The Passage

The Passage
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The Passage is a literary podcast where authors read a passage from their own work and break down exactly how they wrote it, from the first spark of inspiration and the early drafts to the sentence-level decisions and the moment they knew it was finished. Guests span fiction, nonfiction, essays, and more, from novelists to memoirists to food and travel writers. Your hosts are Jon and Cory, two former book editors who love getting into the weeds of how writing actually gets made.

  1. Jul 19

    M Lin | "The Memory Museum" | Fiction | Ep. 13

    Author M Lin joins us to discuss her fantastic debut collection, The Memory Museum, a series of stories that move between contemporary China and imagined futures to explore memory, family, censorship, loss, and—perhaps unexpectedly—joy. The passage M reads for us, from the collection’s title story, comes from a scene she added only after nearly a year of revisions—a late breakthrough that ended up recontextualizing the emotional core of the story itself. It's a fascinating conversation about the unreliability of memory, and the satisfaction of “uncovering” elements of a story you didn’t realize were there.  M also talks to Cory and Jon about why writing is sometimes less an act of creation than one of patient discovery, how the process of writing itself gradually narrows a blank page’s infinite possibilities, the challenge of writing a hopeful story using the conventions of dystopian fiction, the influence of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony and classical music, why she abandoned the rigid outlining habits she’d developed as a screenwriter, and how learning to trust her instinct became one of the most important parts of her creative process. M’s passage, from The Memory Museum: It took me years to uncover what I owed Lu Tian—my own memory of the afternoon when my father was first taken away. As the first step, I paused my visits to the library, shelving Laolao’s reconstruction into the subconscious. Several years later, I requested its audial and olfactory profiles and experienced them strictly on their own. Initially only to the point I used to stop at, then all the way to the end, to the huge fight between my mother and Laolao, which started with Laolao telling my mother to give up what she and my father were doing and ended in my mother packing up and leaving. Once I synced the profiles again, my brain cells went giddy, as if they were cooking up a big surprise but did not know the recipe. The fluster lasted a long time, straining my excitement into frustration. Often I thought about admitting defeat, but Lu Tian always managed to send me back to the memory tank, hopeful again. One day, I left the two profiles playing on repeat and resigned myself to keeping my eyes closed. Very soon, time lost its grip on me. I couldn’t count how many times they ended and started over again. At some point, toward the end of a cycle, the audio glitched, but I didn’t open my eyes. The profiles continued playing but the sound became faint, as if everything were happening far away. It was then that an unfamiliar image flickered. In Laolao’s memory, after my mother left, we sat together in the living room, mindlessly watching a children’s patriotic education program on TV. Now that the show’s voiceover sounded more remote, I realized that my memory of those few minutes differed: I had not been with Laolao but by myself in the adjacent room, looking out from five floors above, the TV’s sound reaching me at a subdued volume. The unfamiliar image was familiar after all: It was of my mother in the courtyard, standing below our window with her suitcase. She bent her arms overhead, making the shape of a heart, and waved goodbye to me. In my memory, I could not hear her, but somehow she convinced me to move away from the window first, to return to Laolao in the living room, to resume the life of a child, with the show on TV, dinner on the table, and family by her side, so that, I understood now, her daughter did not have to imprint on her mind the image of her mother walking away, leaving her behind.

  2. Jul 5

    Sonya Walger | Wifehouse | Fiction | Ep. 12

    Award-winning author and actor Sonya Walger (Lost, For All Mankind) joins us to discuss her latest novel, Wifehouse—the story of a woman who has always defined herself as a wife and mother, and who, in trying to put her own happiness first, pursues an affair with a much younger French tutor. As Sonya puts it, it's ultimately a novel about "a mother who leaves,” and the questions such a story raises: Why would a woman make that decision? And what happens after? The passage Sonya reads centers on a real-life story that inspired one of the book's most pivotal scenes—and one of the hardest for her to get right. It’s a great conversation about concision, pacing, metaphor, and how an ordinary podcast anecdote can find it’s way to unlocking the emotional heart of a novel. Sonya also talks to Cory and Jon about her process of “writing into a question,” how the experience of interrogating a script as an actor lends itself to novel-writing, why more actors should write novels, the art of turning life’s observations into fiction, and what makes airplanes great places to get some work done (hint: it’s the fact that you’re trapped). Sonya’s passage, from Wifehouse: She gropes for her phone in the dark, finds a podcast to drown out her thoughts. The host of a news review show tells a story about a group of tourists on a guided tour bus in Iceland who got off at a rest stop to stretch their legs and take in the scenery. One female traveler decided to change her clothes before getting back on the bus. When it was time to leave, the passengers boarded the bus, and one of them alerted the driver that they were missing a passenger—a woman in black who had been sitting by the window. The driver agreed to wait, and they all sat on the bus, patiently awaiting this woman’s return. Eventually, when she did not appear, they decided to get out and search for her. The female traveler joined in the search. Local police were summoned, the fire department deployed, all beginning an increasingly frantic search for a missing woman in a black jacket. It was many, many hours before the female traveler realized that she was, in fact, the person for whom they were searching. She informed the authorities, and the search was called off. The host laughs as he tells the story. Annie is wide awake now. She pictures this woman, trudging through the tundra, searching for the missing tourist. She wonders how long it took her to realize her mistake. She wonders how long it took her to admit to it. Did she hesitate, Annie wonders, did she for one wild moment wonder what would happen if she never owned her mistake but allowed that other self to vanish into that treeless horizon? Did she, for a moment, hover on the threshold of becoming someone new, someone naked, reborn, free? Annie stares at the darkness. She, too, is walking in the wrong direction, knowing full well that she is the one who is missing.

  3. Jun 24

    John Keene - "Gloss" (Counternarratives) | Fiction | Ep. 11

    John Keene reads from "Gloss on a History of Roman Catholics in the Early American Republic, 1790–1825; or The Strange History of Our Lady of the Sorrows," a novella at the heart of his 2015 collection Counternarratives. It’s an experimental piece of fiction imagined as a footnote to an obscure history text, centered on an enslaved woman named Carmel and expanding across the early 19th century Americas, starting from the Haitian Revolution and evolving into a gothic, possibly supernatural tale in a Kentucky convent. John talks to Jon and Cory about: How the novella's structural framework, a historical footnote that “swallows” the text it annotates, came out of his early graduate work with E.L. Doctorow linking experimental fiction with historyHis initial worry that the asterisk/footnote idea for the story was nothing but "postmodern hijinks"Losing an early version of this story and several others from Counternarratives to a computer crash and spending years away from it, then returning to discover the rewrite was more ambitious than anything he'd lostHow Carmel's arc emerged late in the process, as he realized her growing power meant she could eventually claim her own voice and narrate her own endingHis habit, when stuck, of opening any nearby book, and the belief that another writer will always show you the way forwardThe Latin American experimentalists, including Reinaldo Arenas, Severo Sarduy, José Lezama Lima, who showed him that fiction could be formally radical and historically engaged at once The opening of John’s passage, from “Gloss”: GLOSS ON A HISTORY OF ROMAN CATHOLICS IN THE EARLY AMERICAN REPUBLIC, 1790–1825; OR THE STRANGE HISTORY OF OUR LADY OF THE SORROWS A History of Roman Catholics in the Early American Republic: 1790–1825, Jos. N. O. de L'Écart-Francis and Ambrose Carroll Meyer (Boston: Flaherty & Smith, 1895) The status of the ancient Faith differed on the eastern shores of the Mississippi and its southerly tributaries. A convent and school, established at the turn of the nineteenth century, are referred to indirectly in the records of His Holiness Bishop John Carroll of the Diocese of Baltimore, whose curacy extended at that time to the far western frontiers of the virgin Republic's lands. A specific reference may be found, however, in the personal papers of Fr. Auguste-Marie Malesvaux, a native of Saint-Domingue, whose evangelistic labors encompassed the Spanish and later French territories from Louisiana as far north as the Great Lakes. Malesvaux offers brief notations on the convent and school, which he asserts were the first in this region. Flemish Nuns of the Order of the Most Precious Charity of Our Lady of the Sorrows established both near the village of New Hurttstown, in this frontier region of western Kentucky, in 1800. Because the convent and school suddenly vanished without a trace, and within several years the order itself disappeared as well, and as the nearby non-Catholic settlement suffered through a series of calamities before dwindling to near-extinction until its reestablishment in 1812, no other definitive records of this foundation remain.* It was not until the Reverend Father Charles Nerinckx, the native of Herfe- *Carmel was the lone child among the handful of bondspeople remaining at Valdoré, the coffee plantation to which Olivier de L'Écart returned in late July 1803. The estate, over which his elder brother Nicolas had presided for more than two decades, clung like a forget-me-not to the cliffs high above the coastal city of Jérémie, west of the Rivière Grand'Anse, in the southern district of the colony of Saint-Domingue.

  4. Jun 11

    Sam Shelstad | The Cobra and the Key | Fiction | Ep. 10

    Sam Shelstad reads three short chapters from his (very funny) novel, The Cobra and the Key, a fictional creative writing guide penned by an aspiring literary genius who isn’t going to let little things like talent, self-awareness, or a recent break-up hold him back. Sam talks to Jon and Cory about: Why he resisted packaging the book as a straight satire of writing guides and found the characterization and story needed for a novel insteadStarting the book as a collection of one-off comedic writing tips, and how a “silly” riff on Lord of the Rings unlocked what a joke within the book could beTaking inspiration for the book's structure from James Wood's How Fiction Works (and then writing the dumbest version of it)The challenge of writing a narrator who is stupid enough to be funny, but believable at the same time, and the readings where audiences weren't sure he was jokingHow he writes by building on incidental details and throwaway linesFollowing Hemingway's advice to always leave something unfinished at the end of each writing sessionHis love of Thomas Bernhard, Kafka, László Krasznahorkai and other writers whose darkness tips into comedy through repetition and the intense fixation of their characters Sam’s passage, from The Cobra and The Key: 25. Watch how Oscar Wilde reveals character in The Picture of Dorian Gray: “Lord Henry elevated his eyebrows and looked at him in amazement through the thin blue wreaths of smoke that curled up in such fanciful whorls from his heavy, opium-tainted cigarette.” Now we know, through Wilde’s clever and efficient use of detail, that the character has eyebrows. And notice how his cigarette is described as “heavy,” which lets the reader know that Lord Henry is incredibly weak. We also learn, because of the blue smoke, that he’s some kind of wizard character. 26. A character in your story can be a composite of different people you know. You might borrow certain characteristics from one person, and certain characteristics from another. For example, an important character in the novel I’m working on now was created using this technique. The character, Molly, borrows some elements from my ex-lover: her manner of speaking, her sense of humour, her looks. Her name, of course. She’s from the same small town as Molly and had a similar family dynamic growing up. An ex-husband named Charles. Same interests and fears. But this character also wears a red beret, just like one of my neighbors. It’s interesting to mash two different people together like this and see what happens. 29. People like to read about characters they would want to have a beer with. They should be interesting, amiable, and basically the kind of individual you could imagine sitting down and having a beer with. Take, for example, the wide cast of characters who populate J. R. R. Tolkien’s fantasy series The Lord of the Rings. I would sit down and have a beer with Frodo. Of course, I’d definitely want to have a beer with Gandalf. Samwise Gamgee—I’d have a beer. Merry and Pippin—beer. I’d sit down with Aragorn and have a beer, and I would also want to have a beer with Gimli. I would definitely want to sit down and have a beer with Arwen. I’d have a beer with Elrond. I think we would all want to sit down and have a beer with The Ents. I’d also have a beer with Galadriel. Boromir, beer for sure. Legolas, beer. I’d even want to have a beer with Gollum. That would be interesting. And of course, you can’t forget Bilbo Baggins. I’d want to sit down and have a beer with him too.

  5. Jun 1

    ’Pemi Aguda | One Leg on Earth | Fiction | Ep. 9

    Nigerian short story writer and novelist ’Pemi Aguda reads a passage from her latest work, One Leg on Earth, and discusses the challenges–and rewards–of short vs. longform writing, the writers who keep her inspired, and how liberating it can be to scrap your book and start from scratch. 'Pemi’s critically acclaimed work mixes elements of supernatural, speculative fiction, folk horror, and contemporary literature to haunting and mesmeric effect.  It was fantastic to talk to her about her process and her debut novel, “a richly patterned work of tangled mysteries” (The Guardian). ’Pemi’s passage, from One Leg On Earth:  "When a man eventually approached her, two-thirds into the green bottle, the night was already set on its path. Of course, he sat without waiting for an answer to “Fine girl, may I join you?” Of course, he said it should be a crime for a pretty girl like her to be sitting all alone at an hour like this in a city like this, and maybe it was destined, yes, destined, that Yosoye would tilt her head until her maroon braids pooled on one shoulder, and ask if he was there to remedy that.  The lines came unrehearsed to her lips. The script of a worldly woman. She who had always been a hesitant speaker, one who revised her sentences in her head over and over until her conversation partners repeated themselves, assuming she’d never heard them. Was she the same girl? Yosoye from five days ago would have been gobsmacked, would have clapped her hands like a Nollywood village girl and said, “Ehehn? Na you be this? This is you, yeah?” She was heady with unexpected success, so when he rose and took her hand, she didn’t protest. She didn’t think, too-fast-too-fast-too-fast. No. She thought, “Give me, give me.”  This was exactly what she wanted from Lagos: unpredictable turns to a day so that what was up was suddenly sideways, and that 8 p.m. would bring adventure that 6 a.m. never dared to anticipate, and enough courage to stop her from curling back into herself, retreating into the loneliness she was used to, the comfort of its grasping arms. In the cheap motel that smelled too strongly of air freshener, Yosoye removed her clothes with a determination alien to her, a forthrightness that belied inexperience. A handful of painful times was the extent of her sexual knowledge, cold clutches and dry entries, but she did not remember those discomforts in this moment. All she thought was now, was yes, was give me. She flung off her blouse, impatient for what came next, for her future. Her flesh fed on its own hunger, slicked from her eagerness alone, did not look to this man to generate the wet heat needed. She would not remember the air conditioner giving up with a short bang, or the diamond patterns of the bedsheet, and when his socks dropped to the floor, she could not be sure if it was rat or shadow that darted over them.  Yosoye would deliberately refuse to remember him complaining about the condom, pulling out, tugging swiftly and efficiently enough to suggest practice, flinging the rubber into the foliage of a fake indoor plant—to be found by a whistling cleaner, or to ferment there forever. What Yosoye did remember was the feeling of being tugged along this Lagos night, lured, pulled, towed. Not the rhythmic smacking of his sweaty paunch against the inside of her thighs, but a grander hypnotic feeling of being swept up in a current, dragged in the surge of a ravenous tide."

  6. May 15

    Jan Swafford | Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph | Biography | Ep. 8

    Musician, writer, and biographer Jan Swafford reads not one but two passages! The first from the opening of his biography of the American composer Charles Ives and the second from his massive book on the life of Beethoven, Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph–9n his words the hardest thing he’s ever written. He also talks to Jon and Cory about: Why a musical biography has to reflect the subject–an Ives book should be Ivesian, a Beethoven book should be Beethovenian.His start as a “hack writer” writing Civil War history books for hire and learning how to do research.His research process and the value of a solid chronology.What you can learn about how people think and talk–from reading–and retyping–letters.The temptation to interpret a subject and the risks in doing so.Why writing about Beethoven’s process of composing his monumental Eroica symphony was the hardest passage he’s ever worked on.The importance of instinct–and of having a good early reader to give you honest feedback. Jan’s first passage, from Charles Ives: A Life in Music: In the old Ives house in the middle of Danbury, Connecticut in 1874, among the warren of rooms smelling of beeswax and fruit, these sounds were familiar. The intimate patter of rain, the measureless peeling of thunder, the jingle of sleighs in winter, the sure of spring peepers from springs and ponds, the clatter and clop of buggies down dusty Main Street, and the deeper rolling rumble of wagons on their way to shops and factories. From the congregational church next door are the muffled sounds of choir and organ and the great bronze booming of the bell, and all day Sunday the sound of distant bells like intimations of a presence beyond the horizon of this moment of this life. At holidays, the brass bands marching past, the rattle and crump of fireworks, the clang of the fire bell, in summer the cries of icemen and boys selling newspapers, inside the house the groaning of old floors, the antiphonal voices of a big family's comings and goings, and every night the bright rising and falling of music, cornet or piano or violin or bands, little orchestras playing in the park, outside in the shed or in the barn playing quick steps and hymns and Beethoven and Stephen Foster. On October 20th, 1874, from the large bedroom over the South Parlor, rose the Keening whale of newborn Charles Edward Ives, who would register the myriad sounds of home as few people have, and who would never forget them in the intimacies of their timbers and in their deeper human resonances. Jan’s second passage, from Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph: The dots and quilled and penciled on the page define an accumulating and clarifying vision of the work. Beethoven has never seen a battle, but years before, on the road from Bonn to Vienna, he encountered armies heard the bustle and rattle of troops on the march, the bugle calls and martial music. The overarching conception and the minutiae of melody and rhythm and harmony feed on one another. As usual, conceives his ideas in terms of familiar formal outlines. So now I'm talking about the process and the finished at the same time. For the first movement, he needs a Thema for the opening, then what he calls the Mittelgedanke, subsidiary ideas. Then he needs ideas for the Durchführung, his term for the development section. His forms are not molds to be filled with notes, but general guidelines to help organize the conception. This time, the conception is a name, Bonaparte. Whatever the form becomes, it has to be measured and cut to that subject. He wears out one quill pen after another, notes spreading over empty staves, pages accumulating in the sketchbook...

  7. May 1

    Nathan Ballingrud | "The Butcher's Table" (Wounds/The Atlas of Hell) | Horror | Ep. 7

    Horror and dark fantasy writer Nathan Ballingrud reads a passage from his novella, The Butcher’s Table, originally published in the short fiction collection Wounds (The Atlas of Hell). He talks to Jon and Cory about: The story’s origins as a blog serialHis initial struggles to commit to the significant tonal departure from the stories in his first collection, North American Lake MonstersThe fear of being taken less seriously by writing pulpy, fantastical fictionHow Mike Mignola's Hellboy inspired him to commit to something as over-the-top as an angel-possessed squidSwitching between laptop and pen and paper to unlock looser, more reckless draftingLearning to write by mimicking Stephen King and Clive BarkerAttending Clarion WorkshopWhy he tries to avoid reading reviews (including those on Reddit, Goodreads, and social media)His love of Mervyn Peake and the Gormenghast books Nathan’s passage, from The Butcher’s Table: It spoke a word that fractured the jaw of its host, registering the pain as a curiosity. Upon hearing the word, one of the roosting angels took flight, rearing against the sun in a flare of black feathers, and plummeted into the sea, where it sank from sight like a corpse weighted with stones. The angel descended quickly, a dark-feathered ball, until it passed beyond the reach of sunlight and the water grew cold and black. It fell more deeply yet, oblivious to the atmospheres pressing against its body, its eyes pulling from the lightless fathom darting shapes, shifting mountains of flesh. It found a host, made a bloody gash and wriggled into it, and filled the beast with its holy spirit. Skin split in fissures along the length of its form, and it jetted forward with fresh purpose, its tentacles trailing in a tight formation behind it, its red saucer-shaped eyes incandescent with hunger. [...skips about 10 pages…] It was a squid, a deep-sea monstrosity with tentacles nearly as long as the ship itself, and it was inverted in the sky. Its arms pulled the sails from their masts, yanked yardarms free of their moorings. People slid from the deck and into the churning water. The squid hovered in the air, its skin split lengthwise, revealing the white flesh of its interior, as though something within itself did not fit. Ragged black feathers jutted from the wounds. Its tentacles splayed in the air around it, a corona of horrors. Its glaring eyes smoked in the beating rain.

  8. Apr 21

    Michael Katz | The Brothers Karamozov | Russian Translation | Ep. 6

    The great Russian translator Michael Katz reads a passage from Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov and discusses the painstaking process, many challenges, and hard limitations of translation, which he considers a “recreative” act vs. a purely creative one. He also talks to us about what keeps readers coming back to Dostoevsky’s strange, often difficult books, and why a good translation is only good for about 20 or 30 years. Michael’s passage, from his translation of The Brother’s Karamazov: He had a strange dream, utterly out of keeping with the time and place. He was somewhere out on the steppe, where he’d been stationed a long time ago, and a peasant was driving him through the slush in a cart with a pair of horses. Mitya felt cold; it was early November and snow was falling in large, wet flakes; it melted immediately, as soon as it hit the ground. The peasant drove along swiftly, boldly snapping his whip; he had a long fair beard. The driver wasn’t an old man, perhaps fifty, wearing a gray peasant’s homespun coat. There was a village not far off. He could pick out the very black huts; half of them had burned down, and there were only a few charred beams sticking up. Standing along the road leading out of the village were lots of peasant women, a whole row of them, all thin and wan, with brownish faces. There was one in particular at the edge, such a bony woman, tall, looking about forty, but perhaps only twenty, with a long, thin face; in her arms she held a little child who was crying; her breasts must have dried up, with no milk left in them. The baby was crying, crying, holding out his bare little arms, his little fists blue from the cold. “Why are they crying? What are they crying for?” he asks, briskly flying by. “It’s the babe,” the driver replies. “It’s the babe crying.” And Mitya’s struck by the fact that he says it in his own way, the peasant way, “babe,” and not “baby.” He likes the peasant’s calling it a “babe”; it seems as if there’s more pity in it. “But why is he crying?” Mitya persists like a fool. “Why are his little arms bare? Why don’t they wrap him up?” “The babe’s chilled to the bone; his little clothes are frozen and don’t warm him.” “But why is it so? Why?” foolish Mitya persists. “They’re poor people, burned out; they haven’t a crust of bread; they’re begging because they’re burned out.” “No, no.” Mitya still seems not to understand. “Tell me: why are these poor mothers standing there? Why are the people poor? Why is the babe poor? Why is the steppe barren? Why don’t they all embrace and kiss? Why don’t they sing songs of joy? Why are they so dark from black misery? Why don’t they feed the babe?” He feels that although his questions are unreasonable and senseless, he still wants to ask them and he has to pose them in just that way. He also feels that an emotion of sweet tenderness is rising up in his heart, one he’s never experienced before, and that he wants to weep, he wants to do something for everyone so that the babe won’t cry anymore, and so that the dark, dried-up mother of the baby will no longer cry, so that no one will shed any more tears from this moment forth, and he wants to do all this at once, at once, without delay, in spite of all obstacles, with all of the Karamazov recklessness.

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About

The Passage is a literary podcast where authors read a passage from their own work and break down exactly how they wrote it, from the first spark of inspiration and the early drafts to the sentence-level decisions and the moment they knew it was finished. Guests span fiction, nonfiction, essays, and more, from novelists to memoirists to food and travel writers. Your hosts are Jon and Cory, two former book editors who love getting into the weeds of how writing actually gets made.

Information

  • Creator
    The Passage
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    13
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © 2026 The Passage
  • Show Website
    The Passage