My guest this week is journalist and author Susannah Cahalan. Susannah’s first book, "Brain on Fire," about her experiences with a very rare autoimmune disease that was misdiagnosed as mental illness, was a #1 NY Times bestseller, sold over a million copies, and was made into a Netflix original movie. Her second book, "The Great Pretender," was named a best book of 2020 by Time, The Guardian and The Sunday Times. And her newest book is "The Acid Queen," which tells the fascinating story of Rosemary Woodruff Leary, who is best known as the wife of LSD pioneer Timothy Leary, but who played a major role in bringing psychedelics into the mainstream.
NPR called Susannah "one of America's most courageous young journalists." She’s been profiled in the New York Times, featured as an answer on Jeopardy!, and appeared as a guest on The Today Show and Fresh Air, among many others.
What I loved most in this episode was hearing about how Susannah’s process has evolved from something that was very structured, even rigid, into something that’s way on the other end of the spectrum, that involves candles made by witches and doing what it takes to open up a “magical circle” where you can engage with the work on a deeper level.
We covered:
- The side effects of growing up in a house where the grown-ups read newspapers
- The gossip column she started for her high school paper
- Interning at The New York Post as a 17-year-old
- The rare autoimmune disease she experienced in her 20s that was initially misdiagnosed as mental illness, and the fascination with consciousness it fostered
- Adapting to the large amounts of time you spend alone as a writer
- Resisting the lure of spending too much time alone and in your head
- The mix of speaking, ghostwriting, and side projects that supplement the income she makes writing books
- Her biggest speaking fail
- Her transition from structured–even rigid–writing routines to something way more woo woo
- The steps she takes to open up a “magical circle” when it’s time to write
- The shop in New York City that she gets to create special candles for each project (I’m so in–check the show notes on Substack for a link)
- Why writing in the mornings and interviewing and editing in the afternoons works for her
Visit Susannah on Instagram @susannahcahalan or at susannhacahalan.com.
For full show notes with links to everything we discuss, plus bonus photos!, visit katehanley.substack.com.
Thank you for listening!

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Welcome back to the final installment of my interview with Debbie Urbanski, author of the novel “Afterworld,” in which an AI witnesses the last days of the last person on earth, and the story collection “Portalmania,” which combines sci-fi, horror, fantasy, and realism to explore a long list of juicy topics, including betrayal, revenge, parenthood, open marriages, asexuality, neurodiversity, and second chances.
We covered:
- Why she’s learning everything she can about caves, the deep ocean, and whales
- Exploring the things that scare her in her writing
- Looking to writers who let themselves experiment and change over time as role models
- The book she’s read multiple times that gives her the courage to keep experimenting
- Sensing that the themes she wants to explore are changing as she enters a new life stage
- The series she’s re-watching and the graphic novel that was so beautiful, she had to force herself to slow down while reading
- The YouTube video that captures the creative process in real time and gets her fired up to write
- Why Fridays are the best day
Follow Debbie on Instagram and/or Substack @debbieurbanski
For full show notes with links to everything we discuss, plus bonus photos!, visit katehanley.substack.com.
Thank you for listening!

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My guest this week is Debbie Urbanski, whose writing focuses on the intersections of horror, fantasy, science fiction, memoir, and often the planet. Her debut novel, “Afterworld,” narrates the last days of the last human on Earth's life, as told by an AI. It was named a best book of the year by the San Francisco Chronicle and the Los Angeles Times. Her newest book is “Portal Mania”, a collection of short stories that use a combination of sci-fi, fantasy, horror, and realism to ask, If you could go anywhere, where would you go? And what happens to the people you leave behind?
We covered:
- The literary journal acceptance that made Debbie feel like, “I think I could do this [whole writing thing]”
- Figuring out what to do after you meet your writing goals
- How Instagram has been a useful tool for building a community of writers
- Figuring out which social media platforms are helpful for you
- How studying poetry makes writing novels harder–and marketing easier
- The business she and her husband run that provides steady income
- What she’s learning about writing from Alfred Hitchcock
- The daily schedule she tries to stick to
- The genres she’s reading for inspiration
- The standing desk, stacks of print outs, and nap strategy she uses to get her writing done
Follow Debbie on Instagram and/or Substack @debbieurbanski
For full show notes with links to everything we discuss, plus bonus photos!, visit katehanley.substack.com.
Thank you for listening!

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My guest this week is Debbie Urbanski, whose writing focuses on the intersections of horror, fantasy, science fiction, memoir, and often the planet. Her debut novel, “Afterworld,” narrates the last days of the last human on Earth's life, as told by an AI. It was named a best book of the year by the San Francisco Chronicle and the Los Angeles Times. Her newest book is “Portal Mania”, a collection of short stories that use a combination of sci-fi, fantasy, horror, and realism to ask, If you could go anywhere, where would you go? And what happens to the people you leave behind?
We covered:
- The literary journal acceptance that made Debbie feel like, “I think I could do this [whole writing thing]”
- Figuring out what to do after you meet your writing goals
- How Instagram has been a useful tool for building a community of writers
- Figuring out which social media platforms are helpful for you
- How studying poetry makes writing novels harder–and marketing easier
- The business she and her husband run that provides steady income
- What she’s learning about writing from Alfred Hitchcock
- The daily schedule she tries to stick to
- The genres she’s reading for inspiration
- The standing desk, stacks of print outs, and nap strategy she uses to get her writing done
Follow Debbie on Instagram and/or Substack @debbieurbanski
For full show notes with links to everything we discuss, plus bonus photos!, visit katehanley.substack.com.
Thank you for listening!

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Welcome to the final installment of my interview with Beth Macy, award-winning and New York Times bestselling author of “Factory Man,” “Dopesick,” and her newest book, “Paper Girl,” which uses a blend of memoir and reporting to examine the rural-urban divide through the lens of her hometown of Urbana, Ohio.
Beth was the first in her family to go to college, an event that drastically changed and maybe even saved her life. She's gone on to become a Guggenheim fellow and a Nieman fellow for journalism at Harvard.
In today’s episode we find out what Beth knows at this moment about where her personal throughline is leading her next. And I ask her my fast final five questions about what she's reading, watching, listening to, and fantasizing about eating.
We cover:
- Why she’s feeling called to activism
- How she patched things up with her brother, who’s on the other end of the political divide
- Robert Guy, the Kentucky writer whom Beth considers her “Appalachian sensei”
- The Netflix show “about England before it was England” her hairdresser told her about that she loved
- Palmyra, her younger son’s band that’s touring–keep an eye out!
Connect with Beth on Bluesky and/or Instagram @bethmacy.
For full show notes with links to everything we discuss, plus bonus photos!, visit katehanley.substack.com.
Thank you for listening!
And thanks to this week’s sponsor, Air Doctor Pro. Visit airdoctorpro.com and use code KATE to save 30% off an amazing indoor air filter *and* receive a free three-year warranty (an $84 value).

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Welcome to the second part of my interview with award-winning journalist Beth Macy, author of the brand new book “Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America” about how politics has divided her hometown of Urbana, Ohio and even her own family. It’s a hard, heart-stirring read for anyone who wonders, “How did we get here? And how can we come back together.”
Beth is also the author of “Dopesick” about the about the opioid crisis–which was also turned into an Emmy-award winning Hulu series–and “Factory Man” about how the effects of globalization have taken a toll on small rural communities.
In this episode, we get into some of the thornier questions about writing, especially writing about polarizing topics–including family.
We cover:
- Why she makes it a point to include humor even in the darkest stories she tells (like babies being born addicted to opiates)
- Keeping her mom’s spirit alive by writing about her in “Paper Girl”
- How interviewing her ex-boyfriend for “Paper Girl” flew right past awkward and into threatening–and how she dealt with it
- What she does to get through those “what do I do now??” moments
- How her husband helped her find the opening scene to “Dopesick”
- Her recently acquired skill of consulting “future Beth” when anxiety starts creeping in
- Her best interviewing question that she got from Denzel Washingon
- The one rule of newspaper reporting she thinks is total B.S.--and how she got around it without breaking it, directly, when she was on staff at the Roanoke Times
Connect with Beth on Bluesky and/or Instagram @bethmacy.
For full show notes with links to everything we discuss, plus bonus photos!, visit katehanley.substack.com.
Thank you for listening!
And thanks to this week’s sponsor, Air Doctor Pro. Visit airdoctorpro.com and use code KATE to save 30% off an amazing indoor air filter *and* receive a free three-year warranty (an $84 value).

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

My guest this week is Beth Macy, the award-winning author of three New York Times bestselling books that examine rural communities left behind by corporate greed and political indifference.
Beth's first book, “Factory Man”, explored the aftermath of globalization on rural communities and won a J. Anthony Lucas Prize. “Dopesick,” her investigation of the opioid crisis, won an LA Times Book Prize and was described as “a masterwork of narrative nonfiction” by the New York Times. (It was also made into a Peabody- and Emmy-award winning Hulu series starring Michael Keaton.)
Her newest book, “Paper Girl,” has just been released and is a combination of memoir and reported analysis of the rural-urban divide told through the lenses of backward mobility, political polarization, and the decimation of local news. Beth lives in Roanoke, Virginia.
We covered:
- How politics divided her family, and the skills she used to write a book about it
- How a Pell grant helped Beth out of poverty, into college, and ultimately into a career in journalism
- Publishing her first book at age fifty
- Why writing books is easier than writing for a newspaper
- Her telltale signs for when she’s stumbled on a good story
- Getting through the big-city gatekeepers to tell stories of small towns
- Why the collapse of local news and public education are playing such a huge role in making us so polarized
- How policy changes shape our everyday reality
- Using personal deadlines as an “anxiety-management tool”
- How clustering tasks–such as reporting, interviewing, writing, and editing helps give structure to a long-term deadline
Connect with Beth on Bluesky and/or Instagram @bethmacy.
For full show notes with links to everything we discuss, plus bonus photos!, visit katehanley.substack.com.
Thank you for listening!
And thanks to this week’s sponsor, Aqua Tru. Visit aquatru.com and use code KATE to save 20% off a great countertop reverse osmosis water filter that I have been using and loving for years now. Comes with a 1-year warranty and a 30-day money back guarantee.

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In the final part of my interview with maritime history author Eric Jay Dolin, we get a tantalizing look at his next book, which he's working on now, about a shipwreck in the Pacific that involves a clash of East and West.
We also covered:
- Why his kids hate going to museums with him
- Using a desire to travel as motivation for selling more books
- The PBS show Eric considers comfort viewing
- Why Friday is the perfect day
- The bachelor meal he makes whenever his wife is out of town
Visit Eric at ⁠ericjaydolin.com⁠.
For full show notes with links to everything we discuss, plus bonus photos!, visit katehanley.substack.com.
Thank you for listening!
And thanks to this week’s sponsor, Aqua Tru. Visit aquatru.com and use code KATE to save 20% off a great countertop reverse osmosis water filter that I have been using and loving for years now. Comes with a 1-year warranty and a 30-day money back guarantee.

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In the second part of my conversation with Eric Jay Dolin, (author of "Left for Dead," a true story about a captain of a sealing ship who was marooned on the Falkland Islands for 18 months in the early 1800s), we talk about the squishier side of writing, including dealing with your inner critic, getting through the parts of sharing your work that you'd really rather avoid, and managing your own expectations for how many copies your book will sell while also doing what you can to sell as many as possible.
We talked about:
- Getting geared up for giving talks as an introvert who grew up painfully shy (and the speaking tip that helps)
- The appeal of writing a book that will still be relevant in 30, 40, or more years
- How being in his 60s has affected his writing schedule, and his stress levels
- How being a writer can put you out of step with your friends once they start to hit retirement age, and you are still plugging along
- Taking aim at the belief that if you work hard, everything will work out
- The mystery and serendipity that impact how well your book sells
- The difference between wanting your book to sell well and expecting it to
Visit Eric at ⁠ericjaydolin.com⁠.
For full show notes with links to everything we discuss, plus bonus photos!, visit katehanley.substack.com.
Thank you for listening!
And thanks to this week’s sponsor, Aqua Tru. Visit aquatru.com and use code KATE to save 20% off a great countertop reverse osmosis water filter that I have been using and loving for years now. Comes with a 1-year warranty and a 30-day money back guarantee.

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Calling all lovers of true tales about the sea! This week I'm talking with Eric J. Dolin, bestselling author of numerous books that explore some aspect of American history, generally as it relates to the sea. His latest book is "Left for Dead: Shipwreck, Treachery, and Survival at the Edge of the World." Eric has a really interesting through line that started with him studying to be a marine biologist, then morphed into studying environmental policy, and includes a big list of cool, interesting jobs, including curatorial assistant in the mollusk department at Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology.
We covered:
- Eric's winding path to writing, which started with wanting to be Jacques Costeau as a kid, wended through getting three degrees in marine biology, and ended with him working in government jobs (managing a fishery, for example) while saving up to make the leap to writing full-time
- How winning awards can keep you going, even when you're not selling as many books as you'd like
- HOT TIP: Eric's new book, "Left for Dead," would make a great gift for anyone in your life who lives a good maritime yarn (like, say, my Dad)
- How "people are overly impressed with writers", and that recognition can also keep you going
- The skills he developed as a student that help him write books
- How researching his current book generally leads to the idea for his next book
- The secret cove in Marblehead, Mass. where Eric gets his reading done during the summer
- How reading books from the 1800s and early 1900s (as part of his research) changes his language
For full show notes with links to everything we discuss, plus bonus photos!, visit katehanley.substack.com.
Thank you for listening!
And thanks to this week’s sponsor, Aqua Tru. Visit aquatru.com and use code KATE to save 20% off a great countertop reverse osmosis water filter that I have been using and loving for years now. Comes with a 1-year warranty and a 30-day money back guarantee.

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