Community of Writers Podcasts

Interviewing advice from someone who has been doing it for nearly fifty years.

BJ Robbins, Kirby Kim, and Michael Mungiello. Moderated by Katy Hays.

Reagan Arthur, Leland Cheuk, Jean Garnett, and Dan Lopez. Moderated by Michael Mungiello.

Lily Grimes (Faultline), Andrew Tonkovich (Santa Monica Review/Citric Acid), David Ulin (Air/Light), and Blaise Zerega (Alta Journal) discuss west coast literary journals.

Dana Johnson, Sameer Pandya and Gregory Spatz discuss the craft of the short story. Moderated by Tom Barbash.

Victoria Patterson kicks off day 2 of our writers' workshops in olympic valley with a talk on show vs. tell. 

Victoria Patterson’s latest story collection, The Secret Habit of Sorrow, was published in 2018. The critic Michael Schaub wrote: “There’s not a story in the book that’s less than great; it’s a stunningly beautiful collection by a writer working at the top of her game.” Her novel The Little Brother, which Vanity Fair called “a brutal, deeply empathetic, and emotionally wrenching examination of American male privilege and rape culture,” was published in 2015. She is also the author of the novels The Peerless Four and This Vacant Paradise, a 2011 New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice. Her story collection, Drift, was a finalist for the California Book Award and the Story Prize and was selected as one of the best books of 2009 by the San Francisco Chronicle. She currently teaches at Antioch University’s Master of Fine Arts program.

With Leslie Daniels, Leland Cheuk, Louis B. Jones, Andrew Tonkovich. Moderated by Victoria Patterson.

Jason Roberts, Janet Fitch, Karen Joy Fowler, and Gail Tsukiyama, moderated by Sands Hall.

The first craft talk of the 2024 Writers Workshops in Olympic Valley: Staff member and board member Margaret Wilkerson Sexton kicks off day 1 with a craft talk on writing a character's journey throughout a life: Writing Across Generations. Be sure to subscribe to our podcast feed to keep up with this summer's excellent programming, wherever you may be. Thanks for listening!

As a podcast special, we wanted to share the late Gill Dennis’s welcome address from 2014, ten years ago. Gill Dennis died less than a year later in May of 2015. He was an enormous part of our community for decades. Along with Tom Rickman, he founded and directed the Community of Writers Screenwriting Program. His screenwriting credits include Return to Oz, Walk the Line, and Forever.  He was Master Filmmaker in Residence at the American Film Institute Conservatory and won the LA Drama Critics Circle Award for Distinguished Direction in Theatre. He taught his “Finding the Story Workshop” at the Community of Writers for many years, which has lately been revived, and is now taught by Gill’s good friend Leslie Daniels. We are missing Gill this year, and remembering his wisdom, wit, and joyous presence as we approach the ten-year anniversary of his death. Please enjoy this podcast throwback to 2014, and remember to subscribe to our podcast feed on your favorite app to stay abreast of the goings on at this year’s Writers Workshops from Olympic Valley.