29 episodes
The Writing Bull: a Podcast For Fearless Writers Marcos McPeek Villatoro, Professor of Creative Writing, Mount St. Mary's University, Los Angeles
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The Writing Bull Podcast is a show for fearless writers: Poets, novelists and memoirists who are committed to the written word, who can't live life without it. Marcos McPeek Villatoro, who writes in all three genres and holds the Fletcher Jones Endowed Chair of Creative Writing at Mount St. Mary's University, Los Angeles, invites you into his classroom to consider all the aspects of writing. Here you'll find everything from the "how-to" suggestions (such as how to create characters, or make of yourself a character in your own memoir), to the bigger questions: why do we do this in the first place? What are the risks of writing our own work? And what are the glories? If you crave the written word, this is your podcast.
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The Panther in the Cage
Today’s show is a recording of a poetry show I did at Mount St. Mary’s University in Los Angeles, where I teach. I took Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem “The Panther,” memorized it, and performed it for the students, along with other poems that followed the theme. The all about the cages that we live in, […]
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Writer Susana Marcelo, The Old Country and New Writing
Susana Marcelo is a professor at California State University Northridge, a writer, poet, essayist, and. . .well, a lot more! In our interview, we spend time on what it means to write in the different genres (poetry, fiction, nonfiction), and how many of us like to push against those definitions, crossing from one genre to […]
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Kennia Lopez: A New Voice in Literature
Ken Lopez is a Mexican and Salvadoran poet from Kansas City. She hopes her work will, like Chinua Achebe said, tell the story of the hunt from the perspective of the lion. She will be pursuing her MFA in poetry at Brooklyn College in the fall. I had the chance to interview her at the […]
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José Orduña: Writing and Justice
I met José Orduña at the Associated Writing Program conference in Tampa, Florida this past spring. He had arrived at the conference about 48 hours after getting arrested in D.C. for civil disobedience, fighting for the rights of DACA recipients. José is a Professor of creative writing at the University of Nevada. His take on […]
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George Plimpton, Graywolf Press and the State of Literature Today
Today’s podcast of The Writing Bull offers you a two-fer: Years ago I had the opportunity to interview one of the founders and the editor of The Paris Review, George Plimpton. You might recognize him, his face popped up all over the place in the second half of the twentieth century, playing in a professional baseball game […]
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The Exiled Poet: Guisell Gomez
While I was at the Associated Writing Programs conference in Florida this past month, I met Guisell Gomez, a student of creative writing and a published poet. Born in Colombia, she and her family moved to the United States when she was a child. She remembers the move, the brutal act of being torn out […]