"As a ghostwriter, I've trained my ear to listen for what's really there or not there, to discern what's underneath or between someone's words," writes veteran collaborator Samantha Rose, in her stirring, soaring new memoir Giving Up the Ghost: A Daughter's Memoir. "I hear what's implied, what's withheld…"

Samantha's gifts as a storyteller are very much on display in the pages of her new book—a heartbreaking account of her mother's suicide, published earlier this year by Sybilline Press.

An Emmy Award-winning television writer and a New York Times best-selling collaborator, Samantha has written extensively in the areas of spirituality, health and wellness, personal growth and parenting. Her books have been translated into more than 20 foreign languages and have been featured selections of Reese's Book Club and Target's Bookmarked Book Club.

She is the principal of literary development and the head of client relations for Yellow Sky Media, her boutique editorial agency in Petaluma, Calif.

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Nelson and Alex DeMille's The Tin Men is an electrifying read and a chillingly timely one," writes The New York Times best-selling novelist Megan Abbott of the third and final father-son collaboration in the Scott Brodie & Maggie Taylor series. "[It's] both a master-class in suspense and a haunting exploration of the dangers and costs of a surrender to technology, an abandonment of the human."

Yes, it is. It's also the final novel from legendary author Nelson DeMille, completed posthumously following his death in September 2024, and a follow-up to the duo's first two collaborations in the series—The Deserter and Blood Lines, both immediate New York Times best-sellers.

Its publication offers Alex DeMille an opportunity to reflect on growing up under the influence of one of our finest storytellers—a backdrop that at first inspired Alex to become a filmmaker. A graduate of the MFA program in film at UCLA, Alex's films have won many awards and fellowships, and have played at festivals worldwide, including "My Nephew Emmett, " which was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Live Action Short in 2018.

"I want to thank my father," he writes in an emotional grace note to the new book, "who might be reading this somewhere among the stars with a good scotch in hand. Thank you for all you've given me, all you've taught me, for your love, your encouragement, for making me laugh and making me think. Thank you for trusting me. Thank you for showing me the way. I hope this makes you proud."

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Student journalist and first-time documentary filmmaker Matthew Winkler joins us to discuss his work on a film chronicling the life and career of Joya Sherrill, an unsung American jazz vocalist who wrote the lyrics to the Billy Strayhorn standard, "Take the A Train," made famous by the Duke Ellington orchestra.

Matthew came across Sherrill's name during his freshman year at Tufts University, while doing research for Boston Globe journalist and noted biographer Larry Tye, who was writing a book about jazz. Matthew, a music and history major, was astonished to discover the small footprint Sherrill had left behind, despite being the first female jazz singer to visit the Soviet Union, accompanying bandleader Benny Goodman, and earning the distinction of being one of Duke Ellington's favorite singers.

"Public-facing history is very important to me," Matthew told a reporter for Tufts Now, the university's alumni magazine, in an article detailing how the Tufts undergraduate grew a student research project into a feature-length documentary, with the help of his professors and mentors. "I hope this film will make people know who Joya Sherrill is and why we should care about her. On a broader level, I think a documentary like this will make people realize how easy it is for remarkable figures to fall through the cracks of history."

With this conversation, it is hoped, he might also signal to aspiring storytellers how easy it is to keep their eyes and ears open for stories that might move us, inspire us, and enlighten us.

Learn more about Matthew Winkler:

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• Five Sisters Productions

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Podcast guest Michael E. Long calls himself "a professional explainer with a restive mind." He is just that. Trained as physicist, Mike is the co-author of the international bestseller The Molecule of More, which has been translated into more than 20 languages, and the sole author of the recently-published follow-up title Taming the Molecule of More. As a speechwriter, he has written for members of Congress, U.S Cabinet secretaries, presidential candidates, governors, diplomats, and business leaders. As a ghostwriter, he has collaborated on several books of non-fiction. As a playwright, he's had more than two dozen of his shows produced, most on New York stages. He was finalist for the grand prize in screenwriting at the Slamdance Film Festival. A popular keynote speaker, Mr. Long has addressed audiences around the world, including at Oxford University. He teaches writing at Georgetown University, where he is a former director of writing. The son of a southern preacher, Mike's call to writing found him close to home. "I learned how to write," he says, "and how words should go together, by listening to the music of my father's voice." Join us for a fun, freewheeling conversation on a writing life lived at the crosshairs of the written word and the spoken word. Learn more about Michael E. Long:

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"No two caregiving journeys are alike," writes Emma Heming Willis, the wife of actor Bruce Willis, who was diagnosed in 2023 with Frontotemporal Dementia (FTD), a rare form of dementia affecting behavior, movement and language. "But we are connected by the same unchosen thread."

In The Unexpected Journey: Finding Strength, Hope, and Yourself on the Caregiving Path, Emma writes movingly and hopefully about the blessings and burdens of being thrust into the role of caregiver, emerging as a passionate voice for care partners and families navigating neurodegenerative disease. Together with her collaborator, Michele Bender, she offers an essential blueprint for others confronting some of the same issues facing her own family.

"My grief can still paralyze me," she shares in the pages of the book she wishes someone had handed her when her husband was first diagnosed. "I still have a hard time accepting what is, yet FTD doesn't give you many options. It can suck all the air out of a room. So I've made a choice to pump oxygen back into our lives, for the sake of our girls, Bruce, and me. And to give the middle finger to this disease."

Join us as we visit with Emma Heming Willis and her co-author Michele Bender for a heartbreaking and heart-lifting conversation on what it takes to tap the universal elements in such a deeply personal story—and what it means to step from an unimaginable darkness at home to stand in the world as a light for others.

Learn more about our guests:

• Emma Heming Willis Website
• Emma Heming Willis Facebook
• Emma Heming Willis Instagram
• Michele Bender Website
• Michele Bender Instagram

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"Pull the heart of your work out of your chest and lay it out there for the gods," podcast guest Samuel G. Freedman told his Columbia Journalism School graduate students on the first day of his final semester after 35 years of teaching. "That's all I'm asking of you. Not much."

No, not much. And yet what Sam Freedman asked of his students during his tenure as one of our leading journalism educators was everything. Before his retirement this spring, his popular book-writing seminar led to the publication of 95 books by his students.

"He's been the godfather to an awful lot of publishing over the years," noted Grove Atlantic executive editor George Gibson, in a New York Times profile on Sam's career and his legacy in journalism and publishing.

Sam was named the nation's outstanding journalism professor in 1977 by the Society of Professional Journalists and was awarded Columbia University's coveted Presidential Award for Outstanding Teaching. A former staff reporter and columnist for The New York Times, his work as appeared in numerous publications, including The New Yorker, The Washington Post, Rolling Stone, Tablet, Salon, and New York magazine.

He is the author of 10 acclaimed books, including The Inheritance: How Three Families Moved from Roosevelt to Reagan and Beyond, a 1997 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; Into the Bright Sunshine: Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights; and, Who She Was: My Search for My Mother's Life, which was reissued in a new edition earlier this year.

Learn more about Samuel Freedman:

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Jane Leavy is the New York Times best-selling author of Sandy Koufax: A Lefty's Legacy, The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the End of America's Childhood, and The Big Fella: Babe Ruth and the World He Created. She is also the author of the comic novel Squeeze Play, hailed by Entertainment Weekly as "the best novel ever written about baseball."

A longtime sportswriter and feature writer for The Washington Post, Jane covered baseball, tennis and the Olympics during her tenure at the paper. She also wrote features for the Post's "Style" section on sports, politics and popular culture. Her work has been featured in the New York Times, Newsweek, Sports Illustrated, Grantland, The Los Angeles Times, and Tablet.

In her latest book—Make Me Commissioner: I Know What's Wrong with Baseball and How to Fix It—Jane waxes philosophic and not-quite-catastrophic about the game she has loved her entire life, and asks readers to join her in re-imagining the way that game is played, and all the ways we might play it better, or more meaningfully, or more relevantly. In the book, just published by Grand Central Publishing, she writes movingly and hilariously and insightfully on our national pastime, offering a thinking fan's take on what the game has become, and what the game has lost over the years.

Join us for our Season 5 opener, as we visit with one of baseball's biggest fans… and one of publishing's finest storytellers.

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Episode originally aired on Nov. 2, 2021.

"Don't make it out, make it better."

That's a line from podcast guest D. Watkins, offered in the book trailer for his book of essays We Speak for Ourselves: A Word from Forgotten Black America, in which he gives voice to the voiceless and shines meaningful light on what it means to come of age in East Baltimore, in one of America's poorest black neighborhoods.

It's a line you might hear as well from D.'s NBA legend Carmelo Anthony, himself a product of an uncertain, unforgiving environment–the housing projects of Red Hook, Brooklyn, and Baltimore.

In the future Hall-of-Famer's just-published memoir, Where Tomorrows Aren't Promised: A Memoir of Survival and Hope, an immediate New York Times best-seller, D. helps his celebrated co-author share his story of finding a way out of no way at all, sounding the call for social justice and offering a guidepost for readers looking to pull success from struggle.

More than any other athlete's memoir in recent memory, the book offers a perfect pairing of author and subject, as D. brings his own perspective to Anthony's hard-won experience.

An editor-at-large for Salon, D.'s work has been featured in The New York Times Magazine, The Guardian, and Rolling Stone, among other publications. He is the author of the New York Times best-sellers The Cook Up: A Crack Rock Memoir and The Beast Side: Living and Dying While Black in America.

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Episode originally aired on April 11, 2023

"Writing is not what you start," writes podcast guest Nell Scovell in her scathingly funny memoir Just the Funny Parts. "It's not even what you finish. It's what you start, finish, and put out there for the world to see."

Indeed, Nell offers this observation from a place of hard-won experience. A veteran television writer ("Newhart," "The Simpsons," "Late Night with David Letterman," "The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour," "Murphy Brown," "Coach," and on and on), Nell understands what it means to get an idea on its feet and out in front of an audience. As Sheryl Sandberg's collaborator on the #1 New York Times best-seller Lean In, she helped to create a guidepost for a generation of women looking for a shared compass point in their lives and careers—a book Nell says she wishes she'd read at twenty-five, as a woman working in the male-dominated field of television comedy, instead of helping to write at fifty-two.

Join us as Nell reflects on a lifetime working in collaboration with some of the brightest (and least accommodating!) minds in television, on what it was like to write jokes for President Obama at the White House Correspondent's Dinner ("Obama, out!"), and on what it was like to be Spy magazine's first staff writer, and a contributor to Vanity Fair, Vogue, and The New York Times.

Learn more about Nell Scovell:

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• PostNews

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Ivy Pochoda is the author of the critically-acclaimed novels Visitation Street, These Women, Sing Her Down, and the just-published Ecstasy, a reimagined contemporary feminist horror story hailed by the Washington Post as a "stiletto-sharp remake of Euripides."

She is also the co-author of The New York Times best-selling middle-grade Epoca fantasy series, created by the late basketball legend Kobe Bryant and written under the name Ivy Claire.

Her books have been awarded the L.A. Times Book Prize, the 2018 Strand Critics Award for Best Novel and the Prix Page America in France, and she has been a finalist for the prestigious Edgar Award.

A former collegiate and professional squash player, Ivy has led a creative writing workshop in Skid Row, Los Angeles, and is currently a professor of creative writing at the University of California Riverside-Palm Desert low-residency MFA program.

Writing fiction and playing squash are a lot alike, she says. "Both teach self-reliance and self-motivation. And both practice deception."

Learn more about Ivy Pochoda:

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• Twitter
• Pochoda's appearance on Writer's Bone

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