIane Seuss (Returns)

Diane Seuss is the author of the poetry collections Frank: Sonnets, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award; Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl; Four-Legged Girl, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; Wolf Lake, White Gown Blown Open; and It Blows You Hollow. Her work has appeared in Poetry, the Georgia Review, Brevity, Able Muse, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and the Missouri Review, as well as The Best American Poetry 2014. She was the MacLean Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Department of English at Colorado College in 2012, and she has taught at Kalamazoo College since 1988. Her new poetry collection is Modern Poetry.We talked about aging, John Keats, dogs,  romance, music, objectivity, grief, coldness, and the snarling, flaming bitch of poetry. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Mar 4, 2024 • 57min

First Draft - Sloane Crosley

Sloane Crosley is the author of The New York Times bestselling essay collections, I Was Told There’d Be Cake, How Did You Get This Number, and Look Alive Out There and the bestselling novels, The Clasp and Cult Classic. She served as editor of The Best American Travel Writing series and is featured in The Library of America's 50 Funniest American Writers, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading and others. She is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. Her new memoir is called Grief Is for People.We talked about structuring her memoir around the stages of grief, how she knew she was at the end of the book, being close to an event to write about it, that doctors have the best lines for writers to steal, observing the world, and how grief is not over just because the book is. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Feb 26, 2024 • 60min

First Draft - Temim Fruchter

Temim Fruchter is a queer nonbinary Jewish writer who lives in Brooklyn. She holds an MFA in fiction from the University of Maryland and is the recipient of fellowships from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, Vermont Studio Center, and a 2020 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer's Award. She is co-host of Pete’s Reading Series in Brooklyn. Her debut novel is City of Laughter.We talked about origin stories for families and books, queer sensibility, growing up Modern Orthodox Jew, unraveling the mysterious stories of our lives, and pushing boundaries in life and creative writing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Feb 19, 2024 • 1h 6min

First Draft - Leslie Jamison (Returns Again)

Leslie Jamison is the author of two essay collections— The Empathy Exams and Make It Scream, Make It Burn—a critical memoir, The Recovering, and a novel, The Gin Closet. She’s written for The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Harper's, Oxford American, A Public Space, Virginia Quarterly Review, and The Believer.   Her new book is called Splinters. Jamison teaches at the Columbia University MFA program, where she directs the nonfiction concentration.We talked about how structure can be the answer to figuring out how to get a story on the page, the process of writing versus vetting it for the public, how time and perspective can bring spaciousness, the many selves that we exist as, and Google searches as confessions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Feb 12, 2024 • 59min

First Draft - Margot Livesey (Returns)

Margot Livesey has published ten novels: Homework, Criminals, The Missing World, Eva Moves the Furniture, Banishing Verona, The House on Fortune Street, The Flight of Gemma Hardy, Mercury, and The Boy in the Field, and The Road from Belhaven. The Hidden Machinery, a collection of essays on writing, was published by Tin House Books in 2017. Livesey is currently teaching at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She lives with her husband, a painter, in Cambridge, MA, and goes back to London and Scotland whenever she can.We talked about growing up in Scotland, quiet novels, traveling in her mind when she couldn't in person during Covid, small town farm life, solace in animals and the natural world, secret sorrows, and the supernatural. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Feb 5, 2024 • 56min

First Draft - Kaveh Akbar

Kaveh Akbar's poems appear in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Paris Review, Best American Poetry,and elsewhere. He is the author of two poetry collections: Pilgrim Bell and Calling a Wolf a Wolf, in addition to a chapbook, Portrait of the Alcoholic. He is also the editor of The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse: 100 Poets on the Divine. In His novel is called Martyr! He is also the Poetry Editor of The Nation.  Akbar was born in Tehran, Iran, and teaches at the University of Iowa and in the low-residency MFA programs at Randolph College and Warren Wilson.We talked about the transition to novel writing from poetry, transcendence in poetry, not looking away from the terrors of the world, addiction and rehabilitation, the messiness of life, and questions about goodness. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Jan 29, 2024 • 1h 10min

First Draft - Ilyon Woo

Ilyon Woo is the is the New York Times best-selling author of Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom, one of the New York Times’s “10 Best Books of 2023” and People Magazine’s “Top Ten Books of 2023. Woo is also the author of The Great Divorce: A Nineteenth-Century Mother’s Extraordinary Fight Against Her Husband, the Shakers, and Her Times.  Her writing has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, Time Magazine, and The New York Times.  She has a PhD in English from Columbia University. We talked about the unfathomable but real cruelty of slavery, institutional slavery as the foundation for the building of this country, the indelible spirits of Ellen and William Craft, researching and brining historic events to life in creative non-fiction, the fugitive slave act, how cinema influences her writing, and writing vows. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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