Community of Writers Podcasts

Welcome to the Podcast feed for the 2026 Summer Workshops in Olympic Valley. This week, we will upload daily craft talks, panels and readings as they happen. Be sure to subscribe to our feed to receive all recordings automatically. 

Music: Hot Nights by DreamAudio

The views expressed in this program are those of its presenter and guests, and do not necessarily reflect the values of the Community of Writers or its Board of Directors.

Welcome to the Podcast feed for the 2026 Summer Workshops in Olympic Valley. This week, we will upload daily craft talks, panels and readings as they happen. Be sure to subscribe to our feed to receive all recordings automatically. A full schedule of events can be found at communityofwriters.org.

Music: Hot Nights by DreamAudio

The views expressed in this program are those of its presenter and guests, and do not necessarily reflect the values of the Community of Writers or its Board of Directors.

The views expressed in this program are those of its presenter and guests, and do not necessarily reflect the values of the Community of Writers or its Board of Directors.

My guest this week is Irena Smith,  the author of a defining, or perhaps further defining memoir from a writer, memoirist and raconteur whose storytelling accommodates or contextualizes nearly any circumstance, and bring insight, humor, and welcome complication. In her latest, Smith chronicles an unlikely if completely, joyfully contrived road trip up and down the California coast with her mother and her daughter, adding to the itinerary family history, politics, books, popular culture, Greek myth, scholarship, sociology, language and the series The White Lotus.  The book is Troika: Three Generations, Three Days & a Very American Road Trip. Irena Smith is the author of a previous bestselling memoir, The Golden Ticket: A Life in College Admissions Essays. That book demystified if also critiqued the college admissions process and asked big questions about the nature of striving, success, and learning, all using the thoughtful conceit of responding to those weird application essay prompts, which assume so much and often frighten students. Troika relies on an appreciation, a celebration writing and idiom, language and vocabulary. It doesn’t hurt that Smith is also an expert on Greek mythology, and along the way, teaches us bits of Soviet Russian culture, literature, and language. She is hilarious and ironic in the way, perhaps necessarily embraced by many immigrants to the United States, an ex-stranger in a still very strange land.

Music: Hot Nights by DreamAudio

The views expressed in this program are those of its presenter and guests, and do not necessarily reflect the values of the Community of Writers or its Board of Directors.

Anticipating our Summer Workshops in Fiction, Nonfiction and Memoir, we will be sharing some of our favorite talks from past summers for the next few weeks. This week: 'Three Voices on Voice' a panel from the 2021 Summer Workshops in the Virtual Valley with Dana Johnson, Peter Orner and Andrew Tonkovich. 

Music: Hot Nights by DreamAudio

The views expressed in this program are those of its presenter and guests, and do not necessarily reflect the values of the Community of Writers or its Board of Directors.

The views expressed in this program are those of its presenter and guests, and do not necessarily reflect the values of the Community of Writers or its Board of Directors.

Anticipating our Summer Workshops in Fiction, Nonfiction and Memoir, we will be sharing some of our favorite talks from past summers for the next few weeks. This week: 'About the About' by Amy Tan. 

Music: Hot Nights by DreamAudio

The views expressed in this program are those of its presenter and guests, and do not necessarily reflect the values of the Community of Writers or its Board of Directors.

The views expressed in this program are those of its presenter and guests, and do not necessarily reflect the values of the Community of Writers or its Board of Directors.

My guest this week is Lisa K. Richter, who has written an elegant multi-form memoir meets biography, a book constructed in a series of short, impressionist, lyrical recollections and insights, portraits and meditations, all with music in the background and, indeed, in the foreground. In Fly, My Darling, Richter both condenses and expands, simultaneously, on an unlikely love story, one so meaningful and transformative that perhaps this multi-form collage of document, journal, poetry, family history and grief chronicle --- and again, always with music --- could be told only and most vividly in gorgeous fragments which, finally, in their combining, produce a full, rich portrait of both self and subject.

It’s the story of Lisa Richter and Lynda Roth, of a piano student and her teacher, of lovers, of a caregiver and the commitments demanded of love. Finally, the book esteems and celebrates the lost lover and, in its telling, introduces us to a writer who has used everything she has to find her own art and identity.

Music: Hot Nights by DreamAudio

The views expressed in this program are those of its presenter and guests, and do not necessarily reflect the values of the Community of Writers or its Board of Directors.

My guests this week have not made books, they have helped make history. They are academic workers. Yes, this is ostensibly a literary arts show but Bibliocracy often features discussion with activists, teachers, researchers, cultural critics, and historians.  Lately I’ve featured experts on so-called AI in education, and on labor justice in higher education.  Indeed, the motto of my own higher ed labor union is, instructively, (pun intended),“Our working conditions are our students’ learning conditions.”  Today’s show speaks, loudly, to what that means by way of a recent and historic victory by the United Auto Workers union, which represents higher ed workers at the University of California, one of the state’s biggest employers. At the same time, I am pleased to recommend a new title out from PM Press, Out of the Lab, Into the Streets.  It is an oral history of the historic —- and winning! —- 2022 high ed union contract campaign for Academic Student Employees at the University of California and offers an occasion to speak with two union comrades, academic professionals with impressive bios as scholars and teachers and, yes, as activists, Kerri McCanna and Kien Le.

Music: Hot Nights by DreamAudio

The views expressed in this program are those of its presenter and guests, and do not necessarily reflect the values of the Community of Writers or its Board of Directors.

My guest this week in part two of a two-part show is Christopher Mathias, a journalist with a long career of covering the far right, including at HuffPost, The Guardian, MSNBC and Zeteo. His investigative reporting has charted the role of racist and often violent nativist groups like the Proud Boys in the politics and policies of the GOP. He’s out now with a remarkable book titled To Catch a Fascist: The Fight to Expose the Radical Right which profiles the covert work of anti-fascist activists by way of a definitional history, case studies and a review of the tactics and traditions of the reactionary, racist, right from the Ku Klux Klan to the present, and perhaps most helpfully, their place in Trumpworld. In addition to charting the work of individual and organized anti-fascists, it presents a parallel narrative of the absurdly cartoonish if violent and dangerous work of multiple fascist groups in the context of the cartoonish, violent and dangerous ascendency of the Trumpist Republican Party.  To Catch a Fascist, out from Atria Books, is not just a sociological study, current affairs book, and a corrective to the mainstream narrative but an exciting, engaging and dramatically rendered adventure story too. In this half hour we talk about the ethical code of anti-fascist political work, about the successful outing of dozens of organized radical right members, and Mathias’s own personal bravery in documenting these struggles. 

Music: Hot Nights by DreamAudio

The views expressed in this program are those of its presenter and guests, and do not necessarily reflect the values of the Community of Writers or its Board of Directors.

My guest this week is Terese Svoboda, author of two dozen books, in addition to short stories, poems, journalism, with work in The Atlantic, Slate, the New Yorker and the Santa Monica Review.  She has won multiple literary prizes, and is a three-time winner of the New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship.  Svoboda has written for and produced documentary film and wrote the libretto for the opera Wet, which premiered at LA’s Disney Hall. Svoboda’s engagement with so many stories, forms, and genres is both chronicled and exemplified in her latest, Hitler & My Mother-in-Law, gorgeously connected fragments, episodes, anecdotes, scenes and lots and lots of research, assembled ostensibly as an investigation into the life and career of Svoboda’s one-time mother in law,  the trailblazing journalist Patricia Lochridge, whose life is quite impressively unbelievable --- in so many ways --- but the book is also an examination of what and how we believe, and who tells stories anyway, not to mention a memoir of author Terese Svoboda herself.

Music: Hot Nights by DreamAudio

The views expressed in this program are those of its presenter and guests, and do not necessarily reflect the values of the Community of Writers or its Board of Directors.

My guest this week is Stephen Cooper, the leading biographer, scholar, and booster of the writer John Fante. He is winner of an NEA for his fiction, a filmmaker, and creative writing teacher at CSULB for many years.  He is the author of Full of Life: A Biography of John Fante, a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year and cowrote and produced the Netflix Original Documentary Struggle: The Life and Lost Art of Szukalski. 

Cooper writes remarkable short stories, fiction which has appeared widely, including in The ThreePenny Review, American Fiction and the Santa Monica Review. Now ten of his short stories are collected in a volume titled River of Angels, out from the literary collective What Books Press --- the river being both metaphorical and very real indeed and the angels being human or imagined or fallen if always redeemable. This is a gorgeous and defining collection with a cover by legendary artist Gronk.

Music: Hot Nights by DreamAudio

The views expressed in this program are those of its presenter and guests, and do not necessarily reflect the values of the Community of Writers or its Board of Directors.