First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing

Robert Kolker is the author of Hidden Valley Road, an instant #1 New York Times best-seller and selection of Oprah's Book Club that was named a Top Ten Book of the Year by the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and Slate; one of the year’s best by NPR, the Boston Globe, the New York Post, and Amazon. His previous work includes Lost Girls, also a New York Times best-seller and New York Times Notable Book, and one of Slate’s best nonfiction books of the quarter century. He is a National Magazine Award finalist whose journalism has appeared in the New York Times Magazine. His new book is called The Vanishing Family: Love, Fate, and the Quest to End Dementia.

Support First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing on Patreon. No ads, plus extras like cuts from the interviews not in this episode, writing tips from guests and more.

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

Margrét Ann Thors is a writer based in Reykjavík, Iceland. Originally from Fairfield County, Connecticut, she holds a BA, MA, and MFA from Columbia University and teaches at the University of Iceland. In 2025, she earned her PhD with an emphasis on literature after 9/11. Her creative writing has been published in Glamour, Creative Nonfiction, Ós Pressan, Storychord, and other outlets. Her debut novel is FREYJA.

Support First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing on Patreon. No ads, plus extras like cuts from the interviews not in this episode, writing tips from guests and more.

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

Sebastian Barry was born in Dublin in 1955. The 2018–21 Laureate for Irish Fiction, he is the author of nine novels, five of which have been long- or shortlisted for the Booker Prize, most recently Old God’s Time. His work has won numerous awards in Ireland, the UK, and France, including the Costa Book of the Year Award, the Walter Scott Prize, and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. In the US, his novels have been recognized by the ALA Carnegie Medal (longlist), the Los Angeles Times Book Prize (shortlist), and the High Plains Book Award (winner). He lives in County Wicklow, Ireland.  His new novel is The Newer World.

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

Elizabeth Alexander is a prize-winning and New York Times best-selling author, renowned poet, educator, scholar, and cultural advocate. Her memoir, The Light of the World, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award. She composed and recited "Praise Song for the Day" for President Barack Obama’s 2009 inauguration and is currently president of the Mellon Foundation, the nation’s largest funder of the arts, culture, and humanities. Her new work is called Signals Across Vast Distances: Essays and Tales.

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

Roberta Rossella Recchia was born in Rome and  lived for a time in Lille, France, where she earned a master’s degree in international relations and cultures. She worked for ten years for a big company and then quit office work to devote herself to teaching. She currently teaches English in a high school in Rome. She is passionate about film and literature, especially Russian and French. She lives with her chihuahua, Claudio, in a small town on the coast of Lazio, Italy. Her new novel is All That Is Left of Life.

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

James Salter grew up in New York City and was a career officer and Air Force pilot until his mid-thirties, when the success of his first novel, The Hunters(1957), led to a fulltime writing career. Salter’s potent, lyrical prose has earned him acclaim from critics, readers, and fellow novelists. His novel, A Sport and a Pastime (1967), was hailed by the New York Times as “nearly perfect as any American fiction.” His latest book, All That Is, was published to critical acclaim in 2013. He died in 2015.  This interview was recorded in November 2014.

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

Jess Row is the author of the novels The New Earth and Your Face in Mine as well as a collection of essays, White Flights: Race, Fiction, and the American Imagination.  His short story collections include The Train to Lo Wu, Nobody Ever Gets Lost and the newly published Storyknife. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Tin House, Conjunctions, Ploughshares, Granta, n+1, and elsewhere, has been anthologized three times in The Best American Short Stories, and has won two Pushcart Prizes and a PEN/O. Henry Award. He has received a Guggenheim fellowship, an NEA fellowship in fiction among other honors. He directs the undergraduate creative writing program in the Department of English at NYU and is an ordained senior dharma teacher in the Kwam Um School of Zen.   

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

Richard Russo is the author of 11 novels, including most recently, Under the Falls, Somebody’s Fool, Chances Are . . . , Everybody’s Fool, and That Old Cape Magic; two collections of stories; and the memoir Elsewhere. In 2002 he received the Pulitzer Prize for Empire Falls, which, like Nobody’s Fool, won multiple awards for its screen adaptation, and in 2023 his novel Straight Man was adapted into the television series Lucky Hank. In 2017 he received France’s Grand Prix de Littérature Américaine. He lives in Port­land, Maine.

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

Michael Cunningham is a novelist, screenwriter, and educator. His novel The Hours received the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1999. He has taught at Columbia University and Brooklyn College. He is currently a professor in the practice at Yale University. His new book is Unsayable: A Life in Writing.

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

Rachel Eliza Griffiths is a poet, multimedia artist, memoirist and novelist. Her literary and visual work has been widely published in magazines, journals, and anthologies, including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poets and Writers, and Best American Poetry, among others. Some of her poetry collections include Miracle Arrhythmia, Mule and Pear, Seeing the Body, and Lighting the Shadow. Griffiths’ hybrid collection of poetry and photography, Seeing the Body was selected as the winner of the 2021 Hurston/Wright Foundation Legacy Award in Poetry, the winner of the 2021 Paterson Poetry Prize, and a finalist the 2020 NAACP Image award. Her debut novel, Promise was a Kirkus Reviews and Chicago Public Library Best Book of the Year. Her memoir is called The Flower Bearers.  

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