Babe Cave

Season five kicks off with Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke, and people are still mad about it. So, obviously, it had to be the first thing Amanda Polick talked about.

Amanda is joined by longtime friend of the show, Jacque, to talk about the novel that set the internet on fire this year. Natalie is a trad-wife influencer who wakes up in 1855 and has to actually live the life she's been selling online. It's weird, it's uncomfortable, and it made both of them furious in the best way.

They get into trad-wife culture, the manosphere, unlikable women, and why the people who hate this book might be proving its point. Amanda also shares what it was like to watch a real trad-wife speak at a conference this year, and how disorienting it was to not nod along with everyone else in the room.

Also in this episode:

• Why Natalie not having a redemption arc is actually the whole point
• The misinformation and performance baked into influencer culture — on and off the page
• The twist, the ending, and Caro's response to a very unhappy reader in her Instagram comments
• Jacque's wild plot theory that sends Amanda screaming

If you read it and had feelings, this one's for you. If you haven't read it yet, consider this your sign.

Spoiler warning: this episode discusses major plot points and the ending of Yesteryear.

Resources mentioned: Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke, Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn, James by Percival Everett, A Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swift, The End of the Story by Lydia Davis, House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski, Caro Claire Burke's Marie Claire Australia interview

Find Amanda: @amandapolick | amandapolick.com

Free 1-hour cookbook masterclass: Writing Gold

Season four is a wrap, and Amanda is taking the summer to go analog.

After eight months of taking on too much and being chronically online — including a day job that is literally social media marketing — she is ready to step back, create some white space, and remember what life felt like before the algorithm. This episode is part season finale, part personal manifesto, part permission slip.

In this episode:

• Why she's calling it an analog summer and what that has everything to do with becoming a better writer
• The advice Brand Builders Group gave to one of their clients about splitting attention across too many channels — and why it landed so hard
• What she wants season five to look like, including bringing back the book club and having the audacity to invite more guests
• The Annie F. Downs book that might be her whole summer reading plan
• Disposable cameras, needlepoint, a record player she needs to replace, and the whimsy she's been missing in her own home
• Why being present, having real conversations, and actually living your life is research — whether you know it or not

She's not disappearing. She's just going to be where her feet are for a while.

See you in season five.

Perfect for: anyone who's been a little too online lately and needed someone to say it out loud.

Find Amanda: @amandapolick | amandapolick.com

Books are having a moment on screen, and Amanda has thoughts — including that Greta Gerwig is going to direct her novel someday. Greta doesn't know this yet.

Hollywood has spent years refusing to greenlight anything without existing IP, which sounds like bad news until you realize that existing IP is exactly what a published book is. This episode is about why that matters for writers right now, and what it actually looks like when a book becomes a film.

In this episode:

• The Yesteryear deal: four studios bidding, 15 publishers competing, Anne Hathaway attached — and why that kind of buzz starts with the book
• What the self-described Book Whisperer of Hollywood says changed after Harry Potter and Twilight, including her advice to screenwriters to write the book first
• How options work, why most of them never become movies, and why that's not necessarily the tragedy it sounds like
• What you're actually giving up when you sign those rights over, and why having a good agent in the room matters more than people think
• Why the size of your fictional world determines whether it's a film or a TV series
• What Claire Cook said about showing up on the Must Love Dogs set to cheer, not to give notes — and why letting go of the book is part of the deal

The thing she keeps coming back to: AI can't write from the depths you can. Hollywood needs original stories. So does everyone else.

Perfect for: fiction writers who've pictured their book on a screen and wanted to know how that actually happens.

Find Amanda: @amandapolick | amandapolick.com

No gatekeeping allowed — and that includes yourself.

After leaving Jubilee feeling like the real conversations were happening somewhere else, Amanda found them at Copper Books' Book Fair in Nashville. One day, one room, and editors, agents, marketers, and publicists actually telling the truth about what's happening in publishing right now. She's bringing it back to you here, along with a moment of self-reckoning she didn't see coming.

In this episode:

• The honest state of nonfiction publishing right now: who's buying, who isn't, and where cookbooks actually land in that conversation
• Why a Simon & Schuster editor said one Substack subscriber is worth five to ten Instagram followers to a publisher, and what Amanda actually thinks about that
• What three publicity powerhouses said about in-house pub teams, and why authors who were promised the moon are learning the hard way to be their own best advocate
• Allison Trowbridge's reminder that if you have a book idea, you really have a business idea
• The moment she realized she'd been gatekeeping her own process, and why she's done with that
• Why the mysterious writer who disappears and reappears with a bestseller is almost never the rule

The finger, she admits, was pointing right back at her.

Perfect for: writers who want the inside conversation without having to buy the conference ticket, and anyone who's been holding their process a little too close to share.

Find Amanda: @amandapolick | amandapolick.com

Writer's block is real. Amanda Polick believes in it, and she's in it right now.

She's deep in revisions on her novel: the one she's been writing for years, the one she wrote 30,000 words of in the wrong direction in 2024, the one she finished a rough draft of last year that she's now going back through with brain fatigue and a spring that got away from her. Instead of hiding from it, she brought it here.

In this episode:

• The one-page flash fiction exercise that gets her out of her own head when she's too stuck to touch the actual manuscript
• Why she thinks she's lost the habit of romanticizing her writing process — and why she wants it back
• Olafur Arnalds, instrumental music, and the case for being bored more often
• What she's noticing in the novel she's currently reading about backstory dumps, exposition monologues, and the things she's actively trying not to do in her own book
• Why consuming the same content over and over is part of what creates the block in the first place
• The honest truth about writer's block: sometimes it's real, sometimes it's procrastination, and sometimes you just have to sit down and do the work anyway

Perfect for: writers in the thick of a long project who need someone to say out loud that it's hard, and anyone who's been calling it writer's block when they might just need to sit back down.

Find Amanda: @amandapolick | amandapolick.com

Cherry Bombe's Jubilee is the conference in THE food world. Amanda Polick has been before, took a few years off, and went back this year with an actual game plan and a lot of thoughts she's whispering to her friends later.

This episode is her honest debrief: what worked, what left her wanting more, and what she walked away with that had nothing to do with any of the panels.

In this episode:

• Why going in with a loose schedule and a short list of people she wanted to meet changed everything
• Her real talk on conference programming that stays too surface when the room is full of people who came for the inside baseball
• The Levain Bakery founders, copycat recipes, and the conversations she wished had gone deeper
• Why she cried meeting Grace Young and has zero regrets about it
• The follow-up moves that actually matter after a conference ends

The best thing she got out of Jubilee wasn't from the talks. It was the face-to-face time, texting new connections already, and the moment she shared her novel idea and watched people get chills.

Perfect for: food writers and creatives weighing whether a conference is worth it, and anyone who's left a big event feeling like they missed something and wanted someone to just say it.

Find Amanda: @amandapolick | amandapolick.com

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If you have a book idea, you really have a business idea.

That line — from publisher Allison Trowbridge at a Parnassus Books panel — is the jumping-off point for this episode. Amanda Polick gets into what it actually means to treat your writing life like a business: not in a hustle-culture, monetize-everything way, but in a packaging-yourself-correctly, knowing-what-you-bring-to-the-room way.

She's been doing her own reckoning with this lately — restarting after a year heads-down on her novel, going back to conferences, cold-emailing people, and asking herself how to pull together all the scattered pieces of a writing career into something coherent.

In this episode:

• Jane Friedman's The Business of Being a Writer and why Amanda tells every single client to get it
• Why writers being financially sustained by writing alone has always been the exception, not the rule — and what that actually frees you up to do
• The cold email formula that works almost every time, and why showing up in someone's inbox is more underrated than people think
• Why literary agents are now paying close attention to Substack — and why putting everything behind a paywall might be costing you more than it earns
• The Elizabeth Gilbert argument for not being afraid of people stealing your ideas (and Amanda's own version of it)
• How being a generous champion of other people's work is one of the highest-leverage things you can do for your career
• Lisa Kron, story consultants, and the reminder that you can just make up a job title and then do it

The through line: the best opportunities — the ones that actually move the needle — tend to happen in rooms, not on social media. And you have to be in the rooms first.

Perfect for: writers who are great at the craft and resistant to the business side of it, anyone trying to figure out how to package what they already do into something people will pay for, and creatives who know they need to be more visible but aren't quite sure where to start.

Find Amanda: @amandapolick | amandapolick.com

Here's your Apple Podcasts description:

If you have a book idea, you really have a business idea.

That line, from publisher Allison Trowbridge at a Paths to Publishing panel, is the jumping-off point for this episode. Amanda Polick gets into what it actually means to treat your writing life like a business: not in a hustle-culture, monetize-everything way, but in a packaging-yourself-correctly, knowing-what-you-bring-to-the-room way.

She's been doing her own reckoning with this lately — restarting after a year heads-down on her novel, going back to conferences, cold-emailing people, and asking herself how to pull together all the scattered pieces of a writing career into something coherent.

In this episode:

• Jane Friedman's The Business of Being a Writer and why Amanda tells every single client to get it
• Why writers being financially sustained by writing alone has always been the exception, not the rule...and what that actually frees you up to do
• The cold email formula that works almost every time, and why showing up in someone's inbox is more underrated than people think
• Why publishers are now paying close attention to Substack — and why putting everything behind a paywall might be costing you more than it earns
• The Elizabeth Gilbert argument for not being afraid of people stealing your ideas (and Amanda's own version of it)
• How being a generous champion of other people's work is one of the highest-leverage things you can do for your career
• Lisa Kron, story consultants, and the reminder that you can just make up a job title and then do it

The through line: the best opportunities — the ones that actually move the needle — tend to happen in rooms, not on social media. And you have to be in the rooms first.

Perfect for: writers who are great at the craft and resistant to the business side of it, anyone trying to figure out how to package what they already do into something people will pay for, and creatives who know they need to be more visible but aren't quite sure where to start.

Find Amanda: @amandapolick | amandapolick.com

Writing workshops: a combination of ritual scarring and group therapy — or the thing that actually made you a better writer? Amanda Polick is not sure it isn't both.

In this episode, Amanda digs into the history and honest reality of the writing workshop, whether creative writing can even be taught, and why she still has PTSD from the ones she's been in. She also revisits the Girls Iowa arc, which she maintains is the most accurate depiction of workshop culture ever put on television.

In this episode:

• The history of creative writing programs in America, from a Harvard drama workshop in 1906 to the GI Bill-fueled MFA explosion — and Iowa's official position that they had nothing to do with producing Flannery O'Connor, Kurt Vonnegut, and Ann Patchett
• Why Hannah Horvath's Iowa episodes still hold up: the rotted-teeth prodigy, the party meltdown, the non-apology letter, and the relief of almost getting kicked out
• Stephen King's argument that workshops force you to write with the door open when you need it closed
• The weekly writing exercise her professor assigned that genuinely changed how she wrote
• Why "a friend who loves reading" is not the same as a professional developmental editor

The bottom line on whether writing can be taught: good writers can be made better. But you still have to be obsessed with it first.

Perfect for: writers who've survived a workshop and want someone to commiserate with, anyone curious about MFA culture without wanting to take out the loans, and writers who have ever sat silently while strangers dismantled something they wrote.

Find Amanda: @amandapolick | amandapolick.com

Here's the full description:

What if the thing standing between you and your best work isn't a better template — it's not enough resistance?

Amanda Polick has been thinking about friction. Not the kind you eliminate, but the kind you seek out: the static electricity of doing hard things anyway, showing up when it's inconvenient, sitting with a sentence until it finally lands. This episode is a case for why writers who are obsessed with removing every obstacle from their process might be accidentally removing the thing that makes the work worth doing.

It starts with her handwriting, which has, by her own admission, become garbage. And it ends somewhere much bigger.

In this episode:

• A Dan Koe post on writing without AI, without templates, and without knowing what you're writing yet — and why it stopped her cold
• Why a template is only valuable after you've sent hundreds of terrible versions first, and what we lose when we skip that part
• What C.S. Lewis, dense reading, and the lost art of wrestling with a text have to do with becoming a better writer
• Why she deliberately packed her calendar to the point of hair-on-fire panic, and what she learned from it
• Poetry as a friction practice: sitting for hours with three sentences, waiting for the fourth to arrive
• The difference between doing something and doing it done well, and why writers who care about their work feel that gap viscerally

The question she's sitting with, and leaving with you, is this: what would it look like to let yourself be a little more uncomfortable? Not in a punishing way. In a this is where the real thing lives way.

Perfect for: writers at any stage who are reaching for a template when they should be reaching for a pen, creators who feel the pull toward easy and are suspicious of it, and anyone who's been wondering why the work feels hollow when it comes too fast.

Find Amanda: @amandapolick | amandapolick.com

Print never died. The people running it just stopped believing in it first.

Amanda Polick — former Cooking Light fellow, Time Inc. segment producer, and longtime magazine obsessive — makes the case for why the magazine revival isn't a nostalgia trip. It's a signal. And if you want to write a book, it might be the most important thing happening in media right now.

Amanda unpacks what the resurgence of publications like Saveur, the new Gourmet newsletter, and indie food zines like Tomato Tomato actually means for writers and why she's always believed that every book idea lives inside a magazine pitch.

In this episode:

• What Charles Dickens, Joan Didion, Maya Angelou, and Hunter S. Thompson all have in common (before the books came)
• What a 2025 Huck magazine piece gets exactly right about why print is culturally ascendant again — and why digital content has trained readers to distrust almost everything they skim
• The inside story of working at Cooking Light and Time Inc. during the era of rolling layoffs, sold buildings, and a podcast idea nobody wanted to greenlight
• Why magazine feature writing makes you a better book writer and why writing shorter is actually harder
• The Central Valley water story that taught her what deep reporting can do for fiction
• Three books worth tracking down if you want to get serious about long-form writing, plus a resource for finding editors who are actively looking for pitches right now

If you've been waiting for permission to fall back in love with writing long, or you've been circling a story idea you haven't known what to do with, this one is for you.

Resources mentioned: Tomato Tomato, the new Gourmet newsletter, Saveur, QWOTED, Will Write for Food by Dianne Jacob, Story by Jack Hart, The Essential Feature by Vicki Hay

Find Amanda: @amandapolick | amandapolick.com