One of the questions I often get this time of year is who were my favorite interviews and what were my favorite books? This year, the question prompted me to begin digging through my 25+ hours of recordings to find the gems from 2024. I decided to edit some of them together and share them here. Of course, this is just a small sampling and doesn’t include Barbara’s many treasures. One of my New Year’s resolutions is to try doing more reading and less watching. If you’re in that boat too and looking for some good places to start, maybe this episode will help you out. All the complete interviews can be found in our archives at www.writersonwriting.com.Here’s a quick list of the authors and books mentioned in this episode: Steve Almond’s Truth is the Arrow, Mercy is the Bow, Kevin Barry’s The Heart in Winter, Bonnie Jo Campbell’s The Waters, Kristin Hannah’s The Women, Jonathan Lethem’s Brooklyn Crime Novel, Hisham Matar’s My Friends, Joyce Maynard’s How the Light Gets In, Alice McDermott’s Absolution, Ben Shattuck’s The History of Sound, Curtis Sittenfeld’s Romantic Comedy, and Elizabeth Strout’s Tell Me Everything. For more information on Writers on Writing and to become a supporter, visit our Patreon page. For a one-time donation, visit Ko-fi. Listen to past interviews on our website. If you'd like to support the show and indie bookstores, consider buying books at our bookstore on bookshop.org. We’ve stocked it with titles from our guests, as well as some of our personal favorites. And on Spotify, you’ll find to an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. Look for the artist, Just My Type. Email the show at writersonwritingpodcast@gmail.com. We love to hear from our listeners!Host: Barbara DeMarco-BarrettHost: Marrie StoneMusic: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)

I have a Christmas and Hanukah gift for you: my show with Stephen Dunn. This is one of my favorite shows and he was one of my favorite poets. He published something like 21 collections of poetry. The show you’re about to hear from 2001, the first time he was a guest on the show. Writers on Writing was on the radio then. Podcasting wouldn’t be along for four more years and it would be a number of years—I’ve lost track—before my cohost Marrie Stone joined us.  I first learned of Dunn back in the early 1980s. I was on a bus in San Francisco, looking up at the placards that lined the roof of the bus and there was a poem of his. It may have been his poem, “Contact,” which he reads during the following interview. Back then the City posted poetry on MUNI busses (I think it’s doing that again). Dunn and I never met in person but he graced me and the show with his presence a half dozen times.Stephen Dunn was born on June 24, 1939, in Forest Hills, Queens. He graduated from Forest Hills High School in 1957. He earned a BA in history and English from Hofstra University, attended the New School Writing Workshops, and finished his MA in creative writing at Syracuse University. Dunn’s books of poetry include the posthumous collection The Not Yet Fallen World (W. W. Norton, 2022); Pagan Virtues (W. W. Norton, 2019); Lines of Defense (W. W. Norton, 2014); Here and Now: Poems (W. W. Norton, 2011); What Goes On: Selected and New Poems 1995-2009 (W. W. Norton, 2009); Everything Else in the World (W. W. Norton, 2006); Local Visitations (W. W. Norton, 2003); Different Hours (W. W. Norton, 2000), winner of the 2001 Pulitzer Prize winner for poetry; Loosestrife (W. W. Norton, 1996), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; New and Selected Poems: 1974–1994(W. W. Norton, 1994); Landscape at the End of the Century (W. W. Norton, 1991); Between Angels (W. W. Norton, 1989); Local Time (William Morrow & Co., 1986), winner of the National Poetry Series; Not Dancing (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1984); Work & Love (HarperCollins, 1981); A Circus of Needs (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1978); Full of Lust and Good Usage (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1976); and Looking For Holes In the Ceiling (University of Massachusetts Press, 1974). He is also the author of Walking Light: Memoirs and Essays on Poetry (BOA Editions, 2001), and Riffs & Reciprocities: Prose Pairs (W. W. Norton, 1998).About Dunn’s work, the poet Billy Collins has written:The art lies in hiding the art, Horace tells us, and Stephen Dunn has proven himself a master of concealment. His honesty would not be so forceful were it not for his discrete formality; his poems would not be so strikingly naked were they not so carefully dressed.Dunn’s other honors include the Academy Award for Literature, the James Wright Prize, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. He has taught poetry and creative writing and held residencies at Wartburg College, Wichita State University, Columbia University, University of Washington, Syracuse University, Southwest Minnesota State College, Princeton University, and University of Michigan.Dunn has worked as a professional basketball player, an advertising copywriter, and an editor, as well as a professor of creative writing. Dunn was the distinguished professor of creative writing at Richard Stockton College and lived in Frostburg, Maryland with his wife, the writer Barbara Hurd. He passed away on June 25, 2021.He won a Pulitzer Prize for Different Hours, the focus for our talk on this day in 2001. We also talk about the poets’ state of mind, writing poems during and after the moment, existing in the world of ambiguity, being a retrospective poet, how his focus has changed over the years, how he taught poetry, good training for a poet, hearing from readers, National Poetry Month, and 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 upon hundreds of past interviews on our website. If you'd like to support the show and indie bookstores, consider buying books at our bookstore on bookshop.org. We’ve stocked it with titles from our guests, as well as some of our personal favorites. And on Spotify, you’ll find to an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. Look for the artist, Just My Type. Email the show at writersonwritingpodcast@gmail.com. We love to hear from our listeners!(Recorded in 2001 in the KUCI-FM studio at University of California Irvine campus.) Host: Barbara DeMarco-BarrettHost: Marrie StoneMusic: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)  

Karl Marlantes served as a Marine in Vietnam, where he was awarded the Navy Cross, the Bronze Star, two Navy Commendation Medals for valor, two Purple Hearts, and ten air medals. He is the bestselling author of Deep River, Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War, and What It is Like to Go to War. His latest, Cold Victory, is out in paperback by Grove Press. Karl joins Marrie Stone to discuss it. He talks about writing books based on direct experience versus writing books based on research, how he turned his experience in Vietnam into fiction, what he learned from Danielle Steel and Louis L’Amour, how to use Excel spreadsheets to plot your novel, 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. Listen to past interviews on our website. If you'd like to support the show and indie bookstores, consider buying books at our bookstore on bookshop.org. We’ve stocked it with titles from our guests, as well as some of our personal favorites. And on Spotify, you’ll find to an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. Look for the artist, Just My Type. Email the show at writersonwritingpodcast@gmail.com. We love to hear from our listeners!(Recorded on December 10, 2024) Host: Barbara DeMarco-BarrettHost: Marrie StoneMusic: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)  

Caroline Leavitt, the New York Times bestselling author of thirteen novels, most recently Days of Wonder, A finalist for the Midatlantic Fiction Prize and longlisted for the Joyce Carol Oates Literary Prize. Caroline is also the co-founder of A Mighty Blaze and a book critic for People Magazine. Find out more at www.carolineleavitt.com Caroline joins Barbara DeMarco-Barrett to talk about writing the end of the book before the beginning, how understanding story structure changed everything for her, using real settings as well as making them up, writing in dual points of view, character arcs, covers, and 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. Listen to past interviews on our website. If you'd like to support the show and indie bookstores, consider buying books at our bookstore on bookshop.org. We’ve stocked it with titles from our guests, as well as some of our personal favorites. And on Spotify, you’ll find to an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. Look for the artist, Just My Type. Email the show at writersonwritingpodcast@gmail.com. We love to hear from our listeners!(Recorded on November 15, 2024) Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett Host: Marrie Stone Music and sound editing: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)

Suzanne Redfearn didn’t discover her talent for fiction until her 30s. A trained commercial and residential architect, she’d also worked as a copywriter, marketing manager, graphic designer, and other odd jobs. Today, Suzanne is the #1 Amazon and USA Today bestselling author of seven novels: Two Good Men, Where Butterflies Wander, Moment In Time, Hadley & Grace, In an Instant, No Ordinary Life, and Hush Little Baby. Her books have been translated into twenty-seven languages and have been recognized by RT Reviews, Target Recommends, Goodreads, Publisher’s Marketplace, and Kirkus Reviews. She has been awarded Best New Fiction from Best Book Awards and has been a Goodreads Choice Awards Finalist.Suzanne joins Marrie Stone to talk about her path to success in commercial fiction. (Spoiler alert: it was neither linear nor easy.) She is an autodidact and shares the resources she found invaluable to teach herself the craft (including Writing the Breakout Novel by Donald Maass and Save the Cat by Jessica Brody). Suzanne has had five agents, three publishers, and still has several unpublished manuscripts in her drawer. She talks about what to look for in an agent, the advantages and disadvantages of publishing under an Amazon imprint, writing the right novel at the wrong time, how to revive an old manuscript, where to look for story ideas, what to do when plot is a problem, and so much more. For more information on Writers on Writing and extra writing perks, visit our Patreon page. For a one-time donation, visit Ko-fi. To listen to past interviews, visit our website. Support the show by buying books at our bookstore on bookshop.org. We’ve stocked it with titles from our guests, as well as some of our personal favorites. You support independent bookstores and our show when you purchase books through the store. And on Spotify, you’ll find to an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. Look for the artist, Just My Type. Email the show at writersonwritingpodcast@gmail.com. We love to hear from our listeners.(Recorded on November 25, 2024) Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett Host: Marrie Stone Music and sound editing: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)

Susan Minot is an award-winning novelist, short-story writer, poet, playwright, and screenwriter. She also paints watercolors and makes collages. She was born in Boston and grew up in Manchester-by-the-sea, Massachusetts, with six siblings who are all artists. Her first novel was Monkeys, published in 1986. She wrote the screenplay for Bernardo Bertolucci’s “Stealing Beauty” (1995.) Her novel Evening, nominated for the Los Angeles Times Book Award, was a worldwide bestseller and became a major motion picture in 2007. Her stories have received O. Henry Awards and have been anthologized widely, including The Best American Short Stories. Her eighth book, a collection of stories, Why I Don’t Write, was published in 2020. Her daughter, Ava, was born in 2001. She teaches in the graduate writing program at Stony Brook University and privately at her kitchen table. She lives in both New York City and on North Haven, an island off the coast of Maine. Her new book is Don’t Be a Stranger, and is the focus of today’s show. Susan joins Barbara DeMarco-Barrett to discuss naming characters, the hubbub that surrounds September to May trysts, Lolita, epigraphs, the conflict between motherhood and desire, structure, book covers, and more.For more information on Writers on Writing and extra writing perks, visit our Patreon page. For a one-time donation, visit Ko-fi. To listen to past interviews, visit our website. Support the show by buying books at our bookstore on bookshop.org. We’ve stocked it with titles from our guests, as well as some of our personal favorites. You support independent bookstores and our show when you purchase books through the store. And on Spotify, you’ll find to an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. Look for the artist, Just My Type. Email the show at writersonwritingpodcast@gmail.com. We love to hear from our listeners.(Recorded on November 12, 2024) Host: Barbara DeMarco-BarrettHost: Marrie StoneMusic and sound editing: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)

Coco Mellors is the author of Cleopatra and Frankenstein, which was a Sunday Times bestseller and is currently being adapted for television. Her second novel, Blue Sisters, came out in September 20240 and was a Read with Jenna pick. She joins Marrie Stone to talk about it.  Coco discusses writing from different POVs, writing compellingly about addiction and substance abuse, how to write sex scenes in all their various forms (and how to trick yourself to write difficult scenes by switching POV), the elegant weave of backstory, and her favorite advice by former professor Rick Moody. They also discuss the difficult heartbreak of the publishing process and the business of being a writer — rejections, MFAs, and the pressure of the next novel. For more information on Writers on Writing and extra writing perks, visit our Patreon page. To listen to past interviews, visit our website. Support the show by buying books at our bookstore on bookshop.org. We’ve stocked it with titles from our guests, as well as some of our personal favorites. You support independent bookstores and our show when you purchase books through the store. And on Spotify, you’ll find to an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. Look for the artist, Just My Type. Email the show at writersonwritingpodcast@gmail.com. We love to hear from our listeners.(Recorded on November 4, 2024) Host: Barbara DeMarco-BarrettHost: Marrie StoneMusic and sound editing: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)  

Nicola Yoon is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Instructions for Dancing, Everything, Everything, The Sun Is Also a Star, and a co-author of Blackout and Whiteout. She is a National Book Award finalist, a Michael L. Printz Honor Book recipient, a Coretta Scott King New Talent Award winner and the first Black woman to hit #1 on the New York Times Young Adult bestseller list. Two of her novels have been made into films. She’s also the co-publisher of Joy Revolution, a Random House young adult imprint dedicated to love stories starring people of color. She grew up in Jamaica and Brooklyn, and lives in Los Angeles with her husband, the novelist David Yoon, and their daughter. Nicola joins Barbara DeMarc-Barrett to talk about her path to writing YA and the transition to writing adult fiction, trigger warnings, categorization of genres, writing horror, revising, theme, POV, titles, The Stepford Wives, and much more.For more information on Writers on Writing and extra writing perks, visit our Patreon page. To listen to past interviews, visit our website. Support the show by buying books at our bookstore on bookshop.org. We’ve stocked it with titles from our guests, as well as some of our personal favorites. You support independent bookstores and our show when you purchase books through the store. And on Spotify, you’ll find to an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. Look for the artist, Just My Type. Email the show at writersonwritingpodcast@gmail.com. We love to hear from our listeners.(Recorded on September 20, 2024) Host: Barbara DeMarco-BarrettHost: Marrie StoneMusic and sound editing: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)

Alice McDermott is the author of nine novels, all published by FSG, including Charming Billy (winner of the National Book Award), That Night, As Weddings and Wakes, and After This (which were finalists for the Pulitzer). She is also the author of the essay collection What About the Baby? Some Thoughts on the Art of Fiction. Her most recent novel, now out in paperback, is Absolution. She joins Marrie Stone to talk about it, her door into the Vietnam War, and many of the lessons she applies to her own work which appear in What About the Baby?For more information on Writers on Writing and extra writing perks, visit our Patreon page. To listen to past interviews, visit our website. Support the show by buying books at our bookstore on bookshop.org. We’ve stocked it with titles from our guests, as well as some of our personal favorites. You support independent bookstores and our show when you purchase books through the store. And on Spotify, you’ll find to an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. Look for the artist, Just My Type. Email the show at writersonwritingpodcast@gmail.com. We love to hear from our listeners.(Recorded on October 23, 2024) Host: Barbara DeMarco-BarrettHost: Marrie StoneMusic and sound editing: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)

Jo Hamya was born in London in 1997 where she now lives. After living in Miami for a few years, she completed an English degree at King’s College London and a MSt in contemporary literature and culture at Oxford University. There, she divided her research between updating twentieth-century cultural theory into twenty-first-century digital contexts, and the impact of social media on form and questions of identity in contemporary women’s writing. Since leaving Oxford, she has worked as a copyeditor for Tatler and edited manuscripts subsequently published by Edinburgh University Press and Doubleday UK. She has also written for the Financial Times. The Hypocrite is her new novel and the focus of today’s show. Jo joins Barbara DeMarco-Barrett to discuss writing dual point of views, writing interiority, the lack of quotation marks in dialogue, poetry’s influence on her writing, changing publishers, and much more. And if you prefer watching interviews instead of listen, check out my youtube channel @inkmama. This interview, along with a few others, is up there.For more information on Writers on Writing and extra writing perks, visit our Patreon page. To listen to past interviews, visit our website. Support the show by buying books at our bookstore on bookshop.org. We’ve stocked it with titles from our guests, as well as some of our personal favorites. You support independent bookstores and our show when you purchase books through the store. And on Spotify, you’ll find to an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. Look for the artist, Just My Type. Email the show at writersonwritingpodcast@gmail.com. We love to hear from our listeners.(Recorded on October 10, 2024) Host: Barbara DeMarco-BarrettHost: Marrie StoneMusic and sound editing: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)