First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing

Steve Almond is the author of twelve books of fiction and nonfiction, including the New York Times bestsellers Candyfreak and Against Football. His recent books include the novel All the Secrets of the World and WilliamStoner and the Battle for the Inner Life.For four years, Steve hosted the New York Times Dear Sugar podcast with Cheryl Strayed. He is the recipient of a 2022 NEA grant in fiction, and his short stories have been anthologized in the Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize, Best American Erotica, and Best American Mysteries series.  His new book is Truth is the Arrow, Mercy is the Bow: A DIY Manual for the Construction of Stories.We talk about craft in creative writing and creative nonfiction, managing conflict in stories, bringing emotion and urgency into writing about the human experience, obsession, plot and causation, and clove cigarettes and the novel Stoner.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Anne Lamott is the author of 20 books, which include fiction and nonfiction. Her novels include Hard Laughter, Blue Shoe, and Imperfect Birds. Her nonfiction titles include Operating Instructions, Bird by Bird, Almost Everything: Notes on Hope and the newly released Somehow: Thoughts on Love. She has been awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship and was inducted into the California Hall of Fame in 2010.We talked about love, call and response, writing craft, secrets, the solace and inspiration of reading, novels and nonfiction, Ms. Magazine, and poetry. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Marie Mutsuki Mockett is the author of the novels Picking Bones from the Ash and The Tree Doctor.  Her nonfiction books include American Harvest, which won the Nebraska Book Award, and Where the Dead Pause, and the Japanese Say Goodbye, which was a finalist for the PEN Open Book Award.  We talked about writing about nature, sex, loss, cross-cultural influences, Japan, and binaries.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Julia Alvarez has written novels including How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, In the Time of the Butterflies, ¡Yo!, In the Name of Salomé, Saving the World, Afterlife, collections of poems including Homecoming, The Other Side/ El Otro Lado, The Woman I Kept to Myself, nonfiction works including Something to Declare, Once Upon A Quinceañera, and A Wedding in Haiti, and numerous books for young readers including the Tía Lola Stories series, Before We Were Free, finding miracles, Return to Sender and Where Do They Go? Her new novel is The Cemetery of Untold Stories.  In 2013, she received the National Medal of Arts from President Obama.We talked about Julia's childhood, her parents reaction to her fiction, telling stories, aging, creativity, the stories we can pass on, and writing craft. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Lily Brooks-Dalton is the bestselling author of The Light Pirate, which was the runner-up for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, a #1 Indie Next pick, a Good Morning America Book Club selection, one of NPR's "Books We Love," and a New York Times Editors' Pick. Her previous novel, Good Morning, Midnight, which was the inspiration for the film adaptation The Midnight Sky and her memoir, Motorcycles I’ve Loved, was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award. Her work has been translated into 18 languages. A former writer-in-residence at The Kerouac House and The Studios of Key West, she currently lives in Los Angeles.We talked about writing climate fiction, making time to feel grief, pacing the story so that hope only comes after a proper time to mourn, listening to intuition, remaking the world after catastrophe, magic, and literary structure.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

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.

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

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

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