120 episodes
QWERTY: A Podcast for Writers on How to Live the Writing Life Marion Roach Smith
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- Arts
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4.9 • 101 Ratings
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Author Marion Roach Smith interviews the best writers in all genres to discover their process. QWERTY is about the real challenges of writing and the steps anyone can take to become a better storyteller. Join the conversation.
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Ep. 119 Hal Schrieve
Hal Schrieve is the author of the 2019 book, Out of Salem, selected for the National Book Award Long List for Young People’s Literature. Hal works as a children’s librarian at the New York Public Library. As a librarian, Hal has written educator guides to other queer books for children and teens. Hal has had poetry in Vetch magazine, and is featured in Stacked Deck Press’s 2018 trans comics anthology We’re Still Here. Hal writes queer fiction for young people and writes comics and zines. Hal’s new novel, How To Get Over the End of the World, was just released with Seven Stories Press. The QWERTY podcast is brought to you by the book The Memoir Project: A Thoroughly Non-Standardized Text for Writing & Life. Read it, and begin your own journey to writing what you know. To learn more, join The Memoir Project free newsletter list and keep up to date on all our free webinars and instructive posts and online classes, as well as our talented, available memoir editors and memoir coaches, podcast guests and more.
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Ep. 118 Suzette Mullen
Suzette Mullen is the author of the new memoir, The Only Way Through is Out, just out from the University of Wisconsin Press. She is the founder of Your Story Finder, where she provides nonfiction book coaching. In 2021, she published a Tiny Love Story in The New York Times that was the seed that became her new book. Listen as she and host Marion Roach Smith discuss how to go from a short piece of memoir to a book, and so much more. The QWERTY podcast is brought to you by the book The Memoir Project: A Thoroughly Non-Standardized Text for Writing & Life. Read it, and begin your own journey to writing what you know. To learn more, join The Memoir Project free newsletter list and keep up to date on all our free webinars and instructive posts and online classes, as well as our talented, available memoir editors and memoir coaches, podcast guests and more.
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Ep. 117 Kevin Baker
Author, historian, essayist, bestselling novelist and commentator Kevin Baker has just published part one of his long-awaited two-part look into baseball and the city that formed it and was formed by it. Called The New York Game: Baseball and The Rise of a New City (Knopf, 2024), this was a labor of love from a super fan of both the city and the game. In our interview on the Qwerty podcast, we discuss the sport, the city and how a historian does his work. The QWERTY podcast is brought to you by the book The Memoir Project: A Thoroughly Non-Standardized Text for Writing & Life. Read it, and begin your own journey to writing what you know. To learn more, join The Memoir Project free newsletter list and keep up to date on all our free webinars and instructive posts and online classes, as well as our talented, available memoir editors and memoir coaches, podcast guests and more.
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Ep. 116 Ani Gjika
Author, essayist, poet and activist Ani Gjika is an Albanian-born poet, literary translator, writer, and author of Bread on Running Waters (Fenway Press, 2013). A finalist for the 2011 Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize and 2011 May Sarton New Hampshire Book Prize, she moved to the US at age 18 and earned an MA in English at Simmons College and an MFA in poetry at Boston University. Her honors include awards and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, English PEN, the Robert Pinsky Global Fellowship, Framingham State University's Miriam Levine Reader Award, and the Robert Fitzgerald Translation Prize. Her poetry appears in Seneca Review, Salamander, Plume, From the Fishouse, and elsewhere. Her new book is An Unruled Body: A Poet’s Memoir, just out from Restless Books, which is the winner of the 2021 Restless Books’ New Immigrant Writing Prize. Listen in and she and host Marion Roach Smith discuss writing into trauma in this new episode of the Qwerty podcast. The QWERTY podcast is brought to you by the book The Memoir Project: A Thoroughly Non-Standardized Text for Writing & Life. Read it, and begin your own journey to writing what you know. To learn more, join The Memoir Project free newsletter list and keep up to date on all our free webinars and instructive posts and online classes, as well as our talented, available memoir editors and memoir coaches, podcast guests and more.
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Ep. 115 Meg Kissinger
Writer and author Meg Kissinger spent more than two decades traveling across the country to report on America’s mental health system for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. A Pulitzer Prize finalist, she has won two George Polk Awards, the Robert F. Kennedy Award, awards from Investigative Reporters and Editors, and two National Journalism Awards. Kissinger teaches investigative reporting at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and was a visiting professor at DePauw University, her alma mater. Her stories on the abysmal living conditions for people with mental illness inspired changes to Wisconsin law and led to the creation of hundreds of new housing units. Now, she has brought the knowledge, insights, determination and humility of a reporter’s eye to the vulnerability needed to get to heart of her own origin story and published her new book, While You Were Out: The Intimate Family Portrait of Mental Illness in an Era of Silence. The QWERTY podcast is brought to you by the book The Memoir Project: A Thoroughly Non-Standardized Text for Writing & Life. Read it, and begin your own journey to writing what you know. To learn more, join The Memoir Project free newsletter list and keep up to date on all our free webinars and instructive posts and online classes, as well as our talented, available memoir editors and memoir coaches, podcast guests and more.
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Ep. 114 Taylor Brorby
Writer, essayist, speaker and activist Taylor Brorby is the author of Boys and Oil, Growing Up Gay in a Fractured Land, a NYT Editors’ Choice published in 2022 by Liveright, a division of W.W. Norton. He is also the author of Crude: Poems, Coming Alive: Action and Civil Disobedience, and he is the co-editor of Fracture: Essays, Poems, and Stories on Fracking in America. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Huffington Post, LitHub, Orion Magazine, The Arkansas International, Southern Humanities Review, North Dakota Quarterly, and numerous anthologies. He is a contributing editor at North American Review and serves on the editorial boards of Terrain.org and Hub City Press. The QWERTY podcast is brought to you by the book The Memoir Project: A Thoroughly Non-Standardized Text for Writing & Life. Read it, and begin your own journey to writing what you know. To learn more, join The Memoir Project free newsletter list and keep up to date on all our free webinars and instructive posts and online classes, as well as our talented, available memoir editors and memoir coaches, podcast guests and more.
Customer Reviews
Always recommending this!
I belong to a couple writing groups and when other writers are asking for tips on writing, editing, drafts, story/theme, etc. I always find myself saying “Ya know, Marion just interviewed someone on her podcast about this!” I love her interview style and tendency for blending encouragement with craft. Thanks for producing this!! - Joan
Matt Mendez
Marion’s interview with Matt Mendez was exceptional. We should all listen to his wise words regarding the difference between a writer and an author in this time of book banning. So helpful. Also his “mechanic’s” approach to editing is fun and insightful. Great work Matt and Marion!
Marion Roach Smith – we our writing meets algebra
Just listened to Marion‘s interview #108 with Allison K. Williams (GuerillaMarketing).
There were so many takeaways in weaving elements of Marion’s The Memoir Project with Allison’s Seven Drafts (both their books are heavily marked up!).
Marion’s algebraic formula: it’s about “x” as illustrated by “y” as told by “z” — struck a cord between my computer science and writing selves :-)
SOME Takeaways:
You can’t make it better by yourself. There’s a time for emotional support for your project, but there comes a time when you need to have outside help to make it the best it can be.
From Allison’s theater experience—it’s not your job to cry, it’s your job to make the audience cry.
Between drafts, you can still be writing. Take portions from your memoir or things that didn’t make the cut and spin them into something that is culturally relevant (Letters to the Editor, Op-Eds, Personal Essays, blog posts, etc.)
When reading other books notice when you love a piece of writing. Analyze what makes it so compelling: details, bookend, metaphor, a new clue. Then try to use that technique in your writing.
Sometimes writing memoir is energizing, other times a slog. Keep the focus on finding the right words that will help people who need to hear them.
When you print out and read a draft after letting it sit for awhile, mark and cut it up. Rearrange. Then re-type it. If your eyes glaze over when retyping, readers’ eyes will glaze over too.
52 card pick up: write one sentence to describe a scene and put it on an index card. Throw all the index cards up in the air. Let them land. Then search for the one that needs to come first. Then next. Until the end. There may be cards left on the floor that don’t belong in the book anymore.
I listened to this while walking on the treadmill and pausing (a lot) to add notes on my iPhone :)
I highly recommend QWERTY, as well as Marion’s book—The Memoir Project and her classes. The same with Allison‘s book—Seven Drafts and her webinars.
Thank you both!
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