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

Cara Benson's writing has been published in The New York Times, Boston Review, Orion Magazine, Sierra Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, Terrain, and selected for Best American Poetry. She has received a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship and the bpNichol Award. Benson wrote a series on walking in the woods for the Best American Poetry website and taught poetry in a New York State Correctional Facility for eight years. Her new book is a memoir called An Armsfull of Birds: A Personal Field Guide to Love, Loss and Commitment, just out from Health Comunications Inc., and distributed by Simon & Schuster. 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, 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.

Jessica Walker is a multidisciplinary artist, illustrator, filmmaker, and educator, she is an assistant professor of fine arts at Parsons and has exhibited films, books, and 2D media in solo and group shows in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston, and Australia. Her work is housed in the permanent collections at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Research Library, Yale University Haas Family Arts Library, and the University of Washington Art Library. Her new book is a debut novel called The Secret Astronomers, published by Viking Books Children’s Books. It won the Best YA Book Award at the 2026 Barnes & Noble Children’s & YA Book Awards. The award is voted on by Barnes & Noble booksellers nationwide. Listen in as we discuss writing and illustrating a coming of age story that explores how to work through our differences. 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, 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.

Hester Kaplan is the author of two story collections, The Edge of Marriage (University of Georgia Press, and Norton), which received The Flannery O’Connor Prize for Short Fiction; and Unravished (Ig Publishing); the novels The Tell (HarperCollins) and Kinship Theory (Little, Brown). Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, Story, Glimmer Train, Southwest Review, and Indiana Review and others, and has been widely anthologized, including in The Best American Short Stories, Creature Needs, and Providence Noir. The recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships and two fellowships in literature from the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts, she was named Quarry Farm Fellow by the Center for Mark Twain Studies. Fellow for her new book, Twice Born, Finding My Father in the Margins of Biography, just out from Catapult. Listen in as she and I discuss how to set up a fine piece of 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, 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, scholar, and award-winning teacher, Marian Yee teaches writing, literature and contemporary art to performing art students at Berklee College of Music. Her published writings include poems, reviews, and scholarly articles. Her debut novel is 4 JANES, published by Little A. Listen in as she and discuss the sheer joy of writing fan fiction. 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, 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.

Rachel Weaver is a writer, author, essayist, memoirist and teacher. She is the author of the novel, Point of Direction which Oprah Magazine named a Top Ten Book To Pick Up Now, and won the 2015 Willa Cather Award for Fiction. Her new book, a debut memoir, is Dizzy, just out from West Virginia Press. Listen in as she and I discuss how to write a braided 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, 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.

Nicole Walker is the author of several books, including, “Processed Meats: Essays on Food, Flesh and Navigating Disaster” and “The After-Normal: Brief, Alphabetical Essays on a Changing Planet.” She edits the “Crux” series at the University of Georgia Press, is the nonfiction editor at the journal “Diagram” and teaches creative writing at Northern Arizona University.. Her new book is How to Plant a Billion Trees: A Memoir of Childhood Trauma and the Healing Power of Nature, just out from Bloomsbury. Listen in as we discuss how to create your authority as a writer without being overly authoritative. 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, 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.

Hilary Plattner is a writer of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Her debut memoir, The Momma Puzzle, was shortlisted for the Santa Fe Writers Project Literary Awards, and named a finalist for the Wandering Aengus and Trail to Table Book Awards. She holds an MFA in fiction writing from Columbia University and has taught writing at The New School. Previously, she founded and directed Brooklyn Writers, a community-based writing program. Her writing has been published in numerous literary journals, including Allegro, Cider Press Review, Fence, GSU Review, Gulf Coast, Synkroniciti and The Ledge. Listen in as we discuss how to write memoir using records left behind by family members, as well as the difficult topic of writing about family suicide. 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, 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.

Jed Alexander is the author of The Fairy Tale Color Collection, a series of children’s books that begins with the wordless 2018 book Red, the follow-up 2022 book, Gold, and the third book in that series, Olive. His clients have included SpongeBob Comics, Cricket Magazine, Writer's Digest and The Children's Book Council. His new book is The Black Market, a Middle Grade book which he wrote and illustrated recently published by Union Square Kids. 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, 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.

Davin Malasarn is a writer an author whose work has appeared in The Los Angeles Review, Rosebud, Opium Magazine, SmokeLong Quarterly and other journals in print and online. His debut novel, The Outer Country, is just out from One World/Random 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, 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 author Scott Eden is an investigative reporter whose work has focused on crime, corruption, injustice, business, science, technology, and the dark side of sports. His work has appeared in Wired, GQ, ESPN The Magazine, The Atavist Inc., and The Believer’s best-of collection Read Hard. The author of Touchdown Jesus: Faith and Fandom at Notre Dame. His new book is A Killing in Cannabis: A True Story of Love, Murder and California Weed, just out from Spiegel & Grau. Welcome, Scott. 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, 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.