Shake-up your lockdown week with some games, writing prompts, and exercises designed to help you think outside the box—and also to have fun with your writing. While there’s a lot to worry about and be distracted by right now, for creatives, this can also be an expansive time, even an opportunity. Guest Maw Shein Win offers so many fun ideas and suggestions, even a few writing games and activities you can do with your kids (or grandkids via Zoom) to vary up their at-home days.

In this week’s episode, Brooke and Grant are joined by best-selling author and inspiring human Elizabeth Gilbert in a conversation about the paradigm shift happening around women’s power, specifically when it comes to women writers and women’s stories, as well as how Liz handles criticism by not going looking for it, and why she’s so fiercely loyal to her readership. This episode is a celebration of inspiration on a show that’s all about inspiration—and we hope it will help our listeners capture a bit of their own during a time when so many of us need it more than ever.

Listening to Elizabeth Acevedo talk about her process, her experience, and her work is poetry in itself. In this episode we talk about how writing is a vehicle for emotional expression that might not necessarily get directed elsewhere and how poetry is edited with the ear. Listeners will also be treated to a spoken excerpt from Elizabeth’s new novel.

This week’s episode is an exploration and celebration of the short form with one of its masters, Pam Houston. Whether you write essays, short stories, interlocking essays, memoirs-in-essay, or short polemics, there’s much to discover in this conversation about structure, finding the “glimmers,” as Pam calls them, and the layers of meaning-making in the short form. We also invite you to be your own cowboy on the writing journey and to enjoy this excursion “deep into the pasture” with Pam.

In this week’s episode, Matt la Peña shares how explores how he went from being a non-reader as a kid to becoming a writer and author as an adult, which involved falling in love with Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street. Brooke and Grant talk with Matt about #ownvoices, the power of YA to effect meaningful change in readers’ lives, and the experience of being a working-class writer.

In this honest and heartfelt episode about the power of writing a reckoning (rather than a tell-all), guest Kiese Laymon shares why he wrote his latest memoir, Heavy, as a letter to his mother, how writing the book came at a cost, and what having “arrived” as a writer both changes and doesn’t change his trajectory as a writer. This is a show about reinventing forms, writing the book you need to write as a soul-cleansing, and the layered meanings that reside in all of our stories.

This week’s episode is a celebration of persistence, with author Nancy Davis Kho sharing her long journey to publication, how she grew and cultivated her author platform, and her process of writing and shopping work along the way. This episode is for all the authors out there who are feeling the slog toward publication. It’s hard work, but the payoff is worth it. We hope this week’s show and theme will support you to honor and celebrate your own persistence. Write on!

To write with dispassion, without judgment, or with distance is something many writers struggle with. In this week’s episode, Jeannette Walls, author of the best-selling memoir, The Glass Castle, shares how she was able to detach herself from judgment and tell a true story of her outrageous upbringing. In this intimate interview, Jeannette’s humility and humanity shine through—and we witness the resilient and generous spirit of that little girl in The Glass Castle who grew up to create a life on her own terms.

Popular author, blogger, and podcaster Joanna Penn joins Grant and Brooke to discuss some of her tips and best practices for staying productive and juggling multiple projects at once. To truly succeed as an authorprenuer takes a lot of discipline, and having more than a few plates spinning at once. With a good dose of her signature good humor and humility, Joanna shares how she gets it all done.