In this episode – recorded live at the 2025 Writers Conference – I have an intimate conversation, in front of 1500 people, with the novelist and poet Ocean Vuong. When he was two years old, in 1990, Ocean immigrated with his family from Vietnam. They settled in East Hartford, CT, seven relatives sharing a one-bedroom apartment. His mother worked at a nail salon. When Ocean learned to read at 11, he became the first literate member of his family. Then he became the first to attend college, eventually earning an MFA in writing from NYU. In 2016, he published his debut poetry collection, “Night Sky with Exit Wounds,” which drew immediate attention and acclaim.

In 2019, his first autobiographical novel, “On Earth We’re Briefly

Photo credit – Tom Hines

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

During his tenure as the Surgeon General of the United States, Dr. Vivek Murthy became, in effect, our national healer. In a soft but strong voice, he spoke about the country’s maladies like addiction, depression, and violence, and he made the passionate case that loneliness was the contributor to many of those ills, including our over-dependence on social media. That message is at the heart of his book, Together: The Healing Power of Human Connection. In this episode and in conversation with Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author Andrea Elliott, Dr. Murthy talks about the book, about his own bouts of loneliness, and how we can each learn to be a healer in our own lives.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Margaret Atwood—author of more than 60 books in almost every conceivable genre, recipient of more than 100 literary prizes—is a global icon. Like Kafka and Orwell before her, she and her writing have become part of the public discourse, wherever we live and whatever our age. Her intelligence is that vital and exacting, her wit that mischievous, her concerns – feminism, environmentalism, dystopian societies – that urgently relevant. The author is fond of quoting a Polish resistance fighter from the Second World War who once told her: “Pray that you will never have the occasion to be a hero.” As it’s turned out, in her long and singular literary career, Margaret Atwood has indeed had the occasion to be a hero, numerous times, and always risen to the moment. After receiving the 2024 Sun Valley Writers Conference Writer in the World Prize, she spoke to Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Ayad Akhtar about her life, her work, and some of the wonders and terrors of the world we are living in.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

No U.S. secretary of state ever achieved such celebrity while in office as Henry Kissinger; immersed in the philosophy of Kant and the diplomacy of Metternich, he was hailed as one of the most important strategic thinkers America has ever produced. Yet no former secretary of state has been more vehemently criticized, most notably for sins of omission and commission in countries such as Bangladesh, Cambodia, Chile and East Timor. In this episode – recorded live at the 2024 Writers Conference – renowned historian NIALL FERGUSON, now completing the second of his two-volume biography of Kissinger, talks to New Yorker staff writer and National Book Award-winning author EVAN OSNOS about his subject’s complicated legacy and considers what he might have made of our current foreign policy landscape.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, recorded live at the 2024 conference, biographer Jonathan Eig talks about his book on Martin Luther King, Jr., the first major biography of the civil rights leader in decades. Eig resurrects King from myth and history and brings him to vivid life, with all of his emotional complexity and unwavering courage, drawing a fresh and indelible portrait of a man whom he justifiably calls one of America’s founding fathers.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode of Beyond the Page, lucky listener, you get to hear the great Judy Blume, the author of twenty-five books for young readers and four novels for adults that all-told have sold more than 90 million copies in forty languages. Blume’s cherished, ground-breaking 1970 young adult novel, Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret, has captivated and enlightened girls (and boys, and their parents) for 55 years and counting. I, for one, read it when I was 10, and it – along with about half a dozen other classic Blume titles – basically taught me everything I know, to this day, about girls and growing up. So consider me yet one more reader for whom Judy Blume was, and remains, a true literary rock star. Here she is, recorded live at the 2024 Writers Conference, in conversation with her friend JEFFREY BROWN of the PBS NewsHour.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, recorded live at the 2024 Writers Conference, I sit down with bestselling crime novelist and TV writer/producer DENNIS LEHANE for a lively, wide-ranging conversation about how he approaches writing books vs. television scripts, his advice for writing true crime stories, as well as his journey developing his two latest AppleTV limited series, Black Bird and the upcoming Firebug, both starring Taron Egerton. Lehane is that rare novelist who has found acclaim and a large audience both in fiction and on the screen. A handful of his novels have been made into excellent films – Mystic River, Gone Baby Gone, and Shutter Island, to name a few – and in recent years he has become a much in-demand television creator and showrunner, a role that first began for him two decades ago, when he joined the now-famous Season 4 writers room on David Simon’s iconic show The Wire.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We were already editing this episode when the L.A. fires broke out on January 7, 2025. In fact, our editor Dean Grinsfelder had to evacuate as the flames moved in. So did my 91-year-old dad, and so did my co-producer James Tooley’s parents and brothers and their families; one of those brothers saw his house burn to the ground.

All of which is to say, I guess, that podcasts, though they live in the ether, don’t exist in a vacuum, and neither do we. We’re all connected.

And so, while those impacted by the LA fires regroup and recover, we want to share an important story – recorded live at the 2024 Conference – about another, eerily similar and catastrophic fire that was the centerpiece of journalist John Vaillant’s award-winning book Fire Weather.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, recorded live at the 2024 Sun Valley Writers' Conference, novelist Kristin Hannah talks to Jenny Emery Davidson, the executive director of The Community Library in Ketchum, Idaho, about her #1 New York Times bestselling novel The Women. In The Women, Hannah (known for previous bestselling historical novels such as The Nightingale, The Great Alone, and The Four Winds) takes up the Vietnam epic and re- centers the story on the experience of the military nurses who worked under fire, on bases and in field hospitals throughout the war, but whose sacrifice and commitment to their country has all too often been forgotten. Like so many male soldiers of the time, Frankie McGrath, the novel’s heroine, finds herself overwhelmed by the chaos and destruction of war, as well as the unexpected trauma of coming home to a changed and politically divided America.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In a time of loneliness and isolation, social rupture and alienation, what will it take to mend our broken hearts and rebuild our society? In this episode, one of Ameriica’s leading rabbis, and the author of the book The Amen Effect, Sharon Brous makes the case that it is through honoring our most basic human instinct – the yearning for real connection – that we reawaken our shared humanity and begin to heal. In a conversation with legendary bookseller Mitchell Kaplan recorded live at the 2024 Writers Conference, Brous pairs heart-driven anecdotes from her experience building and pastoring to a leading-edge faith community over the past two decades with ancient Jewish wisdom and contemporary science. Hers is a clarion call: the sense of belonging engendered by our genuine presence is not only a social and biological need, but a moral and spiritual necessity.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices