AWM Author Talks

Today, in recognition of Indigenous Peoples Day, we talk with Native poets and performing artists Frank Waln and Tanaya Winder, who will also play some of their powerful music.

We hope you enjoy entering the mind of a writer. Listen to more episodes here.

“I really believe in helping people heal through the power of love and I try to infuse anything I write -- whether it’s poetry, nonfiction, music -- into that.”

“We started writing poetry to process the world, and kind of as an act of survival. When our backs were against the wall and we were growing up in the aftermath of genocide and facing things like depression and historical trauma and PTSD and suicide, poetry and expressing ourselves through those words helped us get through that.”

“I play a few instruments. Music was always an escape for me, a safe space for me, as was reading and writing. But music was my language.”

“I was taught as a Lakota person, time is fluid for my people and when you tell stories and sing songs you can time travel. So I really believe that through art and through healing ourselves we can heal our ancestors and we can heal some of those wounds that our ancestors took to the grave.”

“We’re here because of love. We’ve survived genocide because of love. So I’m trying to cling to that love to get us through the aftermath of that genocide.”

This week, AWM Facilities Supervisor, Cristina Carrera, chats with former U.S. Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera about his new collection Every Day We Get More Illegal.

We hope you enjoy entering the mind of a writer. Find more podcast episodes here.

“Instead of more openness, the doors seem to be bigger and tighter and more locked up, in more ways than one. So I wanted to think about that and I want to have the readers and everyone reflect on those things. What kind of nation are we? What is America? Who are we?”

“I write everyday...and scribble. Don’t think I write these big papers everyday. I just scribble, put a few words on paper and just follow those words.”

“Actions can be illegal, perhaps. But how can people be illegal? That’s reducing. When we call someone illegal we’re reducing that human being into a phrase on a piece of paper. And a human being is not a phrase on a piece of paper. A human being is a beautiful being, with many dimensions.”

“If you don’t see a stop sign, don’t create one for yourself. Explore. That’s what we are as writers, we’re explorers.”

“What is reality? It has pain, suffering, joy, happiness, many cultures, many languages, many religions, many people...it has all that. So a full human being embraces the entire world, all of humanity. And then you’ll feel what happiness really is.”

This week, AWM Assistant Director of Programming and Education, Sonal Shukla, chats with Adrianna Cuevas, debut author of the middle grade fantasy novel The Total Eclipse of Nestor Lopez.

We hope you enjoy entering the mind of a writer. Find more episodes here.

“I pretty much live in my own head most of the time, so surrounding myself with my imagination and writing helps me get it all out.”

“It was my way to honor my family and my history, especially as someone who’s first-generation. When my family left Cuba they couldn’t bring anything with them. So the things that we have preserving our history are our language, which I shoved in the book; food, recipes, which I shoved in the book; and then the stories we’ve told each other.”

“It makes a big difference that we do have such a wide variety in kid lit of identities shown and expressed because I think it helps kids realize that reading and stories can be for everybody. And then it helps them feel like the story’s more real.”

“I love middle grade because I love that age. They’re just a lot of fun to not only write for but to talk about writing with because they haven’t yet learned to censor themselves so anything goes. And I just think that’s great.”

“As an author you want to write characters that can make real by making them fully-formed, so you want to make them multidimensional...I think it’s really important as a writer that you try to create a whole character and not let one identity just be the one that drives them.”

We continue celebrating National Hispanic Heritage Month this week with singer-songwriter Louie Pérez, lead singer of Los Lobos, who chats with radio broadcaster Catalina Maria Johnson about his work and writing.

We hope you enjoy entering the mind of a writer. Listen to all podcast episodes here.

“Everything I’ve written has always come from the experiences I had growing up. You know, I couldn’t write about Brentwood. Or Beverly Hills. All I can write about is East LA and the experiences I had growing up there.”

“There’s something about how your direct experience and your personal emotions can actually translate into other people’s lives. And that’s what I took on as a job as a songwriter.”

“If I knew I was gonna live this long I would’ve bought more socks.”

“There isn’t anything really specific about anything, it’s all subjective in a way. The things that make us happy are usually kind of relative to what’s going on in our lives.”

“I wrote in a universal way so that if I’m talking about the wrong side of the tracks, it could be in East Los Angeles, it could be in Kansas City, it could be anywhere so that people can relate to certain things. That’s what I set out to do and I hope I accomplished it.”

This week, AWM President Carey Cranston sits down with bestselling author and immigrant rights advocate Julissa Arce to kick off National Hispanic Heritage Month.

We hope you enjoy entering the mind of a writer. Listen to more episodes here.

“I’ve been very motivated and very inspired by young undocumented people now who are out fighting for their rights and are chanting, ‘Undocumented! Unafraid!’... When I was a teenager I did not have that power to say those things. I was very much afraid.”

“I had always wanted to write and I had a really important story to tell, which is my story, my truth...I really needed to share my story. I can’t keep holding on to this.”

“I did it all. Learned English, got a college degree, got a great job, paid taxes -- because undocumented people pay taxes. I mean I did everything and still it wasn’t enough. It just felt like the goal line was always moving, constantly moving.”

“When I was growing up I never read a book that had a Latina protagonist. And especially I never read a book about an udocumented girl, ever. That made me feel really lonely because I just didn’t think my story was important because nobody was telling this story. And so I thought, if I can make a difference in just one child’s life because they read my book and something in my story resonates with them and they’re able to connect with it, then they can know that their stories are so important that people are writing books about them.”

“I’ve always had really great examples of strong women in my life...My family has always been one of matriarchs and they always really encouraged me to be who I wanted to be.”

This week, AWM President Carey Cranston sits down with author and historian Michelle Duster who discusses the indelible impact and lasting legacy of her great-grandmother, Ida B. Wells.

We hope you enjoy entering the mind of a writer. Listen to more episodes here.

“[Wells] felt the need to write her own autobiography because she was concerned that the work that she did would sort of be marginalized. So I really appreciate the fact that she decided to take control over her own story and her own narrative and chronicle it herself.”

“Until we have a situation where there is truth and reality is represented in a way that is representative of the whole story of African-Americans, then we’re going to continue having these problems that we have in our country.”

“For the writing that [Wells] did to be relevant today, in a way shows how things haven’t changed as much as we would hope. But it also ties the past to the present and I think that’s important for people to understand, that what is going on today is a continuum of what was going on post-Civil War.”

“We are all descendants of the people who lived before us, so we are all affected by what happened before us.”

“A lot of times people look at these historic figures as these larger-than-life figures, and they are to some degree, but they’re also human. And they have vulnerabilities. And I think it’s important for people to be able to see the human side of them.”

This week, AWM Program Director Allison Sansone sits down with Isabel Ibañez to chat about her Bolivian heritage, writing process, and her debut Young Adult Fantasy novel Woven in Moonlight.

We hope you enjoy entering the mind of a writer. Listen to more episodes here.

“Home sort of felt like two places and I had to balance both of them. Those two identities, Isabel in Bolivia and then Isabel in the States, didn’t really converge until much later. Until I accepted both halves and accepted I am the daughter of immigrants and I am American but I am also Bolivian.”

“Every story matters and there’s room for all of them.”

“I’ve had family members who have gone onto the streets in Bolivia protesting and wanting a better future. And so, being here and not being able to be there, I wanted to write my own kind of protest, my own kind of rebellion.”

“I got reacquainted with the process and joy of writing a story, the love-hate relationship.”

“I think everybody wants to see themselves as a hero. And at least for me, I felt like if I’m writing this story someone else might read it with a similar upbringing—or a culture they can connect to because it’s adjacent—and think, ‘I feel so seen.’ There is something really neat about being able to read a story and connect and be able to say, ‘Wow, me too.’”

This week, we honor Ray Bradbury’s recent Centennial on August 22nd with more science fiction. The prolific writer John Scalzi talks about his novel The Consuming Fire, how he wrote it in just two weeks, and his affinity for wombats. Yes, wombats.

We hope you enjoy entering the mind of a writer. Listen to more episodes here.

“I do the majority of my writing in the shower.”

“One of the things they like to tell you about writers is that when a writer is looking out a window, they are writing. It’s not always true, sometimes we’re just looking at a squirrel.”

“Now when I’m writing everyday I use software to block out the internet because quite honestly I can’t help myself.”

“The muscle memory of writing novels was sufficiently advanced that things like pacing, things like ending chapters on cliff hangers, things like making sure the characters are responding believably to each other, those were all muscle memory.”

“So much of what is writing is, is sitting there, just thinking about things.”

This week, journalist Dan Sinker talks with Annalee Newitz about Annalee’s recent time-traveling, punk rock novel The Future of Another Timeline.

This is the second of four conversations with science fiction and fantasy writers in honor of Ray Bradbury’s Centennial on August 22. Admission to the AWM is also free of charge that day to celebrate Bradbury’s work and lasting legacy. Interested in more sci-fi talk? Listen to the previous episode with J. Michael Straczynski.

We hope you enjoy entering the mind of a writer. Listen to more episodes here.

"I wanted to tell a hopeful story. I wanted to tell a story about how people can suffer setbacks and really, really horrific things and still be resilient and still find allies and change things slightly for the better."

"Do you change history by getting a big group of people together to transform things, or can it be just like a dude comes along like Anthony Comstock and makes a bunch of laws?"

"Part of the book is sort of about what it’s like to have technology that’s so advanced that it’s part of nature and what happens when you have to kind of use nature as a machine. You can’t just dig the machine out and take it somewhere. It’s this piece of the earth’s crust."

"One of the conceits of the book is that it’s really hard to change history. If you go back and kill Hitler, you just get like Bitler or Zitler or Mitler because of the fact that Hitler represented a social movement. It wasn’t just the one guy, it was this whole movement of white supremacy and it wasn’t just gonna go away if you got rid of the one bad guy."

"There’s predators out there and sometimes you gotta stick your thumbs in their eyeballs."

In this episode, American Writers Museum Program Director Allison Sansone chats with renowned screenwriter and comics writer J. Michael Straczynski about his recent memoir Becoming Superman: My Journey from Poverty to Childhood.

We hope you enjoy entering the mind of a writer. Listen to more episodes here.

“There’s trying to dance, and there’s dancing. There’s trying to write, and there’s writing. Once it becomes effortless, once you get out of your own way and just let the writing happen, it becomes amazing. You don’t make art happen, you let art happen.”

“We all fall asleep in our own lives at some point, until something wakes us up: a marriage, a birth, a death, a diagnosis, and suddenly for the first time you're awake and alive in your own life. And that’s the moment you have to ask, is this what I really want to do?”

“The role of science fiction is to look over the horizon and ask, do you like what’s coming at you?"

“Every person in this room, everything you’ve gone through and experienced has created a lens in the middle of your forehead that nobody else has. No one else has that point of view. Which is why those of you who are aspiring writers yourselves must understand that if diamonds have value because they are rare, how much more rare is a point of view?”

“I don’t write, I transcribe. I open up a window and I see what the characters are doing and I write it down.”