As Told To

As Told To

Everybody's got a story to tell. Sometimes they need a little bit of help. Veteran ghostwriter Daniel Paisner talks shop with his fellow collaborators and shines a light on what it means to pursue a writing life on the back of someone else's story.

Episodes

February 24, 2026 60 mins

As a freelance writer, Jenna Glatzer has lent her voice to books, articles, essays, blog posts, scripts—even greeting cards and doormats, she's proud to say.

She is the author or co-author of more than 35 books, many of them written in collaboration with some of our leading actors, athletes, CEOs, models, reality television stars, medical professionals and news personalities. Oh, and Celine Dion! (How's that for a ghostwriting cred...

Mark as Played

What makes a good New Yorker cartoon? More to the point, who makes a good New Yorker cartoon?

In our latest episode of As Told To: The Ghostwriting Podcast, we visit with the magazine's self-described "toonsome twosome," the cartooning team of Bizzy Coy and Lia Strasser, and discover what it takes to tap the talents of a like-minded soul to help you discover your best creative self. 

"It wa...

  • January 27, 2026 81 mins

    "This is the best book about how it used to be," writes the influential music critic and record industry analysts Bob Lefsetz, in praise of Paul Rappaport's wild ride of a memoir, Gliders Over Hollywood: Airships, Airplay and the Art of Rock Promotion. "[It's] the only book I can remember that truly details what it was like inside the star factory."

    After a career spanning more than three decades in rock...

  • Mark as Played
    January 13, 2026 71 mins

    "It's off the record until it's on the page."

    That's a line from our As Told To podcast conversation with award-winning author/ghostwriter Joanne Gordon, reflecting on the level of trust that exists between author and subject in a successful book collaboration.

    A former staff writer and contributing editor at Forbes, where she wrote about management, career, and workplace issues, Joanne is ...

  • Mark as Played
    December 30, 2025 71 mins

    This episode originally aired on June 7, 2022.

    Two-time Emmy Award-winner Bruce Vilanch has written jokes for Bob Hope, Lily Tomlin, Barbra Streisand, Bette Midler, Billy Crystal, Whoopi Goldberg and virtually every Hollywood star to grace the Academy Awards stage from 1989 – 2014. 

    As one of the entertainment industry's most sought-after joke writers, the actor, comedian an...

  • Mark as Played
    December 16, 2025 74 mins

    Join podcast host Daniel Paisner as he moderates a panel discussion at the second annual Gathering of the Ghosts ghostwriting conference earlier this year.  

    Dan is joined by former As Told To guests Jodi Lipper, Lisa Dickey, and Ellen Daly, as the veteran collaborators compare notes on craft and process—a fun, spirited, insightful reflection on the very many ways authors and journalists are writing in collaboration. 

    Learn more:

    <...
  • Mark as Played
    December 2, 2025 63 mins

    "As a ghostwriter, I've trained my ear to listen for what's really there or not there, to discern what's underneath or between someone's words," writes veteran collaborator Samantha Rose, in her stirring, soaring new memoir Giving Up the Ghost: A Daughter's Memoir. "I hear what's implied, what's withheld…"

    Samantha's gifts as a storyteller are very much on display in the pages of her new book—a heartbrea...

    Mark as Played
    November 18, 2025 59 mins

    Nelson and Alex DeMille's The Tin Men is an electrifying read and a chillingly timely one," writes The New York Times best-selling novelist Megan Abbott of the third and final father-son collaboration in the Scott Brodie & Maggie Taylor series. "[It's] both a master-class in suspense and a haunting exploration of the dangers and costs of a surrender to technology, an abandonment of the human."

    Yes, it is...

  • Mark as Played
    November 4, 2025 53 mins

    Student journalist and first-time documentary filmmaker Matthew Winkler joins us to discuss his work on a film chronicling the life and career of Joya Sherrill, an unsung American jazz vocalist who wrote the lyrics to the Billy Strayhorn standard, "Take the A Train," made famous by the Duke Ellington orchestra.

    Matthew came across Sherrill's name during his freshman year at Tufts University, while doing research for Boston Globe jo...

    Mark as Played
    October 21, 2025 76 mins
    Podcast guest Michael E. Long calls himself "a professional explainer with a restive mind."
     
    He is just that.
     
    Trained as physicist, Mike is the co-author of the international bestseller The Molecule of More, which has been translated into more than 20 languages, and the sole author of the recently-published follow-up title Taming the Molecule of More.
     
    As a ...
  • Mark as Played

    "No two caregiving journeys are alike," writes Emma Heming Willis, the wife of actor Bruce Willis, who was diagnosed in 2023 with Frontotemporal Dementia (FTD), a rare form of dementia affecting behavior, movement and language. "But we are connected by the same unchosen thread."

    In The Unexpected Journey: Finding Strength, Hope, and Yourself on the Caregiving Path, Emma writes movingly and hopefully about the blessings and burdens ...

  • Mark as Played
    September 23, 2025 72 mins

    "Pull the heart of your work out of your chest and lay it out there for the gods," podcast guest Samuel G. Freedman told his Columbia Journalism School graduate students on the first day of his final semester after 35 years of teaching. "That's all I'm asking of you. Not much."  

    No, not much. And yet what Sam Freedman asked of his students during his tenure as one of our leading journalism educators was everything. Before his reti...

  • September 9, 2025 87 mins

    Jane Leavy is the New York Times best-selling author of Sandy Koufax: A Lefty's Legacy, The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the End of America's Childhood, and The Big Fella: Babe Ruth and the World He Created. She is also the author of the comic novel Squeeze Play, hailed by Entertainment Weekly as "the best novel ever written about baseball."

    A longtime sportswriter and feature writ...

  • Mark as Played
    August 26, 2025 58 mins

    Episode originally aired on Nov. 2, 2021.

    "Don't make it out, make it better."

    That's a line from podcast guest D. Watkins, offered in the book trailer for his book of essays We Speak for Ourselves: A Word from Forgotten Black America, in which he gives voice to the voiceless and shines meaningful light on what it means to come of age in East Baltimore, in one of America's poorest black neighborhoods. 

    It's a line you might hear as...

  • August 12, 2025 73 mins

    Episode originally aired on April 11, 2023

    "Writing is not what you start," writes podcast guest Nell Scovell in her scathingly funny memoir Just the Funny Parts. "It's not even what you finish. It's what you start, finish, and put out there for the world to see."

    Indeed, Nell offers this observation from a place of hard-won experience. A veteran television writer ("Newhart," "The Simpsons,...

  • July 29, 2025 58 mins

    Ivy Pochoda is the author of the critically-acclaimed novels Visitation Street, These Women, Sing Her Down, and the just-published Ecstasy, a reimagined contemporary feminist horror story hailed by the Washington Post as a "stiletto-sharp remake of Euripides." 

    She is also the co-author of The New York Times best-selling middle-grade Epoca fantasy series, created by the late basketball legend Kobe Bryant and written under the name ...

    Mark as Played
    July 15, 2025 63 mins

    Amy Silverberg is a comedian and writer based in Los Angeles. Her stand-up comedy has been featured on Comedy Central, Hulu, NPR, and Amazon Prime. Her short fiction has appeared in Best American Short StoriesThe Paris Review, Granta, and The New Yorker. She holds a Ph.D. in Creative Writing from USC, where she now teaches.

    Prior to publication, Amy's debut novel First Time, Long Time was hailed by Opr...

  • Mark as Played
    July 1, 2025 67 mins

    Veteran journalist Carla Sosenko has written for The New York Times, Cosmopolitan, Marie Claire, People, Self, Newsweek, and numerous other publications. Her work has also appeared in Time Out New York (where she was editor-in-chief), Entertainment Weekly (where she was executive editor), In Touch (where she was managing editor) and Us Weely (where she is currently executive editor at large).

  • Mark as Played
    June 17, 2025 53 mins

    Heaven Help Us: How Faith Communities Inspire Hope, Strengthen Neighborhoods, and Build the Future—a collection of inspiring profiles of individuals working to make a difference with the help of their faith communities—is podcast host Daniel Paisner's fifth collaboration with former Ohio governor John Kasich. 

    The collaboration goes back to the very ...

  • Mark as Played
    June 3, 2025 58 mins

    "I never thought I would have a career in the television business," writes podcast guest Art Bell, the founding father of the Comedy Central network and the longtime president of Court TV.

    While at Comedy Central, which had its origins at HBO as "The Comedy Channel," Art helped to launch the careers of Bill Maher and Jon Stewart, and to provide a platform for up-and-coming comedians. He also found the ti...


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