Community of Writers Podcasts

Welcome to the Podcast feed for the 2025 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 here: https://communityofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/2025-WW-Public-Events-Schedule-scaled.jpg

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.

Welcome to the Podcast feed for the 2025 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 here: https://communityofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/2025-WW-Public-Events-Schedule-scaled.jpg

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.

Welcome to the Podcast feed for the 2025 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 here: https://communityofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/2025-WW-Public-Events-Schedule-scaled.jpg

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.

Welcome to the Podcast feed for the 2025 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 here: https://communityofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/2025-WW-Public-Events-Schedule-scaled.jpg

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.

This week: L. Annette Binder, the author of the short story collection Rise, winner of the Mary McCarthy Prize, and the novel The Vanishing Sky.  Now she’s out with a small, personal, if emotionally, scientifically, poetically encyclopedic book, a meditation exploring her late mother’s dementia. Titled Child of Earth and Starry Heaven, it’s a biography of a person and of a disease, an investigation of Alzheimer’s, and a daughter’s chronicle of attention and care. Part journal, part meditation, part scholarship, this is a multi-form and well-researched account of what Binder learned about the disease, her mother, and herself, and a generous gift to others.

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.

This week: journalist and poet Adolfo Guzman-Lopez, out with a collection decades in the making. Published by Hinchas Press, he joins me this week to read from and talk about California Southern: Writing from the Road 1992-2025. Longtime radio reporter for LAist (89.3 FM in Southern California), Guzman-Lopez is a chronicler of the personal and political, a civic witness and a cultural guide with a multi-lingual voice and perspective full of empathy, insight, humor, and wisdom. A founder of the Taco Shop Poets and writer/producer of the podcast The Forgotten Revolutionary, this autobiographical poetry project assembled by Guzman-Lopez tells the life stories of not just one witness to our civic life but stories of individuals, communities, and movements. 

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.

Emily Greenberg joins us this week. She is the author of a debut short story collection, Alternative Facts, one of the most remarkable literary, political, and sociologically urgent --- not to mention funny and smart --- books I’ve read lately. Inspired in part by the writing of Thomas Pynchon, by what passes for reality, and offering a media and political critique of our post-truth moment, it’s if the Zeitgeist had offered Greenberg a writing prompt, to which she carefully, elegantly, almost scientifically responded. In seven short stories, we are reminded of and challenged to reconsider “real” people and events, including Kellyanne Conway, George W. Bush, B.F Skinner, and the false emergency alert of a nuclear attack on Hawaii. Her work has appeared widely.  Lately Greenberg compiles the online “Lest We Forget the Horrors” series for McSweeney’s.

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.

This week: Acclaimed poet Amy Gerstler, author of 11 collections including Scattered at Sea, long-listed for the National Book Award and Creature, a New York Times Notable Book. Amy Gerstler’s newest book is out, a collection titled Is This My Final Form?, a funny, smart, polemical engagement or perhaps demand that we “keep walking,” keep living, keep noticing, keep evolving, keep celebrating. Of the three dozens poems collected here, some appeared originally in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Columbia Poetry Review and Mississippi Review.  The book is out now --- happy spring! --- from Penguin and includes many forms --- odes, sonnets, and even a long poem which announces itself as a one-act play. I’m pleased that she reads half a dozen poems from the book for us. 

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.

This episode contains both parts of a two-part show featuring novelist and short story writer Sameer Pandya on his newest novel, Our Beautiful Boys.  It is receiving enthusiastic reviews as well as both popular and critical attention. Pandya’s cultural criticism has appeared widely, including in the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Atlantic, Salon, and Sports Illustrated. Our Beautiful Boys is a simultaneously insightful sociological study and tantalizing mystery story set in an affluent community where football, family, social media, status, ethnicity, teenage jargon and identity offer clues meant to explore conflict and consider ethical behavior, easy expectations and difficult, complicated realities. With humor and empathy, and sharp insights into class and culture, Our Beautiful Boys is an unsparing if also empathetic study of aspiration, hypocrisy, and the struggles which some adults seem to pass on to their children. 

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 is Andrew Nicholls. He's written extensively for television print and stage, and produced both a memoir and a how-to comedy writing book. Now he’s out with a long poem on the making of filmmaker Werner Hertzog’s film Fitzcarraldo titled As Man is to God: A Poem on the Making of Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo. 

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.