Julia Phillips is the author of the National Book Award finalist and NYT Book Review’s 10 Best Books of the Year debut Disappearing Earth. Her latest is Bear, out and available by Hogarth. She joins Marrie to talk about it, as well as the power of fairytales and using that structure in your work. She talks about working in a close third point of view, how to make setting a character in your story, and how the pandemic impacted this current wave of fiction. They also talk about finding an agent, being a good literary citizen, and so 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’ll support independent bookstores and our show by purchasing through the store. Finally, on Spotify listen 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 August 1, 2024) Host: Barbara DeMarco-BarrettHost: Marrie StoneMusic and sound editing: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)

Flynn Berry is author of Trust Her. Berry is the New York Times bestselling author of Under the Harrow, winner of the 2017 Edgar Award for Best First Novel; A Double Life, a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice; and Northern Spy, a Reese’s Book Club pick that was named one of the ten best thrillers of 2021 by The New York Times and The Washington Post. Northern Spy is being adapted for film by Netflix.Flynn joins Barbara DeMarco-Barrett to talk about her new thriller, Trust Her, and to discuss why she was attracted to crime fiction, why she writes about Ireland, first chapters, how beholden to the facts is she when writing about a real place with serious history, how much she knows about structure and characters before she begins, her relationship to reviews, surprises in writing the novel, and 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’ll support independent bookstores and our show by purchasing through the store. Finally, on Spotify listen 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 July 12, 2024) Host: Barbara DeMarco-BarrettHost: Marrie StoneMusic and sound editing: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)

New York Times bestseller Kimberly McCreight is the author of eight novels, including A Good Marriage, Friends Like These and Reconstructing Amelia. She’s also the author of the New York Times bestselling young adult trilogy The Outliers. Several of her novels have been optioned for the screen.Her latest is Like Mother, Like Daughter. She joins Marrie Stone to talk about it. Along the way, Kimberly shares how her prior career in the law serves her fiction and how she generates her ideas. She also talks about her revision process, when she shows work to readers, and when she knows a story isn’t working. They also talk about finding an agent and some of the business logistics behind making your living as a writer. 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’ll support independent bookstores and our show by purchasing through the store. Finally, on Spotify listen 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 July 25, 2024) Host: Barbara DeMarco-BarrettHost: Marrie StoneMusic and sound editing: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)

Jill Ciment is the author of the collection of short stories and novellas, Small Claims; the novels The Law of Falling Bodies, Teeth of the Dog, The Tattoo Artist, Heroic Measures, Act of God, The Body in Question; and the memoirs, Half a Life and Consent. She has been the recipient of numerous grants and awards, among them a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, two New York Foundation for the Arts fellowships, the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize, and a Guggenheim fellowship. Jill is a professor emeritus at the University of Florida. She lives in Gainesville, Florida, and New York City.Jill joins Barbara DeMarco-Barrett to discuss Jill’s path to writing, how she learned to structure books, how to be completely honest when the person you’re writing about is still alive, pacing a memoir while adding interiority and reflection, writing dialogue when you didn’t take notes, the hardest part of writing memoir, and 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’ll support independent bookstores and our show by purchasing through the store. Finally, on Spotify listen 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 June 14, 2024)  Host: Barbara DeMarco-BarrettHost: Marrie StoneMusic and sound editing: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)

Teddy Wayne is the author of the novels The Winner, The Great Man Theory, Apartment, Loner, The Love Song of Jonny Valentine, and Kapitoil. He is the winner of a Whiting Writers’ Award and an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship as well as a finalist for the Young Lions Fiction Award, PEN/Bingham Prize, and Dayton Literary Peace Prize. A former columnist for the New York Times and McSweeney’sand a frequent contributor to The New Yorker, he has taught at Columbia University and Washington University in St. Louis. He has developed films and series from his novels with Columbia Pictures, HBO, MGM Television, and others. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife, the writer Kate Greathead, and their children.Teddy joins Barbara DeMarco-Barrett to talk about his path to writing, how to make unlikeable characters empathetic, writing characters who are outsiders, his unusual way of plotting, 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’ll support independent bookstores and our show by purchasing through the store. Finally, on Spotify listen 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 July 12, 2024)  Host: Barbara DeMarco-BarrettHost: Marrie StoneMusic and sound editing: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)

Kevin Barry is the author of four novels — Night Boat to Tangier, Beatlebone, City of Bohane (which was longlisted for the 2019 Booker Prize) and, most recently, The Heart in Winter.  He’s also the author of three short story collections, including That Old Country Music. The Heart in Winter was 25 years in the making. Unlike his other works, the story is set not in Ireland, but in Montana and Idaho in the late 1800s. Kevin joins Marrie Stone to chat about it. They talk about why he always finishes every piece of fiction, even when it’s not working. He also shares his one guiding principle for unlocking his characters, finding the “tuning fork” for your novel, why dreaming and fiction come from the same place, his recommended book on writing, and so 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’ll support independent bookstores and our show by purchasing through the store. Finally, on Spotify listen 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 July 5, 2024)  Host: Barbara DeMarco-BarrettHost: Marrie StoneMusic and sound editing: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)

(This podcast was recorded live on June 22, 2024 at Arvida Book Co in Tustin, California.) Dawn Tripp is the author of the novel Georgia, a national bestseller. She is the author of three previous novels: Game of Secrets, Moon Tide, and The Season of Open Water, which won the Massachusetts Book Award for Fiction. Her poems and essays have appeared in the Virginia Quarterly Review, Harvard Review, AGNI, Conjunctions, and NPR, among others. She serves on the board of the Boston Book Festival and on the board of Gnome Surf: A non-profit Surf Therapy Organization focused on creating a culture shift towards kindness, love, and acceptance for athletes of all abilities. She graduated from Harvard and lives in Massachusetts with her sons. Her new novel is JACKIE. Dawn joins Barbara DeMarco-Barrett to discuss historical fiction and the research involved, surprises in the writing of the novel, why she chose the present tense, getting down the voice, and 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’ll support independent bookstores and our show by purchasing through the store. Finally, on Spotify listen 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 June 22, 2024)  Host: Barbara DeMarco-BarrettHost: Marrie StoneMusic and sound editing: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.

Joyce Maynard has been publishing since she was 13 years old. She first came to national attention with the publication of her New York Times cover story, “An Eighteen Year Old Looks Back on Life,” in 1972, when she was a freshman at Yale. Since then, she has published 20 books, including the New York Times bestselling novel, Labor Day and To Die For (both adapted for film), Under the Influence and the memoirs, At Home in the World and The Best of Us. Count the Ways —the story of a marriage and a divorce, and the children who survived it— was published in 2021. Its sequel, How the Light Gets In, came out last week. Joyce joins Marrie Stone to talk about it, including sustaining characters over two novels and how she knew she wasn’t finished with this family yet. She also talks about her ongoing obsessions and the importance of writing those obsessions down, her advice on not writing prematurely, her heavy use of white boards and what they look like, how to incorporate politics and the external world into fiction, her mother’s writing advice that she shares with her students, and 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’ll support independent bookstores and our show by purchasing through the store. Finally, on Spotify listen 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 June 28, 2024)  Host: Barbara DeMarco-BarrettHost: Marrie StoneMusic and sound editing: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)

Dani Segelbaum began her publishing career as an editorial assistant at HarperCollins Publishers, focusing primarily on highly designed non-fiction titles. She ‘s worked as a literary assistant at New Leaf Literary & Media, working with established and debut authors. Dani joined Arc Literary in 2024 after three years at the Carol Mann Agency. Born and raised in Minneapolis, Dani is a graduate of Boston University’s College of Communication where she studied journalism and political science. Dani represents both fiction and non-fiction and works with authors from diverse backgrounds to tell stories important to them. Dani is also an evaluation agent at Gotham Writers Workshop in New York City.Dani joins Barbara DeMarco-Barrett to discuss comps, ageism in publishing and does it exist or not, prologues, mistakes writers make, query letters and just how voicey they can be, word counts of books, the difference between categories, 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’ll support independent bookstores and our show by purchasing through the store. Finally, on Spotify listen 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 May 31, 2024)  Host: Barbara DeMarco-BarrettHost: Marrie StoneMusic and sound editing: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)

Curtis Sittenfeld is the bestselling author of seven novels and one collection of short stories. Her books have been on many “Best Books of the Year” lists, optioned for television and film, and translated into 30 languages. Romantic Comedy is her latest. It was picked for Reese Witherspoon’s Book Club in 2023 and it’s now out in paperback. She joins Marrie Stone to talk about researching late-night comedy shows and how she accomplished her research during the pandemic, writing authentically about sex and relationships, when to decide to abandon a project, whether MFAs are worth it, and so 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’ll support independent bookstores and our show by purchasing through the store. Finally, on Spotify listen 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 June 13, 2024)  Host: Barbara DeMarco-BarrettHost: Marrie StoneMusic and sound editing: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)