QWERTY: A Podcast for Writers on How to Live the Writing Life

Brigit Binns is a prolific author of cookbooks, with more than 100,000 copies in print, including eleven titles she has authored for Williams Sonoma. She has also co-authored cookbooks, edited cookbooks and written 90 shows for the Food Network series, The Hot Tamales. And now she has turned her attention to memoir. Her new book is titled Rottenkid: A Succulent Story of Survival, just out from Sibylline Press. In this fine memoir, she covers food, Hollywood, neglect, celebrity, infidelity, cooking, betrayal, narcissism, recipes and transcendenceListen in as we discuss how to handle big, compelling themes while writing memoir. The QWERTY podcast is brought to you by the book The Memoir Project: A Thoroughly Non-Standardized Text for Writing & Life. Read it, and begin your own journey to writing what you know. To learn more, join The Memoir Project free newsletter list and keep up to date on all our free webinars and instructive posts and online classes in how to write memoir, as well as our talented, available memoir editors and memoir coaches, podcast guests and more.

Caro De Robertis, whose pronouns are they/theirs, is a Uruguayan-American author and full tenured professor in the creative writing dept at San Francisco State University. They are the author of five novels and the editor of an award-winning anthology, Radical Hope. Their books have been translated into seventeen languages and have received numerous other honors, including a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature. Their new book is The Palace of Eros, just out from Atria Books. Listen in as we discuss how to write characters' interior lives, and so much more. The QWERTY podcast is brought to you by the book The Memoir Project: A Thoroughly Non-Standardized Text for Writing & Life. Read it, and begin your own journey to writing what you know. To learn more, join The Memoir Project free newsletter list and keep up to date on all our free webinars and instructive posts and online classes in how to write memoir, as well as our talented, available memoir editors and memoir coaches, podcast guests and more.

Writer and novelist Juli Min is the editor-in-chief and fiction editor of the Shanghai Literary Review. Currently a resident of Shanghai, she was born in Seoul, Korea, and raised in New Jersey, and has just published her debut novel. Entitled Shanghailanders, the book is just out from Spiegel and Grau. Listen in as she and I discuss book structure, and so much more. The QWERTY podcast is brought to you by the book The Memoir Project: A Thoroughly Non-Standardized Text for Writing & Life. Read it, and begin your own journey to writing what you know. To learn more, join The Memoir Project's free newsletter list and keep up to date on all our free webinars and instructive posts, and online classes in how to write memoir, as well as our talented, available memoir editors and memoir coaches, podcast guests and more.

Deborah Paredez is the author of the critical study, Selenidad: Selena, Latinos, and the Performance of Memory (Duke 2009) and the poetry collections, This Side of Skin (Wings Press 2002) and Year of the Dog (BOA 2020). Her poetry, essays, and commentary have appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, National Public Radio, Boston Review, The Georgia Review, Feminist Studies, and elsewhere. She is a professor of creative writing and ethnic studies at Columbia University and is the Co-Founder of CantoMundo, a national organization for Latinx poets. At Columbia, Professor Pah Red dez Paredez is a recipient of a Lenfest Distinguished Faculty Award. Her new book is American Diva, just published by W.W. Norton. The QWERTY podcast is brought to you by the book The Memoir Project: A Thoroughly Non-Standardized Text for Writing & Life. Read it, and begin your own journey to writing what you know. To learn more, join The Memoir Project free newsletter list and keep up to date on all our free webinars and instructive posts and online classes in how to write memoir, as well as our talented, available memoir editors and memoir coaches, podcast guests and more.

Rusty Gear is an Americana recording artist whose work explores the story of the USA and for whom the Qwerty Podcast host, Marion Roach Smith, writes lyrics. In this episode, they explore working together as creatives. What is the nature of good artistic collaboration? How do two writers work together? Listen in as we explore those themes and much more. The QWERTY podcast is brought to you by the book The Memoir Project: A Thoroughly Non-Standardized Text for Writing & Life. Read it, and begin your own journey to writing what you know. To learn more, join The Memoir Project free newsletter list and keep up to date on all our free webinars and instructive posts and online classes in how to write memoir, as well as our talented, available memoir editors and memoir coaches, podcast guests and more.

Margaret Juhae Lee has been been published in The Nation, Newsday, Elle, ARTnews, The Advocate, The Progressive and most recently in The Rumpus and Ploughshares Blog. She received a Bunting Fellowship from Harvard University and a Korean Studies Fellowship from the Korean Foundation in support of research for her recently published book, book, Starry Field: A Memoir of Lost History, published by Melville House. The QWERTY podcast is brought to you by the book The Memoir Project: A Thoroughly Non-Standardized Text for Writing & Life. Read it, and begin your own journey to writing what you know. To learn more, join The Memoir Project free newsletter list and keep up to date on all our free webinars and instructive posts and online classes in how to write memoir, as well as our talented, available memoir editors and memoir coaches, podcast guests and more.

Lissa Soep knows how to reanimate the voices of the dead, and she is here to teach you how to get those voices into your memoir writing. She is a senior editor for audio at Vox Media and special projects producer and senior scholar-in-residence at YR Media. She has a PhD from Stanford, where she studied education, social theory, and linguistic anthropology with leading Bakhtin scholars. She lives in San Francisco. Lissa has co-led teams honored with Peabody, Murrow, Kennedy, IRE, Gracie and other awards, and knows what it takes to make a great story. She has written for Harvard Educational Review, Boing Boing, NPR and Edutopia, among others, and is the author of a glorious new book that reminds and informs us that we carry within us the language of loved ones who are gone and how their words can be portals to other times and places. The book is Other People’s Words: Friendship, Loss and the Conversations that Never End. Just out from Spiegel & Grau. The QWERTY podcast is brought to you by the book The Memoir Project: A Thoroughly Non-Standardized Text for Writing & Life. Read it, and begin your own journey to writing what you know. To learn more, join The Memoir Project free newsletter list and keep up to date on all our free webinars and instructive posts and online classes in how to write memoir, as well as our talented, available memoir editors and memoir coaches, podcast guests and more.

Storyteller, actor and award-winning author, Alicia D. Williams is on The Qwerty Podcast to talk about her new book, Mid Air, illustrated by Danica Novgorodoff and just published by Atheneum. Her book, Genesis Begins Again received the Newberry and Kirkus Prize honors, and was a William C. Morris Award finalist and won the Coretta Scott King- John Steptoe Award for New Talent. She is also the author of the picture books, Jump at the Sun and The Talk. The QWERTY podcast is brought to you by the book The Memoir Project: A Thoroughly Non-Standardized Text for Writing & Life. Read it, and begin your own journey to writing what you know. To learn more, join The Memoir Project free newsletter list and keep up to date on all our free webinars and instructive posts and online classes in how to write memoir, as well as our talented, available memoir editors and memoir coaches, podcast guests and more.

Michael Jamin is an Emmy-nominated screenwriter who has been writing for television since 1996, and whose credits include Just Shoot Me, King of the Hill, Beavis & Butthead, Wilfred, Out of Practice, and Rules of Engagement. He’s also served as Executive Producer/Showrunner on Glenn Martin DDS, Maron, and Rhett & Link’s Buddy System. If you are interested in how to write book-length memoir in essays, his new book will show you how, one essay at a time. It's called, A Paper Orchestra, and is just out from Three Girls Jumping Press. The QWERTY podcast is brought to you by the book The Memoir Project: A Thoroughly Non-Standardized Text for Writing & Life. Read it, and begin your own journey to writing what you know. To learn more, join The Memoir Project free newsletter list and keep up to date on all our free webinars and instructive posts and online classes in how to write memoir, as well as our talented, available memoir editors and memoir coaches, podcast guests and more.

Janet Skeslien Charles is a New York Times and international bestselling author whose work has been translated into 37 languages. Her shorter work has appeared in the Chicago Tribune, The Sydney Morning Herald, and Montana Noir. Her 2021 novel, The Paris Library, became an instant New York Times, Washington Post and USA Today bestseller upon release. Originally from Montana, she lives in Paris and has just released Miss Morgan’s Book Brigade, published by Atria. Listen in and read along as we talk about doing reserach, writing historical fiction and so much more. The QWERTY podcast is brought to you by the book The Memoir Project: A Thoroughly Non-Standardized Text for Writing & Life. Read it, and begin your own journey to writing what you know. To learn more, join The Memoir Project free newsletter list and keep up to date on all our free webinars and instructive posts and online classes, as well as our talented, available memoir editors and memoir coaches, podcast guests and more.