Writers on Writing

Barbara DeMarco-Barrett and Marrie Stone
  • 4.5 (2)
  • Books
  • Updated Daily

A weekly podcast hosted by Barbara DeMarco-Barrett and Marrie Stone on the art and business of writing.

  1. 1d ago

    Hafeez Lakhani, author of ABUNDANCE

    Hafeez Lakhani was born in Hyderabad, India and raised in suburban South Florida. His fiction and essays have appeared in Crazyhorse, Exposition Review, Salt Hill, Tikkun, The Cortland Review, and The Southern Review, and have garnered fellowships from PEN America and The Center for Fiction. He was twice recognized with a Notable Essay in Best American Essays and twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He was profiled by the Huffington Post as one of “Eight Fantastic New Writers to Look Out For.” His debut novel, Abundance, following five members of an American Muslim family across Miami, New York, Monaco, and Gujarat, was a People Magazine Most Anticipated Book of 2026. Hafeez and Barbara DeMarco-Barrett talk about how he knew the novel idea had legs and how he committed to it for the long haul: 12 years in the making! They also talk about when you know a novel is done, how to use your critique groups’ feedback, using a Venn diagram, not going to an MFA program, 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 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. You can find hundreds of past interviews on our website. (Recorded on April 28, 2026) Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett Host: Marrie Stone Music: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)

    1h 4m

  2. Jun 15

    Annie Hartnett, author of THE ROAD TO TENDER HEARTS

    Annie Hartnett is the award-winning author of three novels: Rabbit Cake, Unlikely Animals, and the national bestseller The Road to Tender Hearts, which won the 2025 New England Book Award for fiction and was named a best book of 2025 from NPR, LitHub, and Southern Living. It’s now out and available in paperback, published by Ballentine. Along with the writer Tessa Fontaine, Annie co-runs Accountability Workshops for writers, helping writers commit to routines and embrace the long, slow, joyful, terrible process of doing the work. The Road to Tender Hearts gives us writers a lot to talk about. Structuring a novel around a road trip and how to weave in backstory while maintaining forward momentum. Writing heavy topics like death, addiction, grief, and abandonment with humor. Annie’s approach to third-person multiple points of view, tackling a range of viewpoints, and so much more. We also talked about her ambivalent relationship with Scrivener, how she uses spreadsheets, working with mind maps, and the importance of accountability for writers. 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 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. You can find hundreds of past interviews on our website. (Recorded June 2, 2026) Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett Host: Marrie Stone Music: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)

    59 min

  3. Jun 9

    Steven Rowley, author of TAKE ME WITH YOU

    Steven Rowley is the New York Times bestselling author of Lily and the Octopus, a Washington Post Notable Book of 2016, The Editor, named by NPR as one of the Best Books of 2019, The Guncle, a Goodreads Choice Awards finalist for 2021 Novel of the Year and winner of the Thurber Prize for American Humor, The Celebrants, a TODAY Show Read With Jenna Book Club pick, and the instant USA Today Bestsellers The Guncle Abroad and The Dogs of Venice. His fiction has been published in twenty languages. Originally from Portland, Maine, he is a graduate of Emerson College and currently resides in Palm Springs with his husband, the writer Byron Lane, and three rescue dogs. His new novel is Take Me With You, and is the focus of our talk today. Steven joins Barbara DeMarco-Barrett to talk about the moment he knew he had to write this book, how he outlines, side characters, the crossover from screenwriting, why he chose Joshua Tree, California, as the desert setting, endings, AI, 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 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. You can find hundreds of past interviews on our website. (Recorded May 15, 2026) Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett Host: Marrie Stone Music: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)

    45 min

  4. Jun 1

    Tom Perrotta, author of GHOST TOWN

    Tom Perrotta’s eleven works of fiction include Election and Little Children, both of which were made into Oscar-nominated films, and The Leftovers, which was adapted into a critically acclaimed, Peabody Award-winning HBO series. He’s now been on the podcast five times with Marrie. First in 2007 with The Abstinence Teacher, again in 2011 for The Leftovers, Mrs. Fletcher in 2017, and Tracy Flick Can’t Win in 2022. We return to familiar New Jersey territory in Ghost Town, a place reminiscent of where Tom grew up, which gives him a chance to talk again about writers’ obsessions with childhood homes. He also talks about writing about race and American politics in fiction, as well as what seemingly simple and straight-forward writing can do for your story, and how he tackled point of view. 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 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. You can find hundreds of past interviews on our website. (Recorded May 22, 2026) Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett Host: Marrie Stone Music: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)

    1 hr

  5. May 26

    Cassandra Neyenesch, author of A LITTLE BIT BAD

    Cassandra Neyenesch is a Brooklyn-based writer, activist, and curator. Cassandra’s reviews and cultural pieces have appeared in The Guardian, Brooklyn Rail, HuffPost, Public Books, The International Herald Tribune, and Art in America. She has a recent story in the New Yorker and her debut novel A Little Bit Bad was published in June. I love this novel. Literary, with plot—a mystery runs through it but you’d never call it a mystery. Ron Charles, former Washington Post book reviewer reviewed A Little Bit Bad on his substack page. Cassandra joins me to talk about what kept her going when the going got tough and she had five novels in the drawer,, the crossover from journalism to fiction, why she converted to an outliner, landing the ending, the trend of older novelists, especially women, getting published, and 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 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. You can find hundreds of past interviews on our website. (Recorded March 6,, 2026) Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett Host: Marrie Stone Music: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)

    58 min

  6. May 18

    Ada Limón, author of AGAINST BREAKING: ON THE POWER OF POETRY

    Ada Limón is likely best known for her role as the 24th Poet Laureate of the United States. Her signature project, "You Are Here," focused on connecting poetry with the natural world, including installations in seven National Parks. She also wrote "In Praise of Mystery: A Poem for Europa," which was engraved on NASA’s Europa Clipper spacecraft which launched in 2024 to explore Jupiter’s icy moon.   Ada is the author of seven collections of poetry, including Startlement, The Hurting Kind, which was a finalist for the Griffin Poetry Prize, The Carrying, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was a finalist of the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, and Bright Dead Things, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, The National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. She is also the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and a Guggenheim and was named a 2024 Time Woman of the Year.   Against Breaking: On the Power of Poetry, is the speech she delivered when she left her post as Poet Laureate last year. She joins Marrie Stone to talk about her work as Poet Laureate and how she used her platform to talk back against this political moment. She discusses her job as a creative and her job as an advocate and gives us a glimpse behind her process. She also reads and discusses her poem, “The Endlessness,” which appeared in The New Yorker in 2023. 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 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. You can find hundreds of past interviews on our website. (Recorded May 12, 2026) Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett Host: Marrie Stone Music: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)

    55 min

  7. May 12

    Estelle Erasmus, author of WRITING THAT GETS NOTICED

    Estelle Erasmus is a 2025 TEDx Speaker and an award-winning writing professor at New York University. An award-winning journalist, she has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, Slate, Next Avenue/PBS, HuffPost, Business Insider, Marie Claire, WIRED, AARP the Magazine, and more. Her essays for The New York Times and The Washington Post have gone globally viral, and she has appeared on Good Morning America and Fox News, with her work mentioned on The View. She’s on the show to talk about her book, Writing That Gets Noticed: Find Your Voice, Become a Better Storyteller, Get Published, named a “Best Book for Writers” by Poets & Writers. Today is all about non-fiction. Estelle joins Barbara DeMarco-Barrett to talk about writing essays, finding your voice, hooks, braided essays and hermit crab essays, writing scenes, queries, pitches, and 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 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. You can find hundreds of past interviews on our website. (Recorded February 27,, 2026) Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett Host: Marrie Stone Music: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)

    1h 8m

  8. May 4

    Jayne Anne Phillips, author of SMALL TOWN GIRLS

    Jayne Anne Phillips has been on the podcast at least three times. First in 2000, with her novel MotherKind. Again in 2014 with Quiet Dell, and the last time in 2023 with Night Watch, before it was announced as the Pulitzer Prize winner. Raymond Carver pronounced her first story collection Black Tickets “stories unlike any in our literature…a crooked beauty” and established Jayne Anne as a writer “in love with the American language.” She published that collection in 1979 when she was only 26. She was praised by Nadine Gordimer as “the best short story writer since Eudora Welty” and Black Tickets has since become a classic of the short story genre. She’s also the author of Machine Dreams, Fast Lanes, Shelter, Lark and Termite, which was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2009.   Her latest memoir-in-essays, Small Town Girls, is comprised of 22 pieces tackling everything from the profoundly personal to the historical and sociological. We learn the backstory behind the feud between the Hatfields and the McCoys and the long and complicated history of West Virginia. We learn about Jayne Anne’s close relationship with her mother, her experiences with religion, abortion, a mass shooting, and — most important for today’s discussion — her lifelong relationship with writing. There are essays about other writers, essays reflecting on the difficulty and necessity of writing, and what this practice has given Jayne Anne, and us, for her entire career. She joins Marrie Stone to talk about all of it.   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 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. You can find hundreds of past interviews on our website. (Recorded April 13, 2026) Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett Host: Marrie Stone Music: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)

    1h 1m
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Ratings & Reviews

4.5
out of 5
2 Ratings

About

A weekly podcast hosted by Barbara DeMarco-Barrett and Marrie Stone on the art and business of writing.

Information

  • Creator
    Barbara DeMarco-Barrett and Marrie Stone
  • Years Active
    2022 - 2026
  • Episodes
    100
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © 622498
  • Show Website
    Writers on Writing

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