Listen Now

This week, AWM Program Director Allison Sansone chats with award-winning NBC News correspondent Jacob Soboroff. This conversation took place September 3rd, 2020 and was recorded live via Zoom. This is our final Author Talks episode of the year. We are taking a couple weeks now to rest but we will return in January with more fun, engaging, and inspiring conversations with contemporary writers. Have a great rest of the year and an even happier new year. Now go, be inspired, and find the Mind of a Writer in yourself! EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS “The reason [Juan and José] let me tell their story was because he had the same questions I did. How did this happen and how can we prevent it from ever happening again?” “And when I say ‘it’ I want to be specific. American Academy of Pediatrics called this government-sanctioned child abuse. Physicians for Human Rights called this torture, what the American government did.” “I set out to write this book to answer questions that I couldn’t answer for myself.” “I always took this assignment as one of literally thousands of versions of this story that I think ultimately should be told. Every person who was separated has a story. All the officials involved in this policy have a story.” “There were career officials who almost at every opportunity tried to stop this from happening. It was the Trump administration officials who kept pushing back and kept pushing forward.”

This week, hear from Caldecott Medal-winning author and illustrator Uri Shulevitz about his new illustrated memoir Chance: Escape from the Holocaust. Presented in partnership with the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center. This conversation took place October 13th, 2020 and was recorded live via Zoom. We hope you enjoy entering the mind of a writer. EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS “Each time I heard an explosion, I closed my eyes and held the paper in the air. Now, my pencil became an airplane.” “In spite of all those travels I still had a home. I had drawing and I had stories…that was the home away from home and something that couldn’t be taken away from me.” “As I kept on writing I realized that the ‘what’ came before the ‘how’…what I had to say was the most important thing and how to say it was of secondary importance.” “The hardest part was the hunger…the hunger pains were raw and strong. My mother’s stories that she was telling me would distract me and ease those pains.” “My two big loves were drawing and stories, so it was natural…I was 25 when I saw a picture book for the first time. And when I saw what it was–words and pictures–that is when I realized this is what I wanted to do.”

This week, AWM President Carey Cranston chats with Pulitzer Prize-winner and global energy expert Daniel Yergin about his timely new book The New Map: Energy, Climate and the Clash of Nations. This conversation took place October 8th, 2020 and was recorded live via Zoom. Quick programming note: near the 20 minute mark, Carey and Daniel start discussing some of the pictures included in the book. If you would like to follow along with them, you can find this full discussion, including the photo slideshow, on the American Writers Museum’s YouTube channel. We hope you enjoy entering the mind of a writer. EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS “This book is about where we are now, not where we were seven months ago.” “I actually think history is an imaginative act. When I’m writing it, it’s kind of like a movie. I’m sort of writing what I’m seeing, or as near as I can tell.” “Ever since I was a child I was writing. My father had been a reporter at the Chicago Tribune so I was raised on stories about stories.” “People think it’s funny these days to know that I write longhand…My mother was an artist and when I was a child I would watch her sketching and I feel that when I’m writing I’m building up a sketch.” “We are in an energy transition…and I wanted to convey that energy transitions have been going on for a long time. I date the beginning of the energy transition that we’re still living through to January of 1709…”

This week, AWM Program Director Allison Sansone chats with writer and historian Catharine Arnold about her recent book Pandemic 1918: Eyewitness Accounts from the Greatest Medical Holocaust in Modern History. This conversation took place May 26, 2020 and was recorded live via Zoom. We hope you enjoy entering the mind of a writer. EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS “It was important for me to really bring [the 1918 pandemic] alive, just to tell readers that these were living, breathing, suffering people just like yourselves.” “It’s quite surprising that as a phenomenon it was written about and mythologized the way [World War I] was…You would’ve thought, given that this is a nation that’s produced so many other great writers especially in that generation, that there would be more written about Spanish Flu.” “Because Spanish Flu, like all pandemics, was going on in a lot of places at the same time. It didn’t do a simple narrative arc from one place to the next. It was literally all over the place and trying to come up with a narrative for it was like trying to nail jelly to the wall.” “I thought there was far more in the way of government control standing between us and total annihilation, and I’m realizing now that there’s less of that, unfortunately.” “We are getting some indication of the colossal existential crisis that people faced [during 1918 pandemic]. That real feeling that we haven’t had for generations, that our lives are at risk from something unknowable.”

This week Glory Edim, founder of Well-Read Black Girl book club, discusses her essay anthology with fellow writer Charlene Carruthers. This conversation was recorded November 5, 2018 live at the American Writers Museum. We hope you enjoy entering the mind of a writer. EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS “As Black women we define ourselves, for ourselves. When you tell us we can’t, we simply resist and defy expectations…We are writing ourselves into the spaces that neglect or ignore us.” “Best advice I got was, write the thing you’re most afraid of…If I’m feeling this discomfort, it means that emotion will be transferred to the reader, I’m hoping. As I’m trying to unpack this difficult moment in my life and write about it, I have to be unafraid of that feeling and that discomfort.” “When it’s invisible on the bookshelf, you can’t see yourself. You can’t even realize that’s something you can aspire to or feel accepted.” “To me, good writing really has a rhythm to it and the things that I enjoy have a level of vulnerability where you can tell the person is really putting themselves on the page and sharing intimate details.” “Going to [Howard University] was a very defining moment for me…I learned how to be my best self and really celebrate my Blackness in a way that I didn’t feel like I had to compare myself to anyone else or feel any reservation in my identity.”

This week we hit the funny pages and talk about the anthology The Peanuts Papers with editor Andrew Blauner, contributing artist Chris Ware and cartoonist Ivan Brunetti who honor the legacy of Charles Schultz and his iconic Peanuts comic strip. This conversation was recorded November 4, 2019 live at the American Writers Museum. We hope you enjoy entering the mind of a writer. EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS “Schultz provided an example of how to be a man who’s not a jerk. And how to be a good father and how to be a good person, and in a way that transcends irony and transcends criticism.” “Tolstoy was probably the writer who most effectively encoded that into his writing. He captured that rhythm of life into his actual prose. And I think Schultz, as a cartoonist, captured that electricity of actual movement and human life better than any other cartoonist.” “It’s a record of the way his hand moves. And the way his hand is connected to his mind and to his heart and to his eyes and how that hand and all of those things changed in 50 years.” “When I read it, not only were the events real and honest, it felt like life…the characters especially, that’s the most important part. They feel more real, almost, than real people. Like, they existed for me, when I opened up those paperbacks and dove into them, those little drawings came alive to me in a way and they were my friends.” “Really what Peanuts is is Charles Schultz battling with himself on the newspaper page every single day.”

This week, AWM President Carey Cranston chats with Dr. Manisha Sinha about the legacy of Frederick Douglass and other abolitionists from her book The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition. This conversation was recorded live May 28, 2020. We hope you enjoy entering the mind of a writer. EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS “Much of the literature that had been written on slave rebellions and resistance was separate from the story of abolition. And I felt it was really important not just to integrate African Americans back into the movement, but to integrate stories of Black resistance back into the history of abolition.” “That whiggish notion that we have of American freedom and democracy as progressing in this linear line towards greater and greater freedom is simply not true. If you study American history you can see all these steps back and forth and all the contestations and conflicts at each age.” “You see the emergence of a quintessential, modern, radical, American movement. And the fact that it was interracial and the fact that women played such an important role in it was really interesting to me.” “In David Walker’s Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World you could literally hear him because of the ways in which he capitalizes and punctuates the text. When you’re reading it you feel as if you’re hearing him. Your hearing his anger, his frustration at being a Black man in a slaveholding republic.” “I really enjoyed reading the women abolitionists, their view of abolition as part of a broader human rights project that would also include women’s rights.”

Today, we discuss the legacy of Nelson Algren with Colin Asher, author of the biography Never A Lovely So Real: The Life and Work of Nelson Algren. This was originally recorded live at the American Writers Museum June 25th, 2019. Quick note: the end of this podcast episode includes a Q&A with the live audience, however their questions were not recorded. We did want to include Colin’s answers though, so we have. We hope you enjoy entering the mind of a writer. EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS “One of the things that interested me most about Algren was the way he thought about writing. Algren is a person who thought a lot about the purpose of writing and its social function. That really drew me to his work.” “Chicago, he realized, was…a place so in love with the idea of its virtue that it was willing to disavow, in the name of the common good, anyone who failed to meet its narrow and exacting standards. It had great symbolic value for that reason. And Nelson decided that using his work to undermine that image would be more impactful.” “[Algren] had things to say about the 30s and the 40s that were so fully realized that they apply today. He was writing about income inequality. He was writing about criminal justice issues. In the 40s he was writing about the opioid epidemic that started after the war, where people were trying to escape this sort of new, emerging late-capitalist reality and feeling adrift. And all of those things we’re still wrestling with.” “[Algren] could’ve used his GI benefits to purchase a home on the edge of the city with no money down but instead he returned to his old neighborhood and looked for an apartment where he could work without distraction.” “How to write is a less meaningful question than why. Literature must challenge authority and defy demagoguery. It is born in fidelity to the truth and crumbles into incoherence in its absence.”

This week we discuss the legacy of Norman Mailer with J. Michael Lennon, Mailer’s archivist and authorized biographer, and Maureen Corrigan, book critic for NPR’s Fresh Air. This conversation was originally recorded August 27, 2018 and was recorded live at the American Writers Museum. We hope you enjoy entering the mind of a writer. EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS “Political power of the most frightening sort was obviously waiting for the first demagogue who would smash the obsession and free the white man of his guilt.” —Norman Mailer, Miami and The Siege of Chicago (1968) “I loved the fact that it seemed like he would say anything and he could get away with it because he was funny and sassy. And that’s an American voice. That voice that’s funny and irreverent and obscene as well.” “I remember what it was like for me to go back and reread Miami and the Siege of Chicago and just be bathed in this language. I mean, it is so alive, it’s so crazy…To be with Mailer as he’s sifting through this kaleidoscope of events around him, it’s just so fabulous to be in his company.” “The events of the 60s are reverberating through the decade that we’re in now. And it might’ve been Mailer’s best decade.” “[Mailer] realized that democracy wasn’t a given. That it was something that had to be tested and fought for, blood had to be shed occasionally, that it required work, that it could slip away. He always talked about a ‘soft fascism’ coming to the United States…little by little an erosion of the powers of the press, of the powers of the courts and so on. If Mailer were here, that’s exactly what he would say.”

This week, we present an excerpt from a previously recorded conversation with author and historian Nicholas Buccola about his recent book The Fire Is Upon Us: James Baldwin, William F. Buckley Jr., and the Debate over Race in America. To watch the full program as well as view an accompanying photo slideshow, visit the American Writers Museum YouTube channel. We hope you enjoy entering the mind of a writer. EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS “For Baldwin this is the human conundrum. If you want to understand racism, homophobia, xenophobia, any ideology of exclusion, at the core is that human paradox, that fear that we have.” “Baldwin and Buckley were born in the same city, but they might as well have been born on two different planets.” “What Baldwin concludes about human nature is that most of us most of the time are in a state of identity crisis. That we really don’t want to come to terms with who we really are. So what we tend to do is create identities that make us feel safe, which are fundamentally false.” “Baldwin is somebody who sets out to find a way to escape that fate [of poverty] and the way he does that is through words.” “At the bottom of all of Buckley’s views is an assumption that some lives matter more than others. That’s one of the things that I argue in the book is that there is this explicit white supremacy you can see, but there’s kind of an implicit white supremacy in all sorts of arguments that Buckley makes.”

This week, get your peanuts and Cracker Jack ready because we’re chatting with essayist Joe Bonomo and sportswriter Rick Telander about their favorite baseball writing. This program took place and was recorded in June when Major League Baseball was still on hiatus. We hope you enjoy entering the mind of a writer. EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS “Baseball especially encourages that, that feeling of connection to other games you’ve been to. And I think that engages imagination and engages memory and it maybe engages, for certain writers, a literary impulse to explore the game in its slowness, its kind of slow-baked quality. Which is what we love about the game.” “What I like most in baseball writing is a skepticism, a resistance to writing about baseball as this maudlin, sort of grand ole game that is America’s pastime. It is, of course, but it’s also full of scoundrels and fascinating people and a lot of coarse humor.” “As a sportswriter you have fandom kind of beaten out of you on a daily basis because you have to do your work. You might want to sometimes just stop and watch the game but you gotta keep typing…I would love to just watch the games, but can’t do it.” “Baseball writing has to be more lyrical than football or basketball or hockey writing, those are different entirely. With baseball, the best writing I think captures the ambience around the game and the people at the game. The game is so different. There’s nothing happening most of the time…but it’s beautiful.” “I don’t like people who worship at the church of baseball, but it does take place in the sunshine and there’s something to be said for that.”

Today, in recognition of Indigenous Peoples Day, we talk with Native poets and performing artists Frank Waln and Tanaya Winder, who will also play some of their powerful music. We hope you enjoy entering the mind of a writer. Listen to more episodes here. EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS “I really believe in helping people heal through the power of love and I try to infuse anything I write — whether it’s poetry, nonfiction, music — into that.” “We started writing poetry to process the world, and kind of as an act of survival. When our backs were against the wall and we were growing up in the aftermath of genocide and facing things like depression and historical trauma and PTSD and suicide, poetry and expressing ourselves through those words helped us get through that.” “I play a few instruments. Music was always an escape for me, a safe space for me, as was reading and writing. But music was my language.” “I was taught as a Lakota person, time is fluid for my people and when you tell stories and sing songs you can time travel. So I really believe that through art and through healing ourselves we can heal our ancestors and we can heal some of those wounds that our ancestors took to the grave.” “We’re here because of love. We’ve survived genocide because of love. So I’m trying to cling to that love to get us through the aftermath of that genocide.”

This week, AWM Facilities Supervisor, Cristina Carrera, chats with former U.S. Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera about his new collection Every Day We Get More Illegal. We hope you enjoy entering the mind of a writer. Find more podcast episodes here. EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS “Instead of more openness, the doors seem to be bigger and tighter and more locked up, in more ways than one. So I wanted to think about that and I want to have the readers and everyone reflect on those things. What kind of nation are we? What is America? Who are we?” “I write everyday…and scribble. Don’t think I write these big papers everyday. I just scribble, put a few words on paper and just follow those words.” “Actions can be illegal, perhaps. But how can people be illegal? That’s reducing. When we call someone illegal we’re reducing that human being into a phrase on a piece of paper. And a human being is not a phrase on a piece of paper. A human being is a beautiful being, with many dimensions.” “If you don’t see a stop sign, don’t create one for yourself. Explore. That’s what we are as writers, we’re explorers.” “What is reality? It has pain, suffering, joy, happiness, many cultures, many languages, many religions, many people…it has all that. So a full human being embraces the entire world, all of humanity. And then you’ll feel what happiness really is.”

This week, AWM Assistant Director of Programming and Education, Sonal Shukla, chats with Adrianna Cuevas, debut author of the middle grade fantasy novel The Total Eclipse of Nestor Lopez. We hope you enjoy entering the mind of a writer. Find more episodes here. EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS “I pretty much live in my own head most of the time, so surrounding myself with my imagination and writing helps me get it all out.” “It was my way to honor my family and my history, especially as someone who’s first-generation. When my family left Cuba they couldn’t bring anything with them. So the things that we have preserving our history are our language, which I shoved in the book; food, recipes, which I shoved in the book; and then the stories we’ve told each other.” “It makes a big difference that we do have such a wide variety in kid lit of identities shown and expressed because I think it helps kids realize that reading and stories can be for everybody. And then it helps them feel like the story’s more real.” “I love middle grade because I love that age. They’re just a lot of fun to not only write for but to talk about writing with because they haven’t yet learned to censor themselves so anything goes. And I just think that’s great.” “As an author you want to write characters that can make real by making them fully-formed, so you want to make them multidimensional…I think it’s really important as a writer that you try to create a whole character and not let one identity just be the one that drives them.”

We continue celebrating National Hispanic Heritage Month this week with singer-songwriter Louie Pérez, lead singer of Los Lobos, who chats with radio broadcaster Catalina Maria Johnson about his work and writing. We hope you enjoy entering the mind of a writer. EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS “Everything I’ve written has always come from the experiences I had growing [...]

This week, AWM President Carey Cranston sits down with bestselling author and immigrant rights advocate Julissa Arce to kick off National Hispanic Heritage Month. We hope you enjoy entering the mind of a writer. Listen to more episodes here. EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS “I’ve been very motivated and very inspired by young undocumented people now who are [...]

This week, AWM President Carey Cranston sits down with author and historian Michelle Duster who discusses the indelible impact and lasting legacy of her great-grandmother, Ida B. Wells. We hope you enjoy entering the mind of a writer. Listen to more episodes here. EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS “[Wells] felt the need to write her own autobiography because [...]

This week, AWM Program Director Allison Sansone sits down with Isabel Ibañez to chat about her Bolivian heritage, writing process, and her debut Young Adult Fantasy novel Woven in Moonlight. We hope you enjoy entering the mind of a writer. Listen to more episodes here. EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS “Home sort of felt like two places and [...]

This week, we honor Ray Bradbury’s recent Centennial on August 22nd with more science fiction. The prolific writer John Scalzi talks about his novel The Consuming Fire, how he wrote it in just two weeks, and his affinity for wombats. Yes, wombats. We hope you enjoy entering the mind of a writer. Listen to more [...]

This week, journalist Dan Sinker talks with Annalee Newitz about Annalee’s recent time-traveling, punk rock novel The Future of Another Timeline. This is the second of four conversations with science fiction and fantasy writers in honor of Ray Bradbury’s Centennial on August 22. Admission to the AWM is also free of charge that day to celebrate Bradbury’s [...]