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Amy Bloom, author of I’LL BE RIGHT HERE
The New Yorker has said that Amy Bloom “gets more meaning into individual sentences than most authors manage in whole books.” She is the author of five novels: White Houses, Lucky Us, Away, Love Invents Us and – most recently – I’ll Be Right Here. She’s also authored three collections of short stories: Where the God Of Love Hangs Out, Come to Me (finalist for the National Book Award), and A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You (finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award). In 2022, she wrote the widely acclaimed New York Times bestselling memoir, In Love. I’ll Be Right Here spans over 80 years and a kaleidoscopic cast of characters (including a few real-life historical figures). We follow them from France to Poughkeepsie, through unconventional relationships, partnerships, and family unions and Amy accomplishes it all within a compact 200 pages. As always, we want to know how she does it. Amy joins Marrie Stone to talk about the novel and how she researched this real and fictional cast of characters. She talks about the best advice she ever received about writing from her father, her inventive use of lists, her use of different forms and structures (including using scripts, epistolary chapters, lists, and more), and why she’s always writing in different genres. She saves some of her best advice and insights for the end of the interview, so be sure to stick around. 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 of past interviews on our website. You can help out the show and indie bookstores by buying books at our bookstore on bookshop.org. It’s stocked with titles by our guest authors, as well as our personal favorites. And on Spotify, you’ll find an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. It’s perfect for writing. Look for the artist, Just My Type. Email the show at [email protected]. We love to hear from our listeners! (Recorded on July 8, 2025) Host: Barbara DeMarco-BarrettHost: Marrie StoneMusic: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)
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Richard Bausch, author of THE FATE OF OTHERS
An acknowledged master of the short story form, Richard Bausch's work has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, Gentleman's Quarterly, Harper's, The Missouri Review, The New Yorker, Narrative, New Letters, Playboy, Ploughshares, and The Southern Review, and his stories have been widely anthologized, including The Best American Short Stories, O. Henry Prize Stories, and Pushcart Prize Stories, among others. He is the author of thirteen novels and ten collections of stories, including his new collection, The Fate of Others. Richard joins Barbara to talk about his path to writing fiction, various stories in the collection as well as titling stories, arranging stories in the book, the difference between writing novels and stories, and so 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. You can find hundreds of past interviews on our website. You can help out the show and indie bookstores by buying books at our bookstore on bookshop.org. It’s stocked with titles by our guest authors, as well as our personal favorites. And on Spotify, you’ll find an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. It’s perfect for writing. Look for the artist, Just My Type. Email the show at [email protected]. We love to hear from our listeners! (Recorded on June 27, 2025) Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett Host: Marrie Stone Music: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)
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Chris Whitaker, author of ALL THE COLORS OF THE DARK
Chris Whitaker is the author of four novels including Tall Oaks, All the Wicked Girls, We Begin at the End and All the Colors of the Dark (now out in paperback). The New York Times bestseller has sold more than one million copies. But more extraordinary is Chris’s story of becoming a professional writer and how these bestsellers get written. He joins Marrie Stone to talk about his unusual path into publishing and how he used writing to overcome trauma. (In fact, Chris is so self-taught that he recently had to Google “MFA” to learn what it stands for.) Chris talks about living in the U.K. but setting his novels in the U.S. and how he masters the research to write about places he’s never visited. One of those tricks is using an online dialect tool to get his dialogue just right. Chris also discusses how he writes in fragments with three computer screens in front of him, and other unconventional writing techniques. 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 of past interviews on our website. You can help out the show and indie bookstores by buying books at our bookstore on bookshop.org. It’s stocked with titles by our guest authors, as well as our personal favorites. And on Spotify, you’ll find an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. It’s perfect for writing. Look for the artist, Just My Type. Email the show at [email protected]. We love to hear from our listeners! (Recorded on June 23, 2025) Host: Barbara DeMarco-BarrettHost: Marrie StoneMusic: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)
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Caroline Fraser, author of MURDERLAND
Born in Seattle, Caroline Fraser holds a Ph.D. in English and American literature from Harvard. Formerly on the editorial staff of The New Yorker, she is the author of three previous nonfiction books, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder, God's Perfect Child: Living and Dying in the Christian Science Church, and Rewilding the World: Dispatches from the Conservation Revolution. She served as editor of the Library of America edition of Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House books and has written for The New York Review of Books, The Atlantic Monthly, Outside Magazine, and The London Review of Books. She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, with her husband, Hal Espen. Her new nonfiction book, Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers, published by Penguin Press, is the focus of today’s talk. Caroline joins Barbara DeMarco-Barrett to talk about the genesis of Murderland, how she decided on structure, the memoir aspect of the book, why she thinks readers and viewers are fascinated with crime, her relationship with research, 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. You can find hundreds of past interviews on our website. You can help out the show and indie bookstores by buying books at our bookstore on bookshop.org. It’s stocked with titles by our guest authors, as well as our personal favorites. And on Spotify, you’ll find an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. It’s perfect for writing. Look for the artist, Just My Type. Email the show at [email protected]. We love to hear from our listeners! (Recorded on June 6, 2025) Host: Barbara DeMarco-BarrettHost: Marrie StoneMusic: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)
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Wally Lamb, author of THE RIVER IS WAITING
Wally Lamb is the author of six New York Times bestselling novels: I’ll Take You There, We Are Water, Wishin’ and Hopin’, The Hour I First Believed, I Know This Much Is True, and She’s Come Undone. He also edited Couldn’t Keep It to Myself and I’ll Fly Away, two volumes of essays from students in his writing workshop at York Correctional Institution, a women’s prison in Connecticut, where he was a volunteer facilitator for twenty years. He’s been on the show three times in the past. Those interviews can be found in our archives. The River is Waiting is his first novel in nine years. He joins Marrie Stone to talk about it. It’s the first time Wally has put York Correctional Institution into his fiction. And he puts other parts of himself into this novel, as well. He talks about rendering real life experiences into fiction, how to weave politics and current events into your prose, making unsympathetic characters sympathetic to your reader, what writing in the present tense does to your prose, what Wally may have learned about writing and life from the inmates he’s worked with, a little about the writing group he’s been part of for 20 years, 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. You can find hundreds of past interviews on our website. You can help out the show and indie bookstores by buying books at our bookstore on bookshop.org. It’s stocked with titles by our guest authors, as well as our personal favorites. And on Spotify, you’ll find an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. It’s perfect for writing. Look for the artist, Just My Type. Email the show at [email protected]. We love to hear from our listeners! (Recorded on April 28, 2025) Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett Host: Marrie Stone Music: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)
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