Beyond the Page: The Best of the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference

In this episode, recorded live at the 2024 conference, biographer Jonathan Eig talks about his book on Martin Luther King, Jr., the first major biography of the civil rights leader in decades. Eig resurrects King from myth and history and brings him to vivid life, with all of his emotional complexity and unwavering courage, drawing a fresh and indelible portrait of a man whom he justifiably calls one of America’s founding fathers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode of Beyond the Page, lucky listener, you get to hear the great Judy Blume, the author of twenty-five books for young readers and four novels for adults that all-told have sold more than 90 million copies in forty languages. Blume’s cherished, ground-breaking 1970 young adult novel, Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret, has captivated and enlightened girls (and boys, and their parents) for 55 years and counting. I, for one, read it when I was 10, and it – along with about half a dozen other classic Blume titles – basically taught me everything I know, to this day, about girls and growing up. So consider me yet one more reader for whom Judy Blume was, and remains, a true literary rock star. Here she is, recorded live at the 2024 Writers Conference, in conversation with her friend JEFFREY BROWN of the PBS NewsHour. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, recorded live at the 2024 Writers Conference, I sit down with bestselling crime novelist and TV writer/producer DENNIS LEHANE for a lively, wide-ranging conversation about how he approaches writing books vs. television scripts, his advice for writing true crime stories, as well as his journey developing his two latest AppleTV limited series, Black Bird and the upcoming Firebug, both starring Taron Egerton. Lehane is that rare novelist who has found acclaim and a large audience both in fiction and on the screen. A handful of his novels have been made into excellent films – Mystic River, Gone Baby Gone, and Shutter Island, to name a few – and in recent years he has become a much in-demand television creator and showrunner, a role that first began for him two decades ago, when he joined the now-famous Season 4 writers room on David Simon’s iconic show The Wire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We were already editing this episode when the L.A. fires broke out on January 7, 2025. In fact, our editor Dean Grinsfelder had to evacuate as the flames moved in. So did my 91-year-old dad, and so did my co-producer James Tooley’s parents and brothers and their families; one of those brothers saw his house burn to the ground.All of which is to say, I guess, that podcasts, though they live in the ether, don’t exist in a vacuum, and neither do we. We’re all connected.And so, while those impacted by the LA fires regroup and recover, we want to share an important story – recorded live at the 2024 Conference – about another, eerily similar and catastrophic fire that was the centerpiece of journalist John Vaillant’s award-winning book Fire Weather. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, recorded live at the 2024 Sun Valley Writers' Conference, novelist Kristin Hannah talks to Jenny Emery Davidson, the executive director of The Community Library in Ketchum, Idaho, about her #1 New York Times bestselling novel The Women. In The Women, Hannah (known for previous bestselling historical novels such as The Nightingale, The Great Alone, and The Four Winds) takes up the Vietnam epic and re- centers the story on the experience of the military nurses who worked under fire, on bases and in field hospitals throughout the war, but whose sacrifice and commitment to their country has all too often been forgotten. Like so many male soldiers of the time, Frankie McGrath, the novel’s heroine, finds herself overwhelmed by the chaos and destruction of war, as well as the unexpected trauma of coming home to a changed and politically divided America. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In a time of loneliness and isolation, social rupture and alienation, what will it take to mend our broken hearts and rebuild our society? In this episode, one of Ameriica’s leading rabbis, and the author of the book The Amen Effect, Sharon Brous makes the case that it is through honoring our most basic human instinct – the yearning for real connection – that we reawaken our shared humanity and begin to heal. In a conversation with legendary bookseller Mitchell Kaplan recorded live at the 2024 Writers Conference, Brous pairs heart-driven anecdotes from her experience building and pastoring to a leading-edge faith community over the past two decades with ancient Jewish wisdom and contemporary science. Hers is a clarion call: the sense of belonging engendered by our genuine presence is not only a social and biological need, but a moral and spiritual necessity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The author of a seminal book on Putin, All The Kremlin’s Men, and the founding editor-in-chief of what was Russia’s most truth-telling opposition news channel TV Rain, Mikhail Zygar is a journalistic hero to many in Russia. Now living and writing in the U.S. after fleeing persecution by Putin, Zygar continues to cover the most troubling stories of his homeland with unmitigated courage and a razor-sharp intelligence. In this episode, recorded live at the 2024 conference, he sits down with The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg to discuss his most recent book, War and Punishment: Putin, Zelensky, and the Path to Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine, and the state of all things Putin. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, recorded live at the 2023 Sun Valley Writers’ Conference, New Yorker Staff Writer Patrick Radden Keefe, who has garnered prizes ranging from the National Magazine Award to the Orwell Prize to the National Book Critics Circle Award for his meticulously reported, hypnotically engaging work on the many ways people behave badly, tells a few stories and lifts the hood on what he calls his “abiding preoccupations: crime and corruption, secrets and lies, the permeable membrane separating licit and illicit worlds, the bonds of family, the power of denial.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In bestselling author Curtis Sittenfeld’s much-loved new novel, she explores—with her typically keen observations and trademark ability to bring complex women to life on the page—the neurosis-inducing and heart-fluttering wonder of love,while slyly dissecting the social rituals of romance and gender relations in the modern age. Sittenfeld sits down with SVWC Literary Director John Burnham Schwartz—a former professor of hers at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop—to discuss what makes Romantic Comedy a romantic comedy, her approach to genre and craft in previous novels such as American Wife, Rodham, and Eligible, and other stories from her literary journey. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode of Beyond the Page, recorded live at the 2023 conference, poet and memoirist Javier Zamora talks to legendary bookseller Mitchell Kaplan about his memoir Solito, which chronicles his experiences traveling from El Salvador to the United States, by himself, when he was 9 years old. Javier Zamora writes, and speaks, like someone who believes he can never afford to forget that journey, or the experience on the other side, in America, of growing up undocumented. You won’t be able to forget, either. And that is the power of great literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices