QWERTY: A Podcast for Writers on How to Live the Writing Life

Melissa Hafting is an ecologist, bird guide, author, and photographer. She founded the British Columbia Young Birders Program in 2014, which aims to bring together youth of all races, sexual orientations, and genders to look at birds on fun excursions in the natural world. The program also helps teach youth about citizen science and the importance of bird conservation. She is the author of Dare to Bird: Exploring the Joy and Healin...

Bridgett M. Davis is the author of the 2019 memoir, The World According to Fannie Davis, which was a New York Times editor’s choice, and a BuzzFeed, Parade and Kirkus best book of 2019. She is also the writer/director of the award-winning film Naked Acts, rediscovered and re-released in 2024 to critical acclaim. Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, among other publications. ...

Shannon Downey, also known as Baddass Cross Stitch, is an artist, activist, craftivist, community builder, and general instigator. Her work inspires others to take action, think, discuss, engage with democracy and their community, and find some digital/analog balance. Her award-winning work can be found in galleries, museums, and private collections around the world and has been featured in outlets including Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar,...

Writer and author Callan Wink has been awarded fellowships by the National Endowment for the Arts and Stanford University, where he was a Wallace Stegner Fellow. His stories and essays have been published in the New Yorker, Granta, Playboy, Men’s Journal, and The Best American Short Stories. He is the author of a novel, August, and a collection of short stories, Dog Run Moon. He lives in Livingston, Montana, where he is a fly-fishi...

Jessica Gutierrez is a former journalist who has earned several awards for her work and is the current author of A Product of Genetics and Day Drinking: A Never Coming of Age Story, just published by Tiny Reparations House, a division of Penguin Random House. Listen in as she and host Marion Roach Smith discuss writing memoir, and specifically how to identify oneself in the world in order to write from there. The QWERTY podcast is ...

While Joan Wickersham is best known for her astonishing book, The Suicide Index, a National Book Award finalist, her work over her many years as a professional journalist, writer and tuhor, has taken her nearly everywhere, including to Stockholm to witness a mysterious object: the seventeenth-century Swedish warship Vasa, which sank only minutes into its maiden voyage and lay underwater for more than three hundred years until it wa...

Gloria L. Huang is a freelance writer whose fiction has appeared in literary journals including Michigan Quarterly Review, The Threepenny Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, Witness Magazine, Massachusetts Review, Pleiades, Southern Humanities Review, Fiction Magazine, North American Review, Arts & Letters, Washington Square Review, The Chattahoochee Review, Gargoyle Magazine, Sycamore Review, and The Antigonish Review. Her debut...

Today my guest is author Nicole Graev Lipson, whose work has appeared in The Sun, Virginia Quarterly Review, LA Review of Books, The Millions, The Washington Post, and The Boston Globe, among other venues. Her work has been awarded a Pushcart Prize, nominated for a National Magazine Award, and selected for The Best American Essays anthology. She is the author of the just-out memoir in essays Mothers and Other Fictional Characters, ...

The author Brooke Randel has just published a memoir titled Also Here: Love, Literacy and the Legacy of the Holocaust, in which she explores the third generations's efforts to understand the Holocaust. In Also Here, she captures one woman's harrowing survival and another's struggle to excavate the story from her grandmother's fading memories so we can continue to explore this global horror. The QWERTY podcast is bro...

In the summer of 1964, the FBI found the smoldering remains of the station wagon that James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman had been driving before their disappearance. Shortly after this awful discovery, Julie Kabat’s beloved brother Luke arrived as a volunteer for the Mississippi Summer Project. He was one of more than seven hundred volunteers from the North who assisted Black civil rights activists and clergy to ch...

Today my guest is writer, author and actor, Amy Wilson. She is the author of the memoir, When Did I Get Like This?: The Screamer, the Worrier, the Dinosaur-Chicken-Nugget-Buyer, and Other Mothers I Swore I'd Never Be, as well as the co-host of the popular parenting podcast WHAT FRESH HELL: LAUGHING IN THE FACE OF MOTHERHOOD. The author of the MOTHER LOAD, a one-woman show which toured to 16 cities after its hit off-Broadway run...

Anita Felicelli's short stories have appeared in The Massachusetts Review, Midnight Breakfast, Air/Light, The Normal School, and elsewhere. She has contributed essays and criticism to the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Alta Journal, Slate, San Francisco Chronicle, Los Angeles Review of Books, and the New York Times Modern Love column, among other places. Her short stories and poems have been anthologized and in 2023, o...

Sarah LaBrie is a TV writer, librettist and memoirist whose new memoir, No One Gets to Fall Apart, is just out from Harper Collins. Listen in as host Marion Roach Smith asks the author about the vulnerability needed to write memoir, how to find the language for defining ourselves and writing about family mental illness. The QWERTY podcast is brought to you by the book The Memoir Project: A Thoroughly Non-Standardized Text for Writi...

Liz Morrow is a ghost writer and collaborator for thought leaders and and industry experts. With Ariel Curry, she runs Hungry Authors, which coaches authors to publish their books. They have co-authored the new book, Hungry Authors, The Indispensable Guide to Planning, Writing and Publishing a Nonfiction Book, just out from Rowman and Littlefield. Listen in while host Marion Roach Smith interviews Liz Morrow on what authors need to...

Comics artist and writer, Teresa Wong is the author of the 2019 graphic memoir Dear Scarlet: The Story of My Postpartum Depression, a finalist for The City of Calgary W.O. Mitchell Book Prize and longlisted for CBC Canada Reads 2020. Her comics have appeared in The Believer, The New Yorker and McSweeney’s. Her new book, All Our Ordinary Stories, is just out from Arsenal Pulp Press. Listen in as she and I discuss the intimacy that t...

Sarah Sherbill's memoir, There was Night and There was Morning: A Memoir of Trauma and Redemption, is just out from Union Sq. and Co., and chronicles a road to redemption after her father, a beloved rabbi in an Orthodox Chicago community is also a man who abuses his family. In Sarah's role in the family, she is the secret keeper, until a secret so grave is revealed that creates the demand to write it al...

Sarah Leavitt is a cartoonist and author of the graphic memoir, Tangles: A Story About Alzheimer’s, My Mother, and Me (2010), and the author of the award-winning historical fiction comic Agnes, Murderess (2019). Sarah is an assistant professor in the School of Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, where she has developed and taught undergraduate and graduate comics classes since 2012. Her new book, a ...

Brigit Binns is a prolific author of cookbooks, with more than 100,000 copies in print, including eleven titles she has authored for Williams Sonoma. She has also co-authored cookbooks, edited cookbooks and written 90 shows for the Food Network series, The Hot Tamales. And now she has turned her attention to memoir. Her new book is titled Rottenkid: A Succulent Story of Survival, just out from Sibylline Press. In...

Caro De Robertis, whose pronouns are they/theirs, is a Uruguayan-American author and full tenured professor in the creative writing dept at San Francisco State University. They are the author of five novels and the editor of an award-winning anthology, Radical Hope. Their books have been translated into seventeen languages and have received numerous other honors, including a fellowship from the National Endowment...