QWERTY: A Podcast for Writers on How to Live the Writing Life

Today my guest is writer, author and actor, Amy Wilson. She is the author of the memoir, When Did I Get Like This?: The Screamer, the Worrier, the Dinosaur-Chicken-Nugget-Buyer, and Other Mothers I Swore I'd Never Be, as well as the co-host of the popular parenting podcast WHAT FRESH HELL: LAUGHING IN THE FACE OF MOTHERHOOD. The author of the MOTHER LOAD, a one-woman show which toured to 16 cities after its hit off-Broadway run, she has appeared as an actor on Broadway and as a series regular on TV sitcoms. Her new book is Happy to Help, Adventures of A People Pleaser, just out from Zibby Books. The QWERTY podcast is brought to you by the book The Memoir Project: A Thoroughly Non-Standardized Text for Writing & Life. Read it, and begin your own journey to writing what you know. To learn more, join The Memoir Project free newsletter list and keep up to date on all our free webinars, instructive posts and online classes in how to write memoir, as well as our talented, available memoir editors and memoir coaches, podcast guests and more.

Anita Felicelli's short stories have appeared in The Massachusetts Review, Midnight Breakfast, Air/Light, The Normal School, and elsewhere. She has contributed essays and criticism to the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Alta Journal, Slate, San Francisco Chronicle, Los Angeles Review of Books, and the New York Times Modern Love column, among other places. Her short stories and poems have been anthologized and in 2023, one of her short stories was performed as part of Symphony Space’s Selected Shorts. Her books include Chimerica: A Novel, the award-winning Love Songs for a Lost Continent and her new short story collection, How We Know Our Time Travelers, published by WTAW Press. Listen in as we discuss the benefit as a writer to being able to write across forms. The QWERTY podcast is brought to you by the book The Memoir Project: A Thoroughly Non-Standardized Text for Writing & Life. Read it, and begin your own journey to writing what you know. To learn more, join The Memoir Project free newsletter list and keep up to date on all our free webinars, instructive posts and online classes in how to write memoir, as well as our talented, available memoir editors and memoir coaches, podcast guests and more.

Sarah LaBrie is a TV writer, librettist and memoirist whose new memoir, No One Gets to Fall Apart, is just out from Harper Collins. Listen in as host Marion Roach Smith asks the author about the vulnerability needed to write memoir, how to find the language for defining ourselves and writing about family mental illness. The QWERTY podcast is brought to you by the book The Memoir Project: A Thoroughly Non-Standardized Text for Writing & Life. Read it, and begin your own journey to writing what you know. To learn more, join The Memoir Project free newsletter list and keep up to date on all our free webinars, instructive posts and online classes in how to write memoir, as well as our talented, available memoir editors and memoir coaches, podcast guests and more.

Liz Morrow, a seasoned ghostwriter and co-author of "Hungry Authors," shares her insights on what it takes to succeed as a writer. She discusses the vital role of 'hunger' in the writing journey, emphasizing determination over traditional skills. Morrow highlights the process of finding a compelling book idea and the nuances of blending genres. She also stresses the importance of understanding your audience and crafting flexible proposals. Finally, she delves into self-care and endurance as essential components for sustaining motivation in writing.

Comics artist and writer, Teresa Wong is the author of the 2019 graphic memoir Dear Scarlet: The Story of My Postpartum Depression, a finalist for The City of Calgary W.O. Mitchell Book Prize and longlisted for CBC Canada Reads 2020. Her comics have appeared in The Believer, The New Yorker and McSweeney’s. Her new book, All Our Ordinary Stories, is just out from Arsenal Pulp Press. Listen in as she and I discuss the intimacy that the graphic memoir allows. The QWERTY podcast is brought to you by the book The Memoir Project: A Thoroughly Non-Standardized Text for Writing & Life. Read it, and begin your own journey to writing what you know. To learn more, join The Memoir Project free newsletter list and keep up to date on all our free webinars and instructive posts and online classes in how to write memoir, as well as our talented, available memoir editors and memoir coaches, podcast guests and more.

Sarah Sherbill's memoir, There was Night and There was Morning: A Memoir of Trauma and Redemption, is just out from Union Sq. and Co., and chronicles a road to redemption after her father, a beloved rabbi in an Orthodox Chicago community is also a man who abuses his family. In Sarah's role in the family, she is the secret keeper, until a secret so grave is revealed that creates the demand to write it all down. Her work, including a remarkable full-page opinion piece in the Sunday New York Times, explores redemption and it complexities. Listen in as author Sarah Sherbill and Qwerty podcast host, Marion Roach Smith, discuss writing memoir, how to wite into redemption and how to look at one family story and turn it into essays, a book and opinion pieces. The QWERTY podcast is brought to you by the book The Memoir Project: A Thoroughly Non-Standardized Text for Writing & Life. Read it, and begin your own journey to writing what you know. To learn more, join The Memoir Project free newsletter list and keep up to date on all our free webinars and instructive posts and online classes in how to write memoir, as well as our talented, available memoir editors and memoir coaches, podcast guests and more.

Sarah Leavitt is a cartoonist and author of the graphic memoir, Tangles: A Story About Alzheimer’s, My Mother, and Me (2010), and the author of the award-winning historical fiction comic Agnes, Murderess (2019). Sarah is an assistant professor in the School of Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, where she has developed and taught undergraduate and graduate comics classes since 2012. Her new book, a graphic memoir, is just out from Arsenal Press. The book is titled Something, Not Nothing, A Story of Grief and Love. Listen in as we discuss the varieties of grapahic memoirs, how to write a graphic memoir, what distinguishes graphic memor from strictly prose memoir, and so much more. The QWERTY podcast is brought to you by the book The Memoir Project: A Thoroughly Non-Standardized Text for Writing & Life. Read it, and begin your own journey to writing what you know. To learn more, join The Memoir Project free newsletter list and keep up to date on all our free webinars and instructive posts and online classes in how to write memoir, as well as our talented, available memoir editors and memoir coaches, podcast guests and more.

Brigit Binns is a prolific author of cookbooks, with more than 100,000 copies in print, including eleven titles she has authored for Williams Sonoma. She has also co-authored cookbooks, edited cookbooks and written 90 shows for the Food Network series, The Hot Tamales. And now she has turned her attention to memoir. Her new book is titled Rottenkid: A Succulent Story of Survival, just out from Sibylline Press. In this fine memoir, she covers food, Hollywood, neglect, celebrity, infidelity, cooking, betrayal, narcissism, recipes and transcendenceListen in as we discuss how to handle big, compelling themes while writing memoir. The QWERTY podcast is brought to you by the book The Memoir Project: A Thoroughly Non-Standardized Text for Writing & Life. Read it, and begin your own journey to writing what you know. To learn more, join The Memoir Project free newsletter list and keep up to date on all our free webinars and instructive posts and online classes in how to write memoir, as well as our talented, available memoir editors and memoir coaches, podcast guests and more.

Caro De Robertis, whose pronouns are they/theirs, is a Uruguayan-American author and full tenured professor in the creative writing dept at San Francisco State University. They are the author of five novels and the editor of an award-winning anthology, Radical Hope. Their books have been translated into seventeen languages and have received numerous other honors, including a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature. Their new book is The Palace of Eros, just out from Atria Books. Listen in as we discuss how to write characters' interior lives, and so much more. The QWERTY podcast is brought to you by the book The Memoir Project: A Thoroughly Non-Standardized Text for Writing & Life. Read it, and begin your own journey to writing what you know. To learn more, join The Memoir Project free newsletter list and keep up to date on all our free webinars and instructive posts and online classes in how to write memoir, as well as our talented, available memoir editors and memoir coaches, podcast guests and more.

Writer and novelist Juli Min is the editor-in-chief and fiction editor of the Shanghai Literary Review. Currently a resident of Shanghai, she was born in Seoul, Korea, and raised in New Jersey, and has just published her debut novel. Entitled Shanghailanders, the book is just out from Spiegel and Grau. Listen in as she and I discuss book structure, and so much more. The QWERTY podcast is brought to you by the book The Memoir Project: A Thoroughly Non-Standardized Text for Writing & Life. Read it, and begin your own journey to writing what you know. To learn more, join The Memoir Project's free newsletter list and keep up to date on all our free webinars and instructive posts, and online classes in how to write memoir, as well as our talented, available memoir editors and memoir coaches, podcast guests and more.