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

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.

Hal Schrieve is the author of the 2019 book, Out of Salem, selected for the National Book Award Long List for Young People’s Literature. Hal works as a children’s librarian at the New York Public Library. As a librarian, Hal has written educator guides to other queer books for children and teens. Hal has had poetry in Vetch magazine, and is featured in Stacked Deck Press’s 2018 trans comics anthology We’re Still Here. Hal writes queer fiction for young people and writes comics and zines. Hal’s new novel, How To Get Over the End of the World, was just released with Seven Stories 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, as well as our talented, available memoir editors and memoir coaches, podcast guests and more.

Suzette Mullen is the author of the new memoir, The Only Way Through is Out, just out from the University of Wisconsin Press. She is the founder of Your Story Finder, where she provides nonfiction book coaching. In 2021, she published a Tiny Love Story in The New York Times that was the seed that became her new book. Listen as she and host Marion Roach Smith discuss how to go from a short piece of memoir to a book, 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.

Author, historian, essayist, bestselling novelist and commentator Kevin Baker has just published part one of his long-awaited two-part look into baseball and the city that formed it and was formed by it. Called The New York Game: Baseball and The Rise of a New City (Knopf, 2024), this was a labor of love from a super fan of both the city and the game. In our interview on the Qwerty podcast, we discuss the sport, the city and how a historian does his work. 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.

Author, essayist, poet and activist Ani Gjika is an Albanian-born poet, literary translator, writer, and author of Bread on Running Waters (Fenway Press, 2013). A finalist for the 2011 Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize and 2011 May Sarton New Hampshire Book Prize, she moved to the US at age 18 and earned an MA in English at Simmons College and an MFA in poetry at Boston University. Her honors include awards and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, English PEN, the Robert Pinsky Global Fellowship, Framingham State University's Miriam Levine Reader Award, and the Robert Fitzgerald Translation Prize. Her poetry appears in Seneca Review, Salamander, Plume, From the Fishouse, and elsewhere. Her new book is An Unruled Body: A Poet’s Memoir, just out from Restless Books, which is the winner of the 2021 Restless Books’ New Immigrant Writing Prize. Listen in and she and host Marion Roach Smith discuss writing into trauma in this new episode of the Qwerty podcast. 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.

Writer and author Meg Kissinger spent more than two decades traveling across the country to report on America’s mental health system for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. A Pulitzer Prize finalist, she has won two George Polk Awards, the Robert F. Kennedy Award, awards from Investigative Reporters and Editors, and two National Journalism Awards. Kissinger teaches investigative reporting at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and was a visiting professor at DePauw University, her alma mater. Her stories on the abysmal living conditions for people with mental illness inspired changes to Wisconsin law and led to the creation of hundreds of new housing units. Now, she has brought the knowledge, insights, determination and humility of a reporter’s eye to the vulnerability needed to get to heart of her own origin story and published her new book, While You Were Out: The Intimate Family Portrait of Mental Illness in an Era of Silence. 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.