Ledger: A Writing Podcast

Juliette Lin is a 2025 graduate of Lena Waithe's Hillman Grad Foundation, a 2026 Writer's Guild Foundation Support Staff Trainee, and a cancer survivor. She stopped by Ledger to chat about submitting to competitions/fellowships (and how getting into one doesn't mean instant success), how she learned self-advocacy as a writer/creator, how improv helped her confront and accept failure and ultimately empowered her life and writing, an...

Lincoln Michel is the author of the novels "Metallic Realms" and "The Body Scout" as well as co-editor of the flash fiction anthologies "Tiny Nightmares" and "Tiny Crimes." He also regularly publishes on Counter Craft, his Substack dedicated to the craft and enjoyment of writing and reading.

His article "Turning Off the TV In Your Mind" is about writing that overly relies on visuals in a way that doesn't lean into the strengths of ...

Kathy Fish is a flash fiction author and teacher, with work published in Ploughshares, Copper Nickel, Washington Square Review, Waxwing Magazine, Electric Literature, Guernica, Smokelong Quarterly, F(r)riction and many more.

She runs The Art of Flash Fiction Substack and is running a Flash Fiction Extravaganza from March 1st to 22nd, 2026 for paid subscribers. This isn't a sponsored show, I just love flash fiction and am having a b...

Kyle Winkler writes weird-horror and is the author of "The Ship of Death," which comes out from Harper Collins on September 29, 2026. He's also written "The Nothing That Is," "Tone-Bone," "Enter the Peerless" and more, all of which are either partially or completely set in Indiana. We chat about the publication of his first novel, his life inside academic and its influence on the genre he writes, where the word "necropotent" comes ...

Ira Rat is the owner/operator, publisher, editor, and graphic designer behind Filthy Loot Press, one of the best publishers for transgressive, weird, and underground fiction, both horror and otherwise.

Is there such a thing as *too* weird for Filthy Loot? Should your poop-centric story have at least some artful storytelling? (Yes.) We also discuss why you should pay EXTRA SPECIAL ATTENTION (all caps, so you know it's legit) to a pu...

Joshua Hull is a screenwriter and author from Indiana, which means he and I have a lot in common. His novel "8114" is out from Clash Books on August 26, 2025 and is intended to unsettle you in many ways.

Are there rules to writing screenplays and prose stories? What's it feel like to have a book so close to publication? Is the setting you grew up in the one you *should* be writing in? We also chat about how important it is to hang ...

Andre Dubus III is the author of HOUSE OF SAND AND FOG, TOWNIE, DIRTY LOVE, SUCH KINDNESS, and more, along with his newest, GHOST DOGS: ON KILLERS AND KIN, a collection of essays.

A previous episode, "The Most Important Question a Writer Can Ask," covers an appearance of Andre's at Politics & Prose when he gave some advice on writing that deeply affected me. This episode continues that trend.

Andre discusses the impulse toward ...

Jamarcus Turner is a TV writer who wrote and story edited for the Chuck Lorre-produced Bob Hearts Abishola, and he also just so happens to live in Indiana. This is the VERY FIRST in-person interview for Ledger!

Jamarcus stopped by to talk about when he started writing for TV - it is unlike anyone else's story, no doubt about it - how he got his 10,000 hours of *watching* TV in, what it's like to work in a writer's room, and what yo...

SHORT FICTION! This is the official audio release of my story "Hate to Meet You," which was originally published in Edgar Allan Poe's Snifter of Death, issue #06, by Ahoy Comics. Two high school coaches meet each other for the first time and realize immediately that they hate each other. They also realize they'll not be able to escape one another...

Watch out for more featured short fiction right here on Ledger!

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Please ra...

Brent Forrester is an Emmy Award-winning writer who has worked on an incredible list of shows including The Office (where he also executive produced and ran the writer's room at one point), The Simpsons, The Ben Stiller Show, King of the Hill, The Larry Sanders Show, and more!

He stopped by Ledger to chat about how to overcome writing pressure, managing expectations, and failure; what it's like to pitch a TV show to studio executi...

Today’s guest is screenwriter Laura Kroeger, one of two winners of the 2024 Final Draft Big Break contest. Disclaimer: Final Draft is not sponsoring today’s episode.

Laura Won the Big Break Contest with her script BIGGER IN TEXAS. She talks about the genesis of that script as well as how the Women In Film & Video (WIF) fellowship helped her writing; how her own reading and writing groups and their dedication to the craft/art ha...

Christine Wenc is a former staff member for The Onion and the author of Funny Because It's True: How The Onion Created Modern American News Satire, out right now in hardcover!

Christine stopped by to chat about how she started researching the book in 2018; searching for (and maybe never finding) objective truth; coming to terms with the ways in which others can live in perceptually-generated realities, and how academics can cut, li...

Jessica Berg is the founder and chief literary agent at Rosecliff Literary. Recently, they hired Tommy Dean, former guest of the show and the EIC of Fractured Lit and Uncharted Mag, two literary journals that publish a lot of great fiction.

Jessica and I discuss whether a literary agent needs to be a lawyer, what a day of work looks like for her, how to handle multiple rejections of a project, and how important community is to writ...

"Am I a writer?" is NOT the question, but it's absolutely related to the most important and revealing question a writer can ask themselves.

Today on Ledger I talk about how I've struggled with defining myself as a writer in the past and the way I get past that weird mental battle.

This is the first of my non-interview episodes for the new phase of Ledger, with more on the way, including some audio fiction!

To watch the Andre Dubus ...

Ledger is changing! 

The craft of writing has so much that goes into it, so many people who help writers produce, finish, and publish their work, so instead of only interviewing writers, Ledger will also begin featuring chats with everyone from Beta readers to editors, to publicists and publishers!

Along with those new interviews there will be shorter episodes offering bits of writing advice. These will be quick and to the point, s...

Alex Wrekk is the writer and creator of Stolen Sharpie Revolution, a fantastic book now two decades into its print run and continuing to influence zinemaking and zinemakers the world over.

Alex also creates the zine Brainscan, and, sometimes, a handful of years will go by before a new issue shows up - but! - it’s always being worked on.

We chat about doing multiple drafts of zines, about the presentation of the zines themselves, an...

Carolyn J Carpenter is a cofounder of Hollywood Gatekeepers and a story analyst, writer, producer, and script reader, which is how I met her! This is another entry in my “Austin went to a film festival” series (along with Drew Larimore and Jim Burnstein) because I met Carolyn at Austin Film Festival in October 2024.

Carolyn has a ton of industry experience as a reader and writer, and has worked as a story analyst on movies like "B...

Jim Burnstein, the John H. Mitchell Professor of Entertainment and Director of Screenwriting Program at the University of Michigan stopped by Ledger to talk about his career as a screenwriter. He's written such films as Renaissance Man, starring Danny DeVito and directed by Penny Marhsall, Mighty Ducks 3, a particular childhood favorite of mine, and more.

We discussed how he became a successful screenwriter without moving from Plym...

Playwright Drew Larimore joins Ledger today for a special reason: I read his play UPSTATE in the very first round of submissions as a script reader for the Austin Film Festival, which is THE film festival/contest/conference for writers. I happily put Drew's play through to the next round and also wrote that it had a serious chance of winning the category. It made it to the semifinals and Drew dropped by to talk about the difficult...